Kurt Russell

Kurt Vogel Russell (born March 17, 1951, in Springfield, Massachusetts) is an American actor whose work in film and television spans more than six decades. The son of actor and former minor-league baseball player Bing Russell, he began performing as a child and appeared in the Western series The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (1963–1964) and a long string of Walt Disney family films during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Russell briefly pursued a professional baseball career in the early 1970s before a shoulder injury redirected him back to acting. He drew strong reviews for the 1979 television film Elvis, directed by John Carpenter, and went on to lead a series of Carpenter films including Escape from New York (1981), The Thing (1982), and Big Trouble in Little China (1986).

Other notable credits include Silkwood (1983), Tombstone (1993), Backdraft (1991), and the Disney sports drama Miracle (2004), in which he played U.S. Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks. He also appeared in James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) as Ego.

Russell has been the longtime partner of actor Goldie Hawn since 1983; they have a son, Wyatt, also an actor, and Russell helped raise Hawn's children Oliver and Kate Hudson.

The name Kurt is a German short form of Konrad, from Old High German kuoni meaning bold or brave, combined with rāt meaning counsel. It entered English use chiefly in the twentieth century.