Tragic Details About Kurt Russell

Kurt Russell seemingly has it all — a successful career spanning decades, a relationship that has been going strong for nearly just as long, and a beautiful blended family. But he experienced plenty of ups and downs on his way to the top. For starters, Russell didn’t even expect to become a Hollywood star. While he started acting as a kid, he initially just did it to make money. What he really wanted was to play sports. Even though he proved to have what it takes, his dream career wasn’t in the cards. So acting it was.

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But his acting journey also came with obstacles. From losing his mentor early on to experiencing burnout, Russell went through a lot — and nearly gave up right when his career was about to explode. Luckily for us, another Hollywood star helped him change his mind. After that, he gained the recognition he had been seeking — even if he didn’t want to admit it. “[I want to do movies] the critics find great. I hate saying that I like pleasing them, but I do,” he told Entertainment Weekly in 1991.

While Russell’s relationship with Goldie Hawn has survived the test of time, it started off amid unfortunate circumstances during the shooting of “Swing Shift” that he has preferred to never properly address. Even though Russell and Hawn never got married, they became one of Hollywood’s most enduring couples. And throughout their years together, they have experienced some traumatic events. Russell certainly has a lot to be thankful for, but the road wasn’t always smooth.

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Acting wasn’t Kurt Russell’s dream. He wanted to be a baseball player. It was actually his love of America’s favorite pastime that motivated him to audition for the 1962 sports film “Safe at Home!” featuring Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris when he was 11. His father was a diehard baseball fan who played until he suffered a head injury. And he passed his passion along. “Baseball was what we were going to do. That was it,” he told the Minor League Baseball website in 2019.

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And that’s what he did. In June 1971, a 20-year-old Russell played his first professional game. By then, he had nine films and several other TV show appearances on his resume. But that was just a job. “I made money but I wanted to play baseball. That was the pursuit,” he said. In 1973, he debuted for the El Paso Sun Kings, and things looked promising. “I loved playing in El Paso. That was a great place to play and I was off to a really hot start,” he said. Then he injured his shoulder.

It wasn’t good news. “The doctor ran some tests, looked at me and he said, ‘Aren’t you also an actor?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘Well, you’re an actor all the time now,'” he recalled. His devastation lasted a decade. “Up until I was 30 or 31, I had a hankering every spring,” he told Men’s Health, referring to the start of baseball season. 

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Kurt Russell may have aspired to become a baseball star, but becoming a Hollywood icon instead isn’t a bad tradeoff. And he has Walt Disney to thank for that. When the film pioneer died in 1966, Russell was under a 10-year contract with the studio. (He’s seen above in the 1969 Disney production “Guns in the Heather.”) The teen star had become close with Disney, who took on the role of his mentor. In fact, the young Russell was on Disney’s mind shortly before he died.

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While it is a myth that Disney’s last words were “Kurt Russell,” he did write down his misspelled name on a piece of paper containing future projects. “I took him up to Walt’s office and showed him one of the last things that Walt had written was his name. I think he was quite impressed even though Walt misspelled it. He’s got Kurt (as) ‘Kirt,'” Disney archivist Dave Smith told historian Jim Korkis for Mouse Planet.

Just a teenager then, Russell tried to grapple with the loss. “I immediately appreciated the time I shared with Walt more than ever,” he told Amy Boothe and Howard E. Green in “Remembering Walt.” Russell wasn’t only appreciative of Disney’s film lessons but also his understanding of his priorities. When he once left early to attend a baseball game, he returned expecting a scolding. Instead, Russell recalled to People, “He said, ‘Well, young man, I hear you got the game-winning hit. Way to go! Have fun today, guys.'” 

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In 2020, Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn went out to dinner with no worries in their minds, only to return home and see that it had been burglarized. They didn’t realize it right away, though. “I went up to the stairs and I walked into my closet and I just lost it,” Hawn said on Kelly Ripa’s “Let’s Talk Off Camera” podcast. “They had broken in from the balcony to our bedroom, our closets, and they completely knocked down my door.”

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That showed Russell and Hawn weren’t dealing with just a petty criminal “[It] is a safe door, so they’re very, very sophisticated and they got a lot of my goodies,” she explained. It’s unclear whether they reported the burglary, but they moved on with their lives, assuming the chances of anything like that happening again were minimal. They were wrong. Just four months later, their house was a target again. This time around, the attempt was unsuccessful.

That didn’t make it any less scary, especially because Hawn had been home. “I’m in the house by myself, just the dog, and I hear this big thump upstairs. And I was alone — Kurt wasn’t there — and I went, ‘What the hell was that?'” she recalled to Ripa. It turned out someone had tried to break into the bedroom. That was it for them. They hired a professional to ensure their safety. “I’m never without a guard,” she revealed. 

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Kurt Russell met Goldie Hawn on the set of the 1968 musical “The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band” when he was just 16 and she was already 21. Russell and Hawn’s age gap was significant for that stage in life, so they went their separate ways. Nearly two decades later, their paths crossed again during the filming of Jonathan Demme’s “Swing Shift.” Now in their 30s, they allowed their chemistry to fully flow on and off camera.

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But Russell’s experience working on the 1984 World War II romantic drama wasn’t pleasant, despite putting his lifelong companion and mother of his second son in his life. The film production was marked by intense conflict between Hawn, whose approval rights afforded her some creative control, and Demme. Hawn hired a separate screenwriter to add more scenes in a perceived effort to elevate her character’s role for reportedly feeling Christine Lahti had stolen her thunder. It was a mess.

The director removed the phrase “A Jonathan Demme Film” from the promotional material and publicly criticized the finished product, and the original screenwriter signed the work using a pseudonym. Russell was caught in the crossfire, much to his chagrin. “Didn’t like it,” is all Russell had to say about it when asked in the 1991 Entertainment Weekly profile. For Hawn’s part, she claimed she and her producing partner, Anthea Sylbert, were doing their jobs. “[We were] just trying to get the movie to work,” she said (via Salon).

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Movie fans who have witnessed Kurt Russell’s skills over the past three-plus decades have Laurence Fishburne to thank. After the 1993 Western “Tombstone” (seen above) and while shooting the 1994 sci-fi “Stargate,” Russell was completely burned out. “I’d just finished doing ‘Tombstone,’ which was a rough ride. Really tough. And I had a job immediately after that,” he told Rolling Stone in 2023. He felt he had enough and had nearly concluded he should retire when a chance meeting with the “Matrix” star changed his plans.

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Russell had a lot of respect for the actor, though he had never met him until that day. And he never forgot him since. “I was like, ‘I think I’m out, man.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, you can’t do that. You’ve got a lot more to do, and a lot more to give. You can’t talk like that,'” he recalled. Russell was struck because Fishburne sounded like he meant it. He wasn’t just trying to make Russell feel better. “He spoke with this sense of honesty … He probably doesn’t know how influential he was in me continuing on,” he shared.

“Tombstone” and “Stargate” changed the course of Russell’s career, elevating his status from cult film icon in the ’80s to A-lister in the ’90s. But it took a toll. Production of the former was particularly difficult, with Russell claiming he ghost-directed it after screenwriter Kevin Jarre was removed from his directorial attempt.  

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