Kevin Kline Biography Quotes 2 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Kevin Delaney Kline was born on October 24, 1947, in St. Louis, Missouri, into a Midwestern household shaped by postwar prosperity and its quiet pressures to choose sensible careers. His father ran a chain of record stores, a detail that mattered: the home was not only practical, but audibly alive with Broadway cast albums, classical records, and the bright, restless American entertainment culture of the 1950s and early 1960s.

St. Louis was also a civic crossroads, with old river-city traditions colliding with the era's upheavals - civil rights, Vietnam, and a generational revolt against conventional scripts. Kline grew up with the paradox that would later define him onscreen: a grounded, all-American demeanor paired with an instinct for disguise. Before fame, his ambition was not celebrity but craft, a desire to inhabit voices and rooms bigger than his own without losing the ordinary human scale he knew well.

Education and Formative Influences

Kline attended Indiana University in Bloomington, initially planning a more conventional path, then pivoting decisively toward performance. He trained seriously in drama and singing, work that took him to New York City's Juilliard School, where he was part of the institution's American Repertory Theater program. That conservatory culture - rigorous text work, vocal discipline, repertory demands, and constant comparison to the canon - taught him to treat acting as a trade rather than a mood, and to value the stage as an athlete values training: repetition, timing, breath, and nerve.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

Kline emerged as a formidable stage performer in the 1970s and early 1980s, winning a Tony Award for On the Twentieth Century (1978), then moving into film with an unusually confident first act: Sophie's Choice (1982) introduced him as charismatic and dangerous; The Big Chill (1983) placed him in the emblematic ensemble of boomer self-examination; and A Fish Called Wanda (1988) turned him into a comic phenomenon, earning him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The 1990s and 2000s showed his range rather than a single brand - he played the dazzling songwriter in De-Lovely (2004), found mainstream warmth in Dave (1993), and returned repeatedly to Shakespeare and musical theater, later winning another Tony for the 2017 revival of Present Laughter. His turning points were less about reinvention than about refusing to be pinned down: alternating film visibility with stage rigor, and choosing roles that let him pivot between elegance, absurdity, and menace.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Kline's style is often described as effortless, but the effect comes from disciplined musicality: he treats scenes as scores, hearing rhythms in dialogue and using pauses like rests. That is why his performances can feel simultaneously classical and spontaneous - the intelligence is structural, not showy. Even in broad comedy, he builds characters from internal logic: how they listen, what they dodge, where vanity leaks into fear. His best work is rarely about likability; it is about control, and the instant it fails.

That inner life is clearest when he speaks about the craft in terms of intimidation and compulsion. "It was all completely incomprehensible to me. I was fearful of the language. You had to look up every third word". The admission is not merely about Shakespeare or heightened text - it reveals an actor who is energized by difficulty, who converts fear into preparation until the foreign becomes playable. His musical roles show a parallel drive, a bodily attraction to sound that precedes interpretation: "I totally related to Cole Porter's magnetic pull to any piano that was in the room, which he was famous for doing, as was Gershwin. You couldn't drag them away from a piano" . Read together, these instincts explain his signature tension: reverence for language as something formidable, and delight in performance as something physically irresistible. Kline repeatedly returns to themes of sophistication versus longing, public wit masking private hunger, and the idea that polish is often a defense.

Legacy and Influence

Kevin Kline's enduring influence is the model he offers for a certain American kind of leading man: not the action hero, but the repertory actor who can anchor prestige drama, steal a farce, and sing a standard without irony. By maintaining serious stage credentials alongside a major film career, he helped keep the pipeline between American theater training and Hollywood viability visible through decades when many actors were forced to choose. His legacy is less a single iconic role than a body of work that argues, quietly but persuasively, that versatility is not a lack of identity - it is an identity built on technique, curiosity, and the courage to look uncomprehending language in the eye until it yields.