Long before Kevin Costner was riding the range on Yellowstone or fighting through a very public second divorce, he was a business student at Cal State Fullerton who couldn’t quite believe the girl he was dating had said yes. Her name was Cindy Silva, and she was his wife for 16 years, from 1978 until 1994, which took them from his first acting classes to the night Dances With Wolves swept the Oscars.
Costner, born January 18, 1955, is now 71. Hello! recently called Cindy his “forgotten” first wife, and after three decades out of the spotlight, it fits. Her story starts like a fairy tale and ends with one of the most honest things Costner has ever said about losing a family.
Where Did Kevin Costner Meet His First Wife, Cindy Silva?
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The two started dating in 1975 as fellow students at California State University, Fullerton, a few miles up the road from Disneyland. That proximity matters to the legend. According to Mental Floss and Hello!, Cindy worked at the park as Snow White, posing for pictures and signing autographs, while Costner is said to have worked there too. Mental Floss has him telling corny jokes as a Jungle Cruise skipper.
Whatever the uniform, he was smitten. “She was beautiful. She was sweet. She was smarter than me,” Costner told People in 1989. “She represented everything about women that I like.” He was also refreshingly honest about why he was so eager to bring her home. “I was just really proud that this girl would go out with me,” he admitted. “I wanted to show my parents.”
They married in 1978, the same year he finished his business degree, and honeymooned in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Neither of them could have guessed who would be sitting on the plane home.
Who Was On The Flight Home From Their Honeymoon?
It was Richard Burton. As Costner has told the story, including to Scotland’s Sunday Post, he worked up the nerve to approach the Welsh star, who talked with him for five or ten minutes about acting and the life that came with it. Costner had been quietly taking acting classes, and Burton’s advice, as it’s usually recounted, was that he had to commit to it completely. Not long after, Costner walked away from a marketing job that, by Wikipedia’s account, lasted all of 30 days.
Cindy worked in marketing for Delta Air Lines, according to People, while Costner chased auditions and worked as a stage manager. His biographies add odd jobs from those years, including driving a truck and leading bus tours past the homes of the stars he hoped to join.
The big break, when it finally came, broke his heart first. Director Lawrence Kasdan cast him as Alex, the friend whose suicide brings the old college gang together in 1983’s The Big Chill. Costner filmed several flashback scenes, and every one of them was cut. Moviegoers saw only brief glimpses of his character’s body. Kasdan felt bad enough to make it up to him with a leading role in the 1985 Western Silverado, and after that the doors started opening fast.
Why Did Their 16-Year Marriage End?
The Untouchables, Bull Durham and Field of Dreams arrived in three straight years starting in 1987. By then Kevin and Cindy had three young children, Annie, Lily and Joe. When Costner directed and starred in Dances With Wolves, little Annie was cast as the young Christine, the girl who grows up to be Stands With a Fist. The film won Best Picture and earned him the Oscar for Best Director, and two years later Cindy was on his arm at the premiere of The Bodyguard with Whitney Houston.
Success brought its own strain. Friends of Cindy told People that she struggled with her husband’s grueling schedule as his career exploded. In 1994 the couple announced, “After 16 years together, we are ending our marriage,” adding that they had “amicably resolved all issues regarding our children and financial affairs.”
There was no prenuptial agreement, and the settlement was widely reported at $80 million, which Fox News and others have called one of the most expensive divorces in Hollywood history. The couple never confirmed it. When Costner’s second marriage, to Christine Baumgartner, ended in a contentious divorce filed in 2023 and finalized in February 2024, during the same stretch he left Yellowstone, those old numbers resurfaced. What he eventually said about the first breakup is the part worth hearing.
Where Are Cindy Silva And Their Children Now?
Cindy has kept her life so private that when photographers caught her running errands outside a California grocery store in 2023, Fox News treated it as news.
Their children grew up and found their own paths. Annie, now 42, left acting and in 2014 founded Sound Off Films, a production company focused on documentaries about social and environmental issues. Joe, 38, appeared with his dad in The Postman and Tin Cup and went on to work behind the scenes as an audio engineer and production sound mixer. Lily, 40, became the musician of the family. She has sung on the soundtracks of her father’s films and recorded “Heaven’s Gate” with his band, Kevin Costner and Modern West, in 2020. “Lily’s way is not to knock doors down. I think she wants a quality of life,” Costner once told HuffPost, calling her “an amazing singer and songwriter.”
Costner went on to have four more children and kept them close to his work too, as when he cast his son Hayes in Horizon. But he never pretended the end of his first family was easy, and in 2012 he opened up to The Hollywood Reporter. “My faith was shaken. No one wants their marriage to end, and it did,” he said. Then he named the real cost, the one no settlement figure could cover. “You are going to see the people you love most, your children, only half as much. That’s a huge loss.”
