Kurt Russell is the everyman of Hollywood – why don’t we appreciate him more?

“Hey kid, how would you like to kick me in the shin?” Elvis Presley asks a random, freckled boy in his 1963 film, It Happened at the World’s Fair. The boy is wary and suspects that Presley is drunk. Nonetheless, once he is offered a quarter, he takes a step back and swings his foot hard. The King winces. The 11-year-old boy in question is Kurt Russell, in one of his first screen roles.

Russell was born into the business. His father, Bing, was an actor with credits ranging from TV’s Bonanza to The Magnificent Seven (1960). Young Kurt was befriended by Walt Disney who took a paternal interest in him. It’s a measure of Russell’s topsy-turvy screen career that while Uncle Walt may have been his childhood mentor, he ended up doing some of his best work in Quentin Tarantino’s bloodiest, most violent movies. As an actor, Russell has a split identity. On one hand, he is among the most wholesome stars of his era – the type you might cast as the all-American husband or boy next door in a frothy comedy or Christmas flick alongside his wife, Goldie Hawn. On the other, Russell has always been drawn to the dark side. Look through his filmography and you’ll find him playing voyeurs, vigilantes, corrupt cops and even killers.

His credits range from the goofy inanity of Follow Me, Boys! (1966), a Disney movie in which he starred as a reluctant boy scout, to Tarantino’s Death Proof (2007). He has done sci-fi, westerns, romcoms and horror, as well as family movies. He has played blue-collar roles – heroic firefighters (1991’s Backdraft) and duplicitous salesmen (1980’s Used Cars) – as well as white-collar types, for example as the beleaguered yuppie husband in Unlawful Entry (1992). You can hear his voice work in animated features like The Fox and The Hound (1981) and can catch a glimpse of him in some of the Fast & Furious pictures.

The veteran star straddles different eras in Hollywood. He is one of the few actors who has appeared on screen alongside both old-time Hollywood legends like James Stewart (in 1972 crime drama Fools’ Parade) and contemporary box office idols like Tom Cruise (in Cameron Crowe’s 2001 cult classic Vanilla Sky). Russell is back on UK screens this week in the 40th-anniversary re-release of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), one of several films he made with Carpenter, which also include an Elvis biopic. He stars as MacReady, a helicopter pilot in a remote Atlantic scientific research station. Russell reportedly took almost a year to grow the enormous, bushy beard that MacReady wears in the film. The facial foliage, though, serves its purpose. No one this hairy could be mistaken for a Disney child star.

With The Thing, Russell further refined the action hero persona he developed as Snake Plissken the eyepatch-wearing, wisecracking renegade of Carpenter’s earlier film Escape from New York (1981). His MacReady combines old-fashioned machismo with some counterculture rebellion. The first time he is seen on screen, he is playing chess against a computer, taking swigs of whisky between moves, convinced he is about to win. When the computer gets him in checkmate, he calls the machine a “cheating b***” and dumps his drink into its operating system.

Carpenter described MacReady as “a true loner… a character who never wanted to assume the leadership role but was forced into it by circumstance”. The Americans in the remote Antarctic research station are pitted against “the Thing”, a shadowy alien organism awoken from the ice that takes over other life forms and moulds its own cells to imitate them. A shape-shifting monster, to put it simply. The film was released at the same time as E.T. Audiences, however, much preferred the lovable alien in Steven Spielberg’s movie to the malign presence that Carpenter conjured up. The Thing received mediocre reviews and did patchy business before being rediscovered on video.

The Thing featured an all-male cast and an almost entirely male crew. The one female voice heard is that of the chess computer. For Carpenter, though, this was always intended as a story about “claustrophobia and about men”. Russell is excellent as the hard-bitten anti-hero determined to survive. He tempers his comedic instincts and tones down any hint of flamboyance. This was a very different performance from his other action movies, for example, his comedic turn opposite Sylvester Stallone in Andrei Konchalovsky’s Tango And Cash (1989), or his wildman antics as Snake Plissken.

On screen, Russell was generally personable and easygoing. Collaborators testify to his geniality. Everyone seems to like him. When he plays villains, though, he often uses his trademark charm to make audiences root for characters they might otherwise despise. One of his most intriguing and underrated screen performances is in Ron Shelton’s 2002 thriller Dark Blue, based on a James Ellroy story about corruption and racism in the LA Police Department. He plays crooked police officer, Sgt Eldon Perry. Sleazy but ingratiating, he is always able to rationalise his own misdeeds. The son of a cop, Perry is simply behaving in the way he was brought up to. He is a cog in a machine. When the law is slow, he’ll take shortcuts. If that means framing a suspect or beating up an informant, so be it. Perry eventually becomes consumed with self-loathing. His wife leaves him; his young partner is killed. He finally turns on his corrupt boss (Brendan Gleeson) and gives himself up for arrest. Russell plays him in a perversely sympathetic fashion. He may be cynical, arrogant and obnoxious but he still keeps the audience on his side.

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A few years before, in Jonathan Kaplan’s Unlawful Entry, Russell had been equally impressive as Michael Carr, a middle-class, golf-playing yuppie in peril, terrorised by a rogue cop (Ray Liotta). Carr has all his normal supports taken away. His credit cards bounce. His car is clamped. Drugs are planted in his house. Officer Davis even tries to steal his wife (Madeleine Stowe). Carr is the contemporary equivalent of an upstanding homesteader preyed on by outlaws in some old frontier tale. He’s the victim, not the villain – but when pushed to extremes, he won’t hesitate to defend himself. Russell plays him with an earnest, self-righteous conviction that brings back memories of Henry Fonda.

As he has grown older, Russell’s character turns have become bolder and more eccentric. Producer Stacey Sher claimed that his performance as the misogynistic bounty hunter, John “the Hangman” Ruth, handcuffed to Jennifer Jason Leigh’s outlaw, in Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015) was inspired by soon-to-be disgraced Hollywood producer, Harvey Weinstein. As played by Russell, though, the bounty hunter is a whiskered pipe-smoking old buzzard, as funny as he is malevolent.

Arguably, Russell is a victim of his own versatility. He is the modern-day everyman of American cinema. There is no single performance in his 60-year career that leaps above the rest. He isn’t an action star like Stallone or Bruce Willis. Nor is he indelibly associated with one genre. Westerns, sci-fi, horror and comedies are all apparently in his wheelhouse. It also can’t be claimed that he was “rediscovered” by Tarantino in the same way actors like Pam Grier or Robert Forster were when they appeared in the director’s Jackie Brown (1997). Russell has never been at risk of falling into obscurity.

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There aren’t many of Russell’s contemporaries who can match either his longevity or his consistency. Take out some of the sillier kids’ movies at the start of his career and you’ll find very few duds. Many cite Russell’s turn as Wyatt Earp in the 1993 western Tombstone as his finest hour. It is noteworthy then that this was a famously troubled movie. The screenwriter and original director, Kevin Jarre, was fired early on and replaced by George P Cosmatos. Russell, though, was the one credited with holding the production together. He brings pathos and subtlety to his role as Earp, the old-time lawman from Kansas who dresses meticulously, behaves with courtesy, gallantry and restraint, but whose capacity for violence is never in doubt.

Astonishingly, Russell hasn’t even a single Oscar nomination. The closest he came was a Golden Globe nod for his role as Meryl Streep’s boyfriend in Silkwood. It’s now almost 60 years since he kicked Elvis Presley in the shin but his cameo in It Happened at the World’s Fair was uncredited – and there have been many subsequent occasions in which he was denied the plaudits that he deserved.

The directors who’ve worked most closely with Russell value him the most. “He [Russell] is an instinctual actor. He is a born mimic. He could do me, he could do you, he could do anybody. He soaks up people and he gives it back out,” John Carpenter said of him in a 2016 interview, praising the actor in uncanny terms that might apply to the shape-shifting creature of The Thing. “Kurt is the consummate professional. I’ve worked with some other great actors but in terms of cinema knowledge, of what the camera does, where the camera is and what he is doing at all times, Kurt is, I think, the best.’”

‘The Thing’ (40th Anniversary 4K Restoration) released 28 October