Type ‘Kurt Russell birth chart’ into your favorite search engine—you may have already, you pervert!—and you’ll notice a handful of unassailable facts: sun in Pisces, belying an artistic temperament; moon and ascendant in Cancer, indicating a nurturing sensitivity; and Venus in Aries, a curveball sure to delight and entice, implying the romantic tendencies of a burly spring ram. From a purely cosmological standpoint, it appears the clean-cut kid from Springfield, MA, was fated for the life of a heartthrob. If the profile above leaves you doubting, consider his universal truth: from his first on-screen appearance—as Elvis Presley’s pint-sized, shin-kicking foe in 1963’s It Happened at the World’s Fair—Kurt Vogel Russell burst forth like Athena from the skull of Zeus, fully-formed, and ready to set cinemas ablaze.

Within the pantheon of child actors trussed up, masticated, and spat out by a ravenous Hollywood studio system, there are but a scant few who managed to maintain their hold on the marquee. Recall Drew Barrymore’s and Christina Ricci’s earliest outings as Kewpie-faced moppets, before their evolution into ’90s pin-ups. Among stars minted in the mid-century, the numbers dwindle: our dearly departed Dean Stockwell is one such example, ditto his boyhood pal Russ Tamblyn, but for all their accomplishments, you could hardly call them blockbuster leads. Perhaps Russell owes his great success to a death-rattle benediction: legend has it a scrap of paper bearing the youngster’s hastily scrawled name was discovered on Uncle Walt’s desk beside the man’s frigid corpse. In homage to Disney’s dying wish, the studio signed the 15-year-old Russell to a 10-year contract, giving him top billing in goofy kiddie fare like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969) and ape-in-an-office-comedy The Barefoot Executive (1971).

Child actors, beloved for their cherubic qualities, tend to wear out their welcome by the time puberty sets in. Yet there’s something about that Russell kid—you can see it, even in Confederate grays in Mosby’s Marauders (1967)—that connotes a staying power seldom afforded his contemporaries. A lesser presence might inspire audience fatigue—and there are countless tales of child stars who ditched the seventh art entirely. But Russell carries on like a Timex: “takes a licking and keeps on ticking.” It’s been nearly 60 years since that first encounter with the King in World’s Fair, and the man still manages a picture a year.

Russell was ‘born in a trunk,’ as the song goes, the child of character actor Bing Russell and hoofer wife Louise. Not exactly Barrymore-level, but a pedigree nonetheless, and true to the tradition of would-be stars plucked from the nurseries of showfolk parents. When the Russell clan decamped to Hollywood in the late ’50s, Bing found consistent employment in television, working in a slew of horse operas and war dramas. This was an era when an Equity card and a union wage could secure a decent, middle-class life for bit players and supporting actors—less ‘late nights at the Brown Derby’ or ‘premieres at Mann’s Chinese,’ more of a ‘time to make the donuts’ mentality.

Good, clean living and a happy home: these are the modest prizes of American ambition. Amid a maelstrom of social change and falling box-office receipts, and coinciding with television’s emergence as a proving ground, the dimple-faced boy stood before his audience as an avatar for national ideals. In many ways, Russell is the last vestige of the era’s traditional star factory. Appearing regularly in living rooms across the country, he grew up on screen alongside his audience.