Kevin Costner, 57, Whitney Houston’s co-star in her 1992 debut film, The Bodyguard, will speak at her funeral Saturday in Newark, New Jersey, reports People magazine.
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The services for Houston are invitation-only at the request of the family and will be held at her childhood church New Hope Baptist Church.
Costner has kept quiet since Houston’s death, but in an ABC interview in 2009, he made his feelings about his Bodyguard co-star very clear from the first time he ever laid eyes on her:
This girl really has it. I wanted to wait for Whitney. We postponed the movie a year to wait for Whitney.”
When Costner was asked about rumors that certain love scenes were cut from the movie, he confirmed that some were edited out of the film; however, he quickly shot down insinuations that it had anything to do with it being an inter-racial relationship. Though he was asked if he thought that race should be addressed, he said he thought it was an irrelevant subject:
We said, no. Let’s not do that,” said Mr. Costner. “This is a woman; this is not race. This was just about good, old-fashioned chemistry, boy/girl stuff.”
Through all of Whitney’s trials and tribulations, Costner remained a stead-fast friend. When asked about a comeback for Houston several years ago, he said that it was inevitable:
We’ve all been bruised and life has taken some big bites out of all of us,” said The Bodyguard co-star. “Whitney Houston has taken some big bites out of life, and we’re all the better for it.”
Since Houston’s death February 11 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, her album sales have witnessed a huge surge — particularly for The Bodyguard, reports the New York Times:
For the week that ended Sunday, Ms. Houston had a nearly 60-fold increase in album sales, virtually all of it digital, and equivalent boosts in track downloads and online streaming.
She sold 101,000 albums in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan, compared with 1,700 the week before, and 91,000 of those albums were sold digitally; she also had 887,000 downloads of individual tracks, up from 15,000 the week before. “I Will Always Love You,” the most popular song, was downloaded 195,000 times, and from Saturday to Monday it had 2,137 spins on the radio, up from 134 during the same period the week before, according to BDS, Nielsen’s radio monitoring arm.
Spotify, the online music service, said that on Sunday there were 2.4 million streams of Ms. Houston’s songs, up 4,000 percent from the day before.
After it’s 1992 release, The Bodyguard quickly became a classic, raking in over $400 million at the box office internationally. See the closing scene that stayed burned in movie-goers minds long after the closing credits:
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