Kevin Bacon

Kevin Norwood Bacon[2] (born July 8, 1958)[3] is an American actor. Known for his leading man and character roles, Bacon has received numerous accolades including Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award and a nomination for a Primetime Emmy Award. The Guardian named him one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination.[4] In 2003, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.[5] Bacon made his feature film debut in National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) before his breakthrough role in the musical-drama film Footloose (1984). He's since starred in critically acclaimed films such as Diner (1982), JFK (1991), A Few Good Men (1992), Apollo 13 (1995), Mystic River (2003), and Frost/Nixon (2008). Other notable roles include Friday the 13th (1980), The River Wild (1994), Sleepers (1996), Wild Things (1998), The Woodsman (2004), Flatliners (1990), Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011), X-Men: First Class (2011), Black Mass (2015), and Patriots Day (2016). He is equally prolific on television, he starred in the Fox drama series The Following from 2013 to 2015. For his role as Lt. Col. Michael Strobl in HBO original film Taking Chance (2009), he received the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Miniseries or Television Film and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Actor in a Miniseries or Television Movie. Bacon starred in the title role in Amazon Prime Video series I Love Dick from 2016 to 2017 for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. From 2019 to 2022 he starred in the Showtime series City on a Hill.

Bacon's directed the films Losing Chase (1996), and Loveryboy (2005). He has become associated with the concept of interconnectedness among people, having been popularized by the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon". In 2007, he created SixDegrees.org, a charitable foundation.[7] He is a brand ambassador for British mobile network operator EE and has been featured in several ads for the company.[8] Bacon, the youngest of six children, was born and raised in a close-knit family in Philadelphia.[3] His mother, Ruth Hilda (née Holmes; 1916–1991), taught at an elementary school and was a liberal activist,[3] while his father, Edmund Bacon (1910–2005), was an urban planner who served for many years as executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission and authored the seminal text Design of Cities.[9] Bacon attended Julia R. Masterman High School for both middle and high school.[10] At age 16, in 1975, Bacon won a full scholarship to and attended the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts at Bucknell University,[11] a state-funded five-week arts program at which he studied theater under Glory Van Scott. The experience solidified Bacon's passion for the arts.[7][9] Bacon left home at age 17 to pursue a theater career in New York City, where he appeared in a production at the Circle in the Square Theater School. "I wanted life, man, the real thing", he later recalled to Nancy Mills of Cosmopolitan. "The message I got was 'The arts are it. Business is the devil's work. Art and creative expression are next to godliness.' Combine that with an immense ego and you wind up with an actor."[12] Bacon's debut in the fraternity comedy National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) did not lead to the fame he had sought, and Bacon returned to waiting tables and auditioning for small roles in theater.[9] He briefly worked on the television soap operas Search for Tomorrow (1979) and Guiding Light (1980–81) in New York. In 1980, he appeared in the slasher film Friday the 13th.[13] Some of his early stage work included Getting Out, performed at New York's Phoenix Theater, and Flux, at Second Stage Theatre during their 1981–1982 season.[14]

In 1990, Bacon had two successful roles. He played a character who saved his town from under-the-earth "graboid" monsters in the comedy/horror film Tremors,[22] and he portrayed an earnest medical student experimenting with death in Joel Schumacher's Flatliners.[14] In Bacon's next project he starred opposite Elizabeth Perkins in He Said, She Said. Despite lukewarm reviews and low audience turnout, He Said, She Said was illuminating for Bacon. Required to play a character with sexist attitudes, he admitted that the role was not that large a stretch for him.[14] By 1991, Bacon began to give up the idea of playing leading men in big-budget films and to remake himself as a character actor. "The only way I was going to be able to work on 'A' projects with really 'A' directors was if I wasn't the guy who was starring", he confided to The New York Times writer Trip Gabriel. "You can't afford to set up a $40 million movie if you don't have your star."[23] He performed that year as gay prostitute Willie O'Keefe in Oliver Stone's JFK[24] and went on to play a prosecuting attorney in the military courtroom drama A Few Good Men.[25] Later that year he returned to the theater to play in Spike Heels, directed by Michael Greif.[14] In 1994, Bacon earned a Golden Globe nomination for his role in The River Wild,[14] opposite Meryl Streep. He described the film to Chase in Cosmopolitan as a "grueling shoot", in which "every one of us fell out of the boat at one point or another and had to be saved". His next film, Murder in the First, earned him the Broadcast Film Critic's Association Award in 1995,[14] the same year that he starred in the blockbuster hit Apollo 13.[26] Bacon played a trademark dark role once again in Sleepers (1996).[27] This part starkly contrasted with his appearance in the lighthearted romantic comedy, Picture Perfect (1997).

In 1982, he won an Obie Award for his role in Forty Deuce,[15] and soon afterward he made his Broadway debut in Slab Boys, with then-unknowns Sean Penn and Val Kilmer. However, it was not until he portrayed Timothy Fenwick that same year in Barry Levinson's film Diner – costarring Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Tim Daly, and Ellen Barkin – that he made an indelible impression on film critics and moviegoers alike.[16] Bolstered by the attention garnered by his performance in Diner, Bacon starred in Footloose (1984).[14] Richard Corliss of TIME likened Footloose to the James Dean classic Rebel Without a Cause and the old Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland musicals, commenting that the film includes "motifs on book burning, mid-life crisis, AWOL parents, fatal car crashes, drug enforcement, and Bible Belt vigilantism."[17] To prepare for the role, Bacon enrolled at a high school as a transfer student named "Ren McCormick" and studied teenagers before leaving in the middle of the day.[9][18] Bacon earned strong reviews for Footloose.[19] Bacon's critical and box office success led to a period of typecasting in roles similar to the two he portrayed in Diner and Footloose, and he had difficulty shaking this on-screen image. For the next several years he chose films that cast him against either type and experienced, by his own estimation, a career slump. After a cameo in John Hughes's 1987 comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles,[20] Bacon starred in John Hughes's 1988 comedy She's Having a Baby,[14] and the following year he was in another comedy called The Big Picture.[21]

In 1990, Bacon had two successful roles. He played a character who saved his town from under-the-earth "graboid" monsters in the comedy/horror film Tremors,[22] and he portrayed an earnest medical student experimenting with death in Joel Schumacher's Flatliners.[14] In Bacon's next project he starred opposite Elizabeth Perkins in He Said, She Said. Despite lukewarm reviews and low audience turnout, He Said, She Said was illuminating for Bacon. Required to play a character with sexist attitudes, he admitted that the role was not that large a stretch for him.[14] By 1991, Bacon began to give up the idea of playing leading men in big-budget films and to remake himself as a character actor. "The only way I was going to be able to work on 'A' projects with really 'A' directors was if I wasn't the guy who was starring", he confided to The New York Times writer Trip Gabriel. "You can't afford to set up a $40 million movie if you don't have your star."[23] He performed that year as gay prostitute Willie O'Keefe in Oliver Stone's JFK[24] and went on to play a prosecuting attorney in the military courtroom drama A Few Good Men.[25] Later that year he returned to the theater to play in Spike Heels, directed by Michael Greif.[14] In 1994, Bacon earned a Golden Globe nomination for his role in The River Wild,[14] opposite Meryl Streep. He described the film to Chase in Cosmopolitan as a "grueling shoot", in which "every one of us fell out of the boat at one point or another and had to be saved". His next film, Murder in the First, earned him the Broadcast Film Critic's Association Award in 1995,[14] the same year that he starred in the blockbuster hit Apollo 13.[26] Bacon played a trademark dark role once again in Sleepers (1996).[27] This part starkly contrasted with his appearance in the lighthearted romantic comedy, Picture Perfect (1997).