Kevin Bacon

08 Jul, 1958 | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Actor

Biography

Kevin Norwood Bacon is an American film and theater actor whose notable roles include Animal House, Footloose, Flatliners, A Few Good Men, Apollo 13, Mystic River, The Woodsman, Friday the 13th, Hollow Man, and Tremors. Bacon has been nominated for Emmy and Screen Actors Guild Awards. He won a Golden Globe for his role as Lt. Col. Michael Strobl in Taking Chance and has been called one of the best actors never to have received an Oscar nomination. Bacon, one of six children, was born and raised in a close-knit family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His mother, Ruth Hilda (née Holmes; 1916–1991), taught elementary school and was a liberal activist, while his father, Edmund Bacon, was a well-respected architect. At 16, Bacon attended the Pennsylvania Governors School for the Arts, a state-funded five-week arts program which helped solidify Bacon's passion for the arts. Acting career Bacon left home at age 17 to pursue a theater career in New York, 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." Bacon's debut in the fraternity comedy Animal House in 1978 did not lead to instant fame for which he had hoped, and Bacon returned to waiting tables and auditioning for small roles in theater. He briefly worked on the television soap operas Search For Tomorrow (1979) and The Guiding Light (1980–81) in New York. He refused an offer of a television series based on Animal House to be filmed in California in order to remain close to the New York stage . Some of his early stage work included Getting Out performed at New York's Phoenix Theater, and Flux which he did at Second Stage Theatre during their 1981–1982 season. In 1982, he won an Obie Award for his role in Forty Deuce, and soon after 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 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. Bolstered by the attention garnered by his performance in Diner, Bacon starred in the 1984 box-office smash Footloose. 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." 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. Bacon did earn strong reviews for Footloose, and he appeared on the cover of People magazine soon after its release. Personal life Bacon has been married to actress Kyra Sedgwick since September 4, 1988; they met on the set of the PBS version of Lanford Wilson's play Lemon Sky. "The time I was hitting what I considered to be bottom was also the time I met my wife, our kids were born, good things were happening", he explained to Cosmopolitan's Chase. "And I was able to keep supporting myself; that always gave me strength."[cite this quote] Bacon and Sedgwick have starred together in Pyrates, Murder in the First, The Woodsman and Loverboy (2005 film). They have two children, Travis Sedgwick Bacon (born June 23, 1989 in Los Angeles, California) and Sosie Ruth Bacon (born March 15, 1992). The family resides on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Bacon and Sedgwick appeared in will.i.am's video It's a New Day which was released following Barack Obama's 2008 presidential win. Bacon and Sedgwick lost an undisclosed amount of money in the Ponzi scheme of infamous fraudulent investor Bernard Madoff.[ Music In 1995, Bacon formed a band called The Bacon Brothers with his brother, Michael. The duo has released six albums.