Kevin Bacon Biography

Kevin Norwood Bacon (born July 8, 1958) is an American actor and musician whose notable roles include National Lampoon's Animal House, Diner, Footloose, Flatliners, Wild Things, A Few Good Men, JFK, The River Wild, Murder in the First, Apollo 13, Hollow Man, Stir of Echoes, Trapped, Mystic River, The Woodsman, Friday the 13th, Death Sentence, Frost/Nixon, X-Men: First Class, and Tremors. He currently stars on the Fox television series The Following.

Bacon has won Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Awards, was nominated for an Emmy Award, and was named by The Guardian as one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination. In 2003, Bacon received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Early life

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 at an elementary school and was a liberal activist, while his father, Edmund Norwood Bacon (May 2, 1910 " October 14, 2005), was a well-respected architect and a prominent Philadelphian who had been Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission for many years. At 16, in 1975, Bacon won a full scholarship to and attended the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts at Bucknell University, a state-funded five-week arts program at which he studied theatre under Dr. Glory Van Scott. The experience solidified 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 National Lampoon's Animal House in 1978 did not lead to the 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 Guiding Light (1980"81) in New York. In 1980, he had a prominent role in the now iconic slasher film Friday the 13th. 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 Dinercostarring Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Tim Daly and Ellen Barkinthat 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. Bacon's critical and box-office success lead to a period of typecasting in roles similar to the two he portrayed in Diner and Footloose. Bacon would have 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. In 1988, he starred in John Hughes' comedy She's Having a Baby and the following year he was in another comedy called The Big Picture. 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 Tremorsa role that People found him "far too accomplished" to playand portrayed an earnest medical student experimenting with death in Joel Schumacher's Flatliners. Bacon's next project was to star 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. 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."

He performed that year as gay prostitute Willie O'Keefe in Oliver Stone's JFK. He went on to play a prosecuting attorney in the military courtroom drama A Few Good Men. Later that year he returned to the theater to play in Spike Heels, directed by Michael Greif.

In 1994, Bacon earned a Golden Globe nomination for his role in The River Wild 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, the same year that he starred in the blockbuster hit Apollo 13. Bacon reverted to his trademark dark role once again in Sleepers in 1996. This role was in stark contrast to his appearance in the lighthearted romantic comedy, Picture Perfect the following year. Bacon also made his debut as a director in 1996 with the television film Losing Chase, which was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards, winning one. Bacon again resurrected his oddball mystique that year as a mentally-challenged houseguest in Digging to China, and as a disc jockey corrupted by payola in Telling Lies in America. As the executive producer of 1998's Wild Things, Bacon reserved a supporting role for himself, and went on to star in Stir of Echoes (directed by David Koepp) in 1999, and in Paul Verhoeven's Hollow Man in 2000.

Bacon, Colin Firth and Rachel Blanchard depict a ménage à trois in their film, Where the Truth Lies. Bacon and director Atom Egoyan have condemned the MPAA ratings board decision to give the film their "NC-17" rating over the preferable "R". Bacon decried the decision, commenting: "I don't get it, when I see films (that) are extremely violent, extremely objectionable sometimes in terms of the roles that women play, slide by with an R, no problem, because the people happen to have more of their clothes on." Bacon was again acclaimed for a dark starring role playing an offending pedophile on parole in the 2004 film The Woodsman; he was nominated best actor receiving the Independent Spirit Award. He appeared in the HBO Films production of Taking Chance, a film based on a story of the same name written by Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl, an American 'Desert Storm' war veteran. The film premiered on HBO on February 21, 2009. Bacon won a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Miniseries or Television Movie for his role. On July 15, 2010, it was confirmed that Bacon would appear in Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class. His character was mutant villain Sebastian Shaw.

In March 2012, Bacon was featured in a performance of Dustin Lance Black's play, '8' "? a staged reenactment of the federal trial that overturned California's Prop 8 ban on same-sex marriage "? as Attorney Charles J. Cooper. The production was held at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre and broadcast on YouTube to raise money for the American Foundation for Equal Rights.

Advertising work

In 2012 and 2013, Bacon has appeared in a major advertising campaign for the EE mobile network in the United Kingdom, based on the Six Degrees concept and his various film roles.

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. He has said "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. And I was able to keep supporting myself; that always gave me strength." Bacon and Sedgwick have starred together in Pyrates, Murder in the First, The Woodsman, and Loverboy. 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 has spoken out for the separation of church and state, and told The Times in 2005 that he did not "believe in God." However, he has also said that he is not anti-religion.

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 most of their savings in the Ponzi scheme of infamous fraudulent investor Bernard Madoff.

Bacon and Sedgwick learned in 2011 via their appearance on the PBS TV show Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates that he and Sedgwick are 9th cousins, once removed. Bacon and Sedgwick appeared in a video promoting the "Bill of Reproductive Rights," supporting among other things a woman's right to choose and access to birth control. As of November 2012, Bacon starred in adverts for the British mobile and Internet service EE.

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

Bacon is the subject of the trivia game titled Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, based on the idea that, due to his prolific screen career covering a diverse range of genres, any Hollywood actor can be linked to another in a handful of steps based on their associations with Bacon. The name of the game derives from the idea of six degrees of separation. Though he was initially dismayed by the game, the meme stuck, and Bacon eventually embraced it, forming the charitable initiative SixDegrees.org, a social networking site intended to link people and charities to each other.

The measure of proximity to Bacon has been mathematically formalized as the Bacon Index and can be referenced at websites including Oracle Of Bacon, which is in turn based upon Internet Movie Database data. Google even added a feature to their search engine, whereby searching for an actor's name followed by the words 'Bacon Number' will show the ways in which that actor is connected to Kevin Bacon. A similar measurement exists in the mathematics community where one measures how far one is removed from co-writing a mathematical paper with the famous mathematician Paul Erd"?s. This is done by means of the Erd"?s number which is 0 for Paul Erd"?s himself, 1 for someone who co-wrote an article with him, 2 for someone who co-wrote with someone who co-wrote with him, etc. People have combined the Bacon Index and the Erd"?s number to form the Erd"?s"Bacon number, which is essentially the sum of the two.

Music

Kevin formed a band called The Bacon Brothers with his brother, Michael. The duo has released six albums.

Filmography

Films

Year	Film	Role	Notes
1978	National Lampoon's Animal House	Chip Diller
1979	Starting Over	Husband
	The Gift	Teddy
1980	Hero at Large	2nd Teenager
1980	Friday the 13th	Jack Burrell
1981	Only When I Laugh	Don
1982	Diner	Timothy Fenwick Jr.
	Forty Deuce	Ricky
1983	Enormous Changes at the Last Minute	Dennis
1984	Footloose	Ren McCormack
1986	Quicksilver	Jack Casey
1987	White Water Summer	Vic
	End of the Line	Everett
	Planes, Trains and Automobiles	Taxi Racer
1988	She's Having a Baby	Jefferson "Jake" Edward Briggs
1989	Criminal Law	Martin Thiel
	The Big Picture	Nick Chapman
1990	Tremors	Valentine "Val" McKee
	Flatliners	David Labraccio
1991	Pyrates	Ari
	Queens Logic	Dennis
	He Said, She Said	Dan Hanson
	JFK	Willie O'Keefe
	A Little Vicious	Narrator	Short subject
1992	A Few Good Men	Capt. Jack Ross
1994	The Air Up There	Jimmy Dolan
	The River Wild	Wade	Nominated - Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor " Motion Picture
	New York Skyride	Narrator	Short subject
1995	Murder in the First	Henri Young	Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Actor Nominated - Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role
	Apollo 13	Jack Swigert	Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture
	Balto	Balto	Voice only
1996	Sleepers	Sean Nokes
1997	Picture Perfect	Sam Mayfair
	Destination Anywhere	Mike
	Telling Lies in America	Billy Magic
1998	Digging to China	Ricky Schroth
	Wild Things	Sgt. Ray Duquette
1999	Stir of Echoes	Tom Witzky
2000	My Dog Skip	Jack Morris
	We Married Margo	Himself
	Hollow Man	Sebastian Caine
2001	Novocaine	Lance Phelps
2002	Trapped	Joe Hickey
2003	Mystic River	Sean Devine	Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Best Cast Nominated - Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture
	In the Cut	John Graham
	Imagine New York	Himself	Short subject
2004	The Woodsman	Walter	Nominated - Chlotrudis Award for Best Actor Nominated - Independent Spirit Award for Best Lead Male Nominated - Satellite Award for Best Actor " Motion Picture Drama
	Cavedweller	Randall Pritchard
	"Natural Disasters: Forces of Nature"	Narrator	Short subject
2005	Loverboy	Marty	Also directed
	Beauty Shop	Jorge
	Where the Truth Lies	Lanny Morris
2007	Death Sentence	Nick Hume
	Rails & Ties	Tom Stark
2008	The Air I Breathe	Love
	Frost/Nixon	Jack Brennan	Nominated - Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture
	Saving Angelo	Brent	Short subject
2009	The Magic 7	Himself
	My One and Only	Dan
2011	Elephant White	Jimmy the Brit
	Super	Jock
	X-Men: First Class	Sebastian Shaw	Nominated - Teen Choice Award for Choice Movie Villain
	Crazy, Stupid, Love.	David Lindhagen
2012	Jayne Mansfield's Car	Carroll Caldwell
2013	R.I.P.D.	Bobby Hayes

Television

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1979	Search for Tomorrow	Todd Adamson
1980"1981	Guiding Light	T. J. 'Tim' Werner No.2	Six episodes
1983	The Demon Murder Case	Kenny Miller
1984	Mister Roberts	Ens. Frank Pulver
1985	The Little Sister	Probation Officer	Uncredited
1988	Lemon Sky	Alan
1994	Frasier	Vic	Voice only Episode: "Adventures in Paradise: Part 2"
2000	God, the Devil and Bob	Himself	Voice only Episode: "Bob Gets Involved"
2002"2006	Will & Grace		Episode: "Bacon and Eggs" "The Finale"
2008	The Colbert Report		Episode: "The Writers Return!"
2009	Taking Chance	Lt. Col. Michael Strobl	Golden Globe Award for Best Actor " Miniseries or Television Film Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Miniseries or Television Movie Nominated - Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor " Miniseries or a Movie Nominated - Satellite Award for Best Actor " Miniseries or Television Film
2010	Bored to Death	Himself	Episode: "Forty-Two Down!"
2011	Robot Chicken	Pringle Ren McCormack	Voice only Episode: "Beastmaster and Commander"
2013"present	The Following	Ryan Hardy	Lead role Saturn Award for Best Actor on Television (2013)

Directing:

• Losing Chase (1996)
• The Closer (2006) (Episode: Serving the King: Part 2)
• The Closer (2007) (Episode: Blindsided)
• The Closer (2008) (Episode: Sudden Death)
• The Closer (2009) (Episode: Waivers of Extradition)