Kevin Bacon

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Kevin Norwood Bacon (born July 8, 1958) is a Golden Globe- and Screen Actors Guild Award-nominated United States film and theater actor whose notable roles include Footloose, Animal House, Stir of Echoes, Wild Things, JFK (film), Apollo 13 (film), Mystic River(film), The Woodsman, and Tremors.

Kevin Bacon biography

Kevin Norwood Bacon (born July 8, 1958) is a Golden Globe- and Screen Actors Guild Award-nominated United States film and theater actor whose notable roles include Footloose, Animal House, Stir of Echoes, Wild Things, JFK (film), Apollo 13 (film), Mystic River(film), The Woodsman, and Tremors.

Biography

Early life & career

Bacon, the youngest of six children, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and raised in a close-knit family in Philadelphia. A former Park Avenue debutante, his mother, Ruth Hilda (married and maiden names Holmes; 1916-1991), taught elementary school and was a liberal activist, while his father, Edmund Bacon, was a well-respected urban planner. Knowing that he wanted to be an actor by age 13, Bacon left home four years later to pursue a theater career in New York, where he was one of the youngest students ever admitted and the youngest student to appear in a production at the Circle in the Square. "I wanted life, man, the real thing", he later recalled to Nancy Mills of Cosmopolitan (magazine). "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 decision to become an actor did not come without pressures. Describing his father to Mills as a "city-planning superstar", he set very high goals for himself because he "felt nothing less than stardom would be enough." With the support of his wife, actress Kyra Sedgwick, Bacon believes that he has come to terms with his qualms about Los Angeles, thus strengthening his commitment to acting. "Our lives are still crazy, we still spend a ton of time out in L.A, and I've finally admitted that the movie business means a lot to me", he told Chase. "I used to say, it's okay, I can do it, but it isn't that important, and then I realized I was out of my mind; this is what I do for a living.". Bacon has always been forthcoming about his lack of professional self-confidence, which has never stopped him from delivering powerful performances. In 1982, he won an Obie Award for his role in Forty-Deuce, a play about street hustlers, and soon after made his Broadway theatre 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 (film) costarring Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Tim Daly and Ellen Barkin that he made an indelible impression on film critics and moviegoers alike. Set in Baltimore during Christmas week of 1959, Diner depicts the lives of six young men in their early twenties who have been close friends since childhood but are gradually moving in different directions. By far the most aimless of the group, the surly, sarcastic Fenwick gets increasingly drunk as the story progresses, deriving great pleasure from playing practical jokes on his friends and outanswering contestants on the television quiz show College Bowl from the safety of his sofa. The New Yorker's Pauline Kael, who included Bacon's name on her list of the film's "amazing" performances, also noted that "with his pointed chin, and the look of a mad Mick, he keeps Fenwick morose and yet demonic." David Denby of New York found Fenwick "both attractive and creepily self-destructive", attributing much of Diners success to the fact that it "offers a completed vision of life, ecstatic in its recovery of forgotten pleasures, melancholy in its knowledge of how small a chance these men ever had of reclaiming their freedom."

Bolstered by the attention garnered by his performance in Diner, Bacon went on to star in the 1984 box-office smash Footloose. Directed by Herbert Ross and packed with energetic musical dance sequences, the film tells the story of Ren McCormick, a streetwise Chicago teenager (Bacon was actually 24 years old when filming began) who, after moving with his mother to a repressive small town in the Midwest, is determined to reverse the town minister's ban on
rock-and-roll made years earlier. Richard Corliss of Time (magazine) 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." Part of the conflict centers around the relationship between the minister, played by John Lithgow, and his wild teenage daughter, played by Lori Singer, who falls in love with Bacon's character and joins forces with him to put on a dance in a neighboring town. 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. Sporting a punk haircut for the role and a rebellious James Dean-type attitude somewhat different than that of the Fenwick character in Diner, Bacon earned strong reviews for Footloose, appearing on the cover of People (magazine) magazine soon after its release. David Ansen of Newsweek noted that Footloose "works because Bacon is always a fine actor," while Corliss found his performance to be "smart and appealing".

His performance that year as gay prostitute Willie O'Keefe in Oliver Stone's JFK (film) received tremendous critical acclaim, Premiere calling his work "flawless", while National Review described it as "stunning". Shining among an ensemble cast in a small but memorable role had its appeal for Bacon, whose career began to swing in a more positive direction. Encouraged by his JFK reviews, he went on to play another character role prosecuting attorney Jack Ross in the 1992 military courtroom drama A Few Good Men, starring Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson. Michael Sragow of The New Yorker found Bacon's performance to be the strongest in the film: "Kevin Bacon, as the prosecutor, gives the most full-bodied performance. You find yourself believing he is a career serviceman not because of his flattop haircut but because he's marinated in Marine tradition. His boyish competitive streak emerges from a saltier place than Cruise's."

Bacon's newfound career momentum did not stop with these two films; that same year he returned to the theater to play, opposite Saundra Santiago, in Spike Heels, directed by Michael Greif. Time, which praised the play's "tart wit, feminist insight, and quirky detours of plot", also pronounced Bacon, who portrays a wealthy cad, its "standout" for his ability to blend "ribaldry, rudeness, rapscallion reprehensibility, and believable redemption."

It was not until his work on The River Wild in 1994, however, that Bacon began to feel more confident about the success of his professional comeback. He earned a Golden Globe Award nomination for his portrayal of a compulsive liar whose boyish charm turns diabolic when he overtakes the raft of a former river guide played by Meryl Streep and her family on a white-water rafting trip. As Wade, Bacon initially flirts with Streep's character and then befriends her young son until it becomes apparent that he only wants her knowledge of the river to secure freedom for himself and his cohorts who are on the lam after a violent robbery. Describing it 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," Bacon had the added stress of worrying about Sedgwick and their children, who had joined him on location. Like the actors and crew, they had to come up the river each day in a helicopter, which would land on a raft and allow them to trudge to shore. "I'd hear somebody say, 'The Bacons are in the chopper,' and I'd see them waving, and then they'd come down," Bacon recalled. "It was terrifying because everything I loved was in that whirlybird." Dispelling any lingering suggestions that Bacon might not be leading-man material, director Curtis Hanson told The New York Times: "Kevin in our movie is playing a movie-star part. In another era if we were making this movie in 1950 I would have wanted Robert Mitchum to play that part." Bacon was again acclaimed for a dark starring role playing an offending pedophile on parole in the 2004 in film The Woodsman; he was nominated best actor receiving the Independent Spirit Award.

He will appear in the HBO film Taking Chance, a movie based on a story written by LtCol. Strobl, an American 'Desert Storm' war veteran.

Kevin was also introduced as one of the writers for The Colbert Report on the first show following the writer's strike.

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."

Bacon and Sedgwick have starred together in Pyrates, Murder in the First, and The Woodsman. They have two children, Travis Bacon (born June 23, 1989 in Los Angeles, California) and Sosie Ruth Bacon (born March 15, 1992). The family reside on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Bacon and Sedgwick insist that neither work on separate projects at the same time. In 1994, while shooting The River Wild, Bacon was accompanied at the set by his family. Bacon prioritizes his relationship with his children, something his father never did for him, and does not want to risk his career coming between him and his wife. "No place, no business could break up my wife and me. I would never give the movie business so much credit", he stated in Cosmopolitan (magazine). "To me, marriage is about committing yourself to one person. In my opinion, I got the hottest babe there is; I would never do anything to jeopardize that."

In December 2007, he endorsed and campaigned for John Edwards in U.S. presidential election, 2008.

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, any Hollywood actor can be "linked" to another in a handful of "steps" based on their associations with Bacon. Although it has since been proven that there are "better" centers in the Hollywood universe, such as Sean Connery, Christopher Lee, Rod Steiger, Gene Hackman or the prolific Michael Caine, Bacon's name remained the focus because he was the first one selected by the game's creators, and because the name "Kevin Bacon" rhymes with the last word of the phrase "six degrees of separation". A person's number of degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon is known as one's "Bacon Number".

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 to charities and each other.

Music

In 1995 Bacon formed a band called The Bacon Brothers with his brother, Michael Bacon (musician). The duo have released four music album.