Kevin Bacon

Kevin Bacon (born July 8, 1958, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.) is an American actor, director, and musician who is best known as the star of the film Footloose (1984). His prolific, increasingly distinguished acting career made him the subject of a parlor game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, the object of which is to link an actor to Bacon across six films or fewer via shared costars.

Early life

Bacon is the sixth and youngest child of Ruth Hilda Holmes, a teacher and political activist, and Edmund Norwood Bacon, a prominent city planner and architect who was once branded “The Father of Modern Philadelphia.” From an early age, KevinBacon knew that he wanted to be an actor. While a high school student in Philadelphia, he participated in the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts, a summer program for artistically and academically talented high school students, which helped him to develop his acting skills. Bacon also studied and performed at Philadelphia’s Manning Street Actor’s Theatre before moving to New York City after high school. There Bacon attended the Circle in the Square Theatre School and appeared in off-Broadway theater productions.

Early acting career

At the school Bacon came to the attention of film director John Landis, who cast the 18-year-old actor in the role of an unlikeable ROTC cadet in the comedy National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978). Although Bacon grew as a performer under Landis’s direction, Animal House did not provide the career breakthrough that Bacon was hoping for, and he focused on performing in TV soap operas and theater. In 1982 he won an Obie Award for his critically acclaimed stage portrayal of a male prostitute in Forty Deuce and his work in Poor Little Lambs. When Forty Deuce was adapted as film by director Paul Morrissey later that year, Bacon had a starring role. In 1982 Bacon also appeared in Barry Levinson’s Diner, the story of a group of friends in Baltimore that became a cult classic and helped launch Bacon’s career, along with those of Mickey Rourke, Steve Guttenberg, and Daniel Stern. The next year Bacon had a prominent role in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, an anthology film based on Grace Paley short stories.

Breakthrough in Footloose and later film career

Footloose (1984) was the film that put Bacon into the limelight. In it, he plays Ren McCormack, a dance-loving teenager who moves from a big city to a small town where rock music and dancing are verboten. Bacon showed himself to be a capable dancer, and the film’s high-energy choreography and catchy soundtrack helped make Footloose a box office hit with a very long shelf life.

After Footloose, Bacon worked often, continuing to appear in romantic, dramatic, or action lead roles in films such as Quicksilver (1986), Lemon Sky (1988), She’s Having a Baby (1988), The Big Picture (1989), Flatliners (1990), Tremors (1990), and He Said, She Said (1991). During this period he also took on smaller character roles, including memorable performances in Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987), Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) with Kevin Costner and Tommy Lee Jones, and A Few Good Men (1992), supporting Jack Nicholson. Bacon increasingly gravitated toward these smaller, more complex character roles in which he thrived.

He earned a Golden Globe best supporting actor nomination for his portrayal of one of the thieves who menace Meryl Streep’s character in the thriller The River Wild (1994). Bacon then won a Critics Choice Award for best actor for his performance as killer Henri Young in Murder in the First (1995), in which he starred with Christian Slater and Gary Oldman. In 1995 he also played real-life astronaut Jack Swigert, appearing alongside Tom Hanks, in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13.

In the first decade of the 21st century, Bacon remained a much-in-demand actor and contributed notable performances to films such as Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River (2003), in which he plays a glum Massachusetts state police detective opposite Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. Bacon was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for best male lead for his risky portrayal of a child molester who attempts to rebuild his life after his release from prison in The Woodsman (2004) . He then abruptly changed course for a comic turn as a haughty hair stylist in Beauty Shop (2005). His portrayal of a Marine officer who escorts the body of Marine killed in Iraq to his home in Wyoming in Taking Chance (2009) earned Bacon a Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by a male actor in a television movie or miniseries and a Golden Glove Award for best actor in a miniseries or motion picture made for television. In the meantime, Bacon received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2003.

Get Unlimited Access

Try Britannica Premium for free and discover more.

Subscribe

Continuing to act in films of various genres, Bacon starred as villain Sebastian Shaw in X-Men: First Class (2011). On television he earned a Golden Globe nomination for his performance as Dick in I Love Dick (2016–17) and praise for his portrayal of a respected but corrupt FBI agent in City on a Hill (2019–22). He played himself in The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (2022).

Personal life, collaborations with Kyra Sedgwick, and musical career

Bacon formally met his wife, actress Kyra Sedgwick, during the filming of Lemon Sky (1988), though, according to her, some 10 years earlier, as a 12-year-old, she had approached him as a fan. Only a few months after their meeting on the Lemon Sky set, Bacon and Sedgwick were married. They have two children: a son, Travis, who is a musician and filmmaker, and a daughter, Sosie, who is an actress. Bacon and Sedgwick have collaborated often as artists, appearing together in Pyrates (1991), Murder in the First, The Woodsman, and Cavedweller (2004). He directed her in the film Loverboy (2005), his directorial debut, and in four episodes of The Closer, the TV series in which Sedgwick starred from 2005 to 2012.

Bacon is also an accomplished musician, who began writing songs at age 12. He and his brother Michael Bacon, an Emmy Award-winning composer for film and television, play together in a band, the Bacon Brothers, which plays “Forosoco” music (their name for their blend of folk, rock, soul, and country influences). They have recorded about a dozen albums and have toured extensively.

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

Bacon has appeared in many more films and television programs than have thus far been mentioned. Indeed, the sheer volume of his filmography (the sense that “he was in everything,” especially during the 1990s) gave rise to the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, the game created by a group of students at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1994. Based on the concept of six degrees of separation—the idea that any human being is six or fewer social connections removed from any other human being—the game challenges its players to connect any film actor, living or dead, to Bacon by citing films in which the connecting actors appeared together. The connection to Bacon must be made in six or fewer films, and the number of films required to make the that connection is know as the Bacon Number. For example, Nick Nolte has a Bacon Number of three: Nolte appeared in Cape Fear (1991) alongside Robert De Niro, who appeared in Goodfellas (1990) alongside Joe Pesci, who appeared in JFK alongside Bacon.