Kevin Bacon

At 66 years old, Kevin Bacon has this physical status:

Kevin Norwood Bacon (born July 8, 1958) is an American actor and musician.

His films include musical-drama film Footloose (1984), the controversial historical conspiracy legal thriller JFK (1991), the legal drama A Few Good Men (1992), the historical docudrama Apollo 13 (1995), and the mystery drama Mystic River (2003).

Bacon is also known for taking on darker roles such as that of a sadistic guard in Sleepers (1996) and troubled former child abuser in a critically acclaimed performance in The Woodsman (2004).

A highly versatile actor, he is also known for the hit comedies National Lampoon's Animal House (1978), Diner (1982), Tremors (1990) and Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011).

His other well known films are Friday the 13th (1980), Flatliners (1990), The River Wild (1994), Wild Things (1998), Stir of Echoes (1999), Hollow Man (2000), Frost/Nixon (2008), X-Men: First Class (2011), Black Mass (2015) and Patriots Day (2016).

He is equally prolific on television, having starred in the Fox drama series The Following (2013–2015).

For the HBO original film Taking Chance (2009), Bacon won a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award, also receiving a Primetime Emmy Award nomination.

More recently Bacon portrayed the title character and was the series lead of the Amazon Prime web television series I Love Dick for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. The Guardian named him 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 for his contributions to the motion pictures industry.Bacon has become associated with the concept of interconnectedness (as in social networks), having been popularized by the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon".

In 2007, he created SixDegrees.org, a charitable foundation.

Early life and education

Bacon, the youngest of six children, was born and raised in a close-knit family in Philadelphia. His mother, Ruth Hilda (née Holmes; 1916–1991), taught at an elementary school and was a liberal activist, while his father, Edmund Norwood Bacon (1910–2005), was an architect who served for many years as executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission.

Bacon attended Julia R. Masterman High School for both middle and high school. At age 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 theater under Glory Van Scott. The experience solidified Bacon's passion for the arts.

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 (b. 1989) and Sosie Ruth (b. 1992). They reside on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Bacon was previously in a five-year relationship with actress Tracy Pollan, in the 1980s.

Bacon has spoken out for the separation of church and state, and told The Times in 2005 that he did not "believe in God." 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.

The pair lost part of their savings in the Ponzi scheme of infamous swindler Bernie Madoff.

Bacon and Sedgwick learned in 2011, via their appearance on the PBS TV show Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, that they are ninth cousins, once removed. They also appeared in a video promoting the "Bill of Reproductive Rights", supporting among other things a woman's right to choose and have access to birth control.

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Acting career

Bacon left home at the age of 17 to pursue a theater career in New York City, where he appeared in a production at the Circle Theater School in New York City. He later recalled Nancy Mills of Cosmopolitan, "I wanted life, man, the authentic thing." "The arts are it," I got." The devil's trade is business. Art and creative expression are right up to godliness.' You end up with an actor if you combine that with a massive ego." Bacon's debut in the fraternity comedy National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) did not lead to the fame he aspired for, and Bacon returned to waiting tables and auditioning for small roles in theater. In New York, he appeared on the television soap operas Search for Tomorrow (1979) and Guiding Light (1980–81).

He appeared in the slasher film on Friday the 13th in 1980. Getting Out, performed at New York's Phoenix Theater, and Flux at the Second Stage Theatre in 1981-1982 were two of his early stage appearances.

In 1982, he received an Obie Award for his work in Forty Deuce, and then he performed his Broadway debut in Slab Boys, alongside then-unknowns Sean Penn and Val Kilmer. However, it wasn't until he portrayed Timothy Fenwick in Barry Levinson's film Diner, that he left an indelible impression on film critics and moviegoers alike, that it was not until he costarred 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 he received for his role in Diner, Bacon appeared in Footloose (1984). Footloose was a TIME staffer written about Richard Corliss of TIME's old Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland musicals, and "motifs on book burning, mid-life, AWOL parents, deadly car accidents, heroin use, and Bible Belt vigilantism," according to Richard Corliss. Bacon spent time at a high school as a transfer student named "Ren McCormick" and investigated adolescents before heading home in the middle of the day. Footloose received raves. Bacon was given a positive review. Bacon's critical and box office success resulted in a period of typecasting in roles like the two he portrayed in Diner and Footloose, and he had a difficult time battling his on-screen image. He chose films that cast him against either gender or experience a career slump.

He appeared in John Hughes' comedy She's Having a Baby in 1988, and the following year he appeared in another comedy called The Big Picture.

Bacon had two fruitful appearances in 1990. In the comedy/horror film Tremors, he saved his town from under-the-earth "graboid" monsters, and he portrayed an earnest medical student experimenting with death in Joel Schumacher's Flatliners.

She Said, He Said, Bacon's next project. Despite lukewarm reviews and poor audience response, He Said, She Said, was illuminating for Bacon. He was expected to play a character with sexist attitudes, but he revealed that the job was not really a stretch for him.

Bacon began to abandon the possibility of playing leading guys in big-budget films and instead reinvent himself as a character actor. "I was going to be able to work on 'A' projects with really 'A' directors if I wasn't the actor who was starring," he told New York Times writer Trip Gabriel. "You can't afford to make a $40 million film if you don't have your actor." Willie O'Keefe, a gay prostitute in Oliver Stone's JFK, went on to play a prosecuting attorney in A Few Good Men's military courtroom drama A Few Good Guys ended him last year. He returned to the theater to star in Spike Heels, directed by Michael Greif later this year.

Bacon received a Golden Globe award in 1994 for his role in The River Wild, opposite Meryl Streep. In which "every one of us fell out of the boat at one point or another and had to be saved," Chase described it as a "grueling shooting."

Murder in the First, his next film, earned him the Broadcast Film Critics Association Award in 1995, the same year that he appeared in the blockbuster hit Apollo 13. Bacon appeared in Sleepers (1996), but it was in a classic black role. This segment starkly contrasted with his appearance in Picture Perfect (1997), a lighthearted romantic comedy.

Bacon made his debut as a producer with Losing Chase (1996), which was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards and won one. Bacon revived his oddball mystique in Digging to China as a physically ill houseguest and as a disc jockey corrupted by payola in Telling Lies in America. Bacon, the executive producer of Wild Things (1998), reserved a supporting role for himself and went on to act in Stir of Echoes (1999), directed by David Koepp.

He appeared in Paul Verhoeven's Hollow Man in 2000. In their film Where the Truth Lies, Bacon, Colin Firth, and Rachel Blanchard depict a ménage à trois. Bacon and director Atom Egoyan have slammed the MPAA ratings board for grading the film "NC-17" rather than the more appropriate "R" in preference. Bacon said: "I don't get it" when I see films (that) are extremely violent and sometimes in terms of the roles that women play. No problem, because the people have more of their clothes on."

In Clint Eastwood's film Mystic River, he appeared alongside Sean Penn and Tim Robbins in 2003.

Bacon was lauded for his role in The Woodsman (2004), in which he was voted for best actor and the Independent Spirit Award for his dark role as an abusive pedophile on parole. He appeared in Taking Chance, an American Desert Storm war veteran, based on an eponymous story written by Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl. On February 21, 2009, HBO premiered the film. Bacon received a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actor Guild Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Male Actor in a Miniseries or Television Movie for his role.

Bacon would appear in Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class as mutant villain Sebastian Shaw on July 15, 2010.

Attorney Charles J. Cooper appeared in a production of Dustin Lance Black's play, 8 in March 2012 – a staged reenactment of the federal trial that overturned California's Pro 8 ban on same-sex marriages. The play was held at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre and broadcast on YouTube to raise funds for the American Foundation for Equal Rights.

Bacon appeared in the FOX television series The Following from 2013 to 2015. In 2013, he received the Saturn Award for Best Actor on Television for his role.

In a Huffington Post interview in 2015, he said he wanted to return to the Tremors brand. Bacon did not appear in Tremors 5: Bloodline (2015), however.

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