Kevin Norwood Bacon (born July 8, 1958) is a Golden Globe - and Screen Actors Guild Award-nominated American film and theater actor.
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, 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 at age 17 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 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 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." However, his movie debut in the fraternity comedy Animal House in 1978 did not lead to the instant fame for which he had hoped, and Bacon returned to waiting tables and auditioning for small roles in theater. He refused a subsequent offer of a television series based on Animal House in order to stay on the New York stage. Some of that early 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.
His motivation to remain in New York still has resonance for Bacon. "I think my decision had a lot to do with just being afraid" he explained to Chase in Cosmopolitan. "L.A. scared me. I call it the city of fear. I get scared when I land, and I live in fear there, and I think a lot of people do. I mean, I've had a hard time in New York City too, but aesthetically and spiritually, I'm an East Coast person."[3] 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 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's long-awaited exposure from these two films proved a mixed blessing, however, who found himself saddled with a new concern – that he had become typecast as the characters he portrayed in the films Diner and Footloose. Bacon would have difficulty shaking this on-screen image. 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 Tremors – a role that People found him "far too accomplished" to play – and portrayed an earnest medical student experimenting with death in Joel Schumacher's Flatliners. 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." The wave of success left Bacon with little time to rest between projects. His subsequent film, Apollo 13, released in the summer of 1995, was a blockbuster. Preparation for the film, which tells the true story of an aborted space mission, involved some difficult stunt work. To simulate space travel, Bacon and costars Tom Hanks and Bill Paxton took several trips on huge NASA KC-135 airplanes, which flies a series of parabolic curves in order to render passengers weightless for short periods of time. Bacon, who enjoyed this sensation no more than the daily exposure to icy wind and water on the set of The River Wild, joked to Entertainment Weekly, "I mean, I'm not a thrill seeker, but I keep getting into these situations."
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.
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 Sedg Bacon (born June 23, 1989) 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. "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."
Bacon and Sedgwick appeared in will.i.am's video "It's a New Day," which was released following Barack Obama's win.
In 1995 Bacon formed a band called The Bacon Brothers with his brother, Michael. The duo have released four albums.