Biography of Kevin Bacon

Kevin Norwood Bacon is an American actor. His films include the musical-drama film Footloose, the controversial historical conspiracy legal thriller JFK, the legal drama A Few Good Men, the historical docudrama Apollo 13, and the mystery drama Mystic River. Bacon is also known for voicing the title character in Balto, and was taking on darker roles, such as that of a sadistic guard in Sleepers, and troubled former child abuser in The Woodsman. He is further known for the hit comedies National Lampoon's Animal House, Diner, Tremors, and Crazy, Stupid, Love. His other well-known films are Friday the 13th, Flatliners, The River Wild , Wild Things, Stir of Echoes, Hollow Man, Frost/Nixon, X-Men: First Class, Black Mass, and Patriots Day.

Kevin is equally prolific on television, having starred in the Fox drama series The Following. For the HBO original film Taking Chance, 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 picture industry.

Bacon, the youngest of six children, was born and raised in a close-knit family in Philadelphia. His mother, Ruth Hilda , taught at an elementary school and was a liberal activist, while his father, Edmund Norwood Bacon , 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.

Bacon left home at age 17 to pursue a theater career in New York City, 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 did not lead to the fame he had sought, and Bacon returned to waiting tables and auditioning for small roles in theater. He briefly worked on the television soap operas Search for Tomorrow and Guiding Light in New York.

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 and Sosie Ruth . The family resides on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Bacon was previously in a five-year relationship with actress Tracy Pollan, in the 1980s.

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 association with Bacon. The name of the game derives from the idea of six degrees of separation. Although he was initially dismayed by the game, the meme stuck, and Bacon eventually embraced it, forming the charitable initiative SixDegrees.org, a social networking services intended to link people and charities to each other.

The measure of proximity to Bacon has been mathematically formalized as the Bacon number and can be referenced at websites including Oracle of Bacon, which is in turn based upon Internet Movie Database data. In 2012, Google 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. This feature is no longer active.