Kevin Bacon

His mother, Ruth Hilda (née Holmes; 1916–1991), taught at an elementary school and was a liberal activist, while his father, Edmund Bacon (1910–2005), was an urban planner who served as executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission and authored the seminal text Design of Cities.

Bacon attended Julia R. Masterman School in the Spring Garden section of Philadelphia for both middle and high school.

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

Known for his leading man and character roles, Bacon has received numerous accolades, including a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a nomination for a Primetime Emmy Award.

At age 16, in 1975, Bacon won a full state-funded scholarship to the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a five-week arts program where 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 made his feature film debut in National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) before his breakthrough role in the musical-drama film Footloose (1984).

Bacon's debut in the fraternity comedy National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) 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 (1979) and Guiding Light (1980–81) in New York.

Other notable credits include Friday the 13th (1980), Tremors (1990), The River Wild (1994), The Woodsman (2004), Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011), X-Men: First Class (2011), and Patriots Day (2016).

In 1980, he appeared in the slasher film Friday the 13th.

Some of his early-stage work included Getting Out, performed at New York's Phoenix Theater, and Flux, at Second Stage Theatre during their 1981–1982 season.

Since then, he has starred in critically acclaimed films such as Diner (1982), JFK (1991), A Few Good Men (1992), Apollo 13 (1995), Mystic River (2003), and Frost/Nixon (2008).

In 1982, he won an Obie Award for his role in Forty Deuce, and soon afterward he made his Broadway 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 film Diner – costarring 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 garnered by his performance in Diner, Bacon starred in Footloose (1984).

Richard Corliss of TIME 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."

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.

Bacon earned strong reviews for Footloose.

Bacon's critical and box office success led to a period of typecasting in roles similar to the two he portrayed in Diner and Footloose, and he had difficulty shaking this on-screen image.

For the next several years he chose films that cast him against either type and experienced, by his own estimation, a career slump.

After a cameo in John Hughes's 1987 comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Bacon starred in John Hughes's 1988 comedy She's Having a Baby, and the following year he was in another comedy called The Big Picture.

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, and he portrayed an earnest medical student experimenting with death in Joel Schumacher's Flatliners.

In Bacon's next project he starred opposite Elizabeth Perkins in He Said, She Said.

Bacon has also directed the films Losing Chase (1996) and Loverboy (2005).

In 2003, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Bacon's prolific career in a variety of genres has led him to become associated with the concept of interconnectedness among people, as evidenced by the trivia game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon".

He is a brand ambassador for British mobile network operator EE and has been featured in several ads for the company.

Bacon is married to actress Kyra Sedgwick.

Bacon was born and raised in a close-knit family in Philadelphia.

He is the youngest of six children.

On television, Bacon received a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award for his role as Lt. Col. Michael Strobl in the HBO original film Taking Chance (2009).

He starred in the Fox drama series The Following from 2013 to 2015.

Bacon played the title role in Amazon Prime Video series I Love Dick from 2016 to 2017; he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for his work on the show.

From 2019 to 2022, he starred in the Showtime series City on a Hill.

The Guardian named Bacon one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination.