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.[6] Bacon is married to actress Kyra Sedgwick.
Early life and education
Bacon was born and raised in a close-knit family in Philadelphia.[2] He is the youngest of six children. His mother, Ruth Hilda (née Holmes; 1916–1991), taught at an elementary school and was a liberal activist,[2] 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.[7]
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."[11]
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.[7] He briefly worked on the television soap operas Search for Tomorrow (1979) and Guiding Light (1980–81) in New York.
Bolstered by the attention garnered by his performance in Diner, Bacon starred in Footloose (1984).[13] 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."[16] 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.[7][17] Bacon earned strong reviews for Footloose.[18]
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.
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,[21] and he portrayed an earnest medical student experimenting with death in Joel Schumacher's Flatliners.[13]
In Bacon's next project he starred opposite Elizabeth Perkins in He Said, She Said. Despite lukewarm reviews and low audience turnout, He Said, She Said was illuminating for Bacon. Required to play a character with sexist attitudes, he admitted that the role was not that large a stretch for him.[13]
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."[22] He performed that year as gay prostitute Willie O'Keefe in Oliver Stone's JFK[23] and went on to play a prosecuting attorney in the military courtroom drama A Few Good Men.[24] Later that year he returned to the theater to play in Spike Heels, directed by Michael Greif.[13]
In 1994, Bacon earned a Golden Globe nomination for his role in The River Wild,[13] opposite Meryl Streep. He described the film to Chase in Cosmopolitan as a "grueling shoot", in which "every one of us fell out of the boat at one point or another and had to be saved".
His next film, Murder in the First, earned him the Broadcast Film Critic's Association Award in 1995,[13] the same year that he starred in the blockbuster hit Apollo 13.[25] Bacon played a trademark dark role once again in Sleepers (1996).[26] This part starkly contrasted with his appearance in the lighthearted romantic comedy, Picture Perfect (1997).[13]
Bacon made his debut as a director with the television film Losing Chase (1996), which was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards, and won one.[27] Bacon again resurrected his oddball mystique that year as a mentally-challenged houseguest in Digging to China[13] and as a disc jockey corrupted by payola in Telling Lies in America.[13] As the executive producer of Wild Things (1998), Bacon reserved a supporting role for himself and went on to star in Stir of Echoes (1999), directed by David Koepp.[28]
In 2000, he appeared in Paul Verhoeven's Hollow Man.[29] Bacon, Colin Firth and Rachel Blanchard depict a ménage à trois in their film, Where the Truth Lies.[30] Bacon and director Atom Egoyan condemned the MPAA ratings board decision to rate the film "NC-17" rather than the preferable "R". Bacon commented: "I don't get it, when I see films (that) are extremely violent, extremely objectionable sometimes in terms of the roles that women play, slide by with an R, no problem, because the people happen to have more of their clothes on."[31] That same year, he played the gruff father in the family film My Dog Skip.[32]
In 2003, Bacon acted with Sean Penn and Tim Robbins in Clint Eastwood's movie Mystic River. He was again acclaimed for a dark starring role playing an offending pedophile on parole in The Woodsman (2004), for which he was nominated for best actor and received the Independent Spirit Award.[33]
Beginning in 2012, Bacon has appeared in a major advertising campaign for EE in the United Kingdom, based on the Six Degrees concept and his various film roles.[46][47] In 2015, he became a commercial spokesperson for the U.S. egg industry.[48]
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 service intended to link people and charities to each other.[49]
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 Wikipedia data (and formerly from 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.[50] This feature is no longer active.
A similar measurement exists in the mathematics community, where one measures how far one is removed from co-writing a mathematical paper with the prolific and itinerant mathematician Paul Erdős. This is done by means of the Erdős number, which is 0 for Paul Erdős himself, 1 for someone who co-wrote an article with him, 2 for someone who co-wrote with someone who co-wrote with him, etc. People have combined the Bacon number and the Erdős number to form the Erdős–Bacon number, which is the sum of the two.[51]
Personal life
Kevin Bacon in 2014
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."[11] 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.[52] Bacon was previously in a five-year relationship with actress Tracy Pollan, in the 1980s.[53]
Bacon and Sedgwick learned in 2011, via their appearance on the PBS TV series Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, that they are ninth cousins, once removed.[60] They also appeared in a video[61] promoting the "Bill of Reproductive Rights", supporting among other things a woman's right to choose and have access to birth control.[62]
2003, September 30: Inducted into Hollywood Walk of Fame with a star for his contribution to Motion Picture presented to him by the Chamber of Commerce.[67]
^"I think there is a puritanical wind that is blowing. I have never seen such a lack of separation between church and state in America. I don't believe in God, but if I did I would say that sex is a God-given right." Wendy Ide, "The Outsider Wants In", The Times (London), December 1, 2005.
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