Kevin Norwood Bacon (born July 8, 1958) is a
Golden Globe- and
Screen Actors Guild Award-nominated
American film and
theater actor whose notable roles include
Animal House,
A Few Good Men,
Stir of Echoes,
Wild Things,
JFK,
Apollo 13,
Mystic River,
The Woodsman, and
Footloose.
Biography
Early life & career
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 (
née Holmes; 1916-1991), 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 four years later 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."
[Cosmopolitan. March 1991, p. 92.]
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.
