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The youngest of the six children of Edmund Bacon, a noted Philadelphia city planner and a school teacher mother, Kevin was born July 8, 1958, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He
decided to leave home at the age of 18 to attend classes at the Manning Street Actor's Theatre and the Circle in the Square Theater School in New York City. He began his acting career on off-Broadway
stages, where he gained notice by playing the part of drug-addict and male-prostitute Rickey in Alan Brown's Forty Deuce. He received an Obie award for this performance. He later played the same part
later in P. Morrissey's film version. His Broadway debut came in 1983, co-starring with Sean Penn and Val Kilmer in the John Byrne play, Slab Boys. At the end of the 70s, he made a number of TV and movie
appearances where he was first noticed in his role of Fenwick, a young man with an alcohol problem in the movie "Diner".
Bacon rocketed into stardom by his lead role in
"Footloose" (1984), a lightweight feel good story about a city boy who shakes up a small, religious town by dancing his buns off. After beginning the 90s inauspiciously with
"Flatliners" that made a limited showing, and "Tremors" (also 1990) as well as "He Said, She Said" (1991), Bacon reinvented himself in the 90s, wisely opting for character
parts in more ambitious movie projects. This brought him to notable roles in Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), A Few Good Men (1992) with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, Ron Howard's Apollo 13 (1995), and in
Barry Levinson's Sleepers (1996). Bacon received a Golden Globe nomination for his sinister role in The River Wild (1995) with Meryl Streep. In 1998, Bacon starred in Wild Things, with Neve Campbell and
Matt Dillon.
Bacon made his directorial debut with the character drama "Losing Chase" (1996), a movie that also starred his wife Kyra Sedgwick. He picked up his first credit as
executive producer for the noir film "Wild Things" (1998) and earned his first song credit ("Medium Rare") for "Telling Lies in America" (1997). The rhythm and blues band he
had formed with his older brother Michael, The Bacon Brothers, also put out their first album ("Forosoco") that year. He also sang on the ABC special "Happy Birthday Elizabeth-A
Celebration of Life" (also 1997), honoring Elizabeth Taylor, and released the Bacon Brothers second album, "Getting There" (1999). They also played their first major NYC concert at the
venerable Town Hall in 2000.
More recent cinematic efforts include the thriller "Stir of Echoes" (1999) and the family hit "My Dog Skip" (2000) with Diane Lane and Frankie
Muniz. In August 2000, Bacon scored a box office hit with the science-fiction thriller "Hollow Man". In 2002, Bacon and Courtney Love portrayed professional serial kidnappers in Luis Mandoki's
action feature "Trapped," which also co-starred Charlize Theron and Stuart Townsend. His most successful role was that of one of three boyhood friends in the academy award nominee thriller,
"Mystic River" (2003).
Bacon was the subject of a strange bit of late 1990s pop culture. A trio of Pennsylvania college students concocted "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," an
amusing parlor game in which participants must link any actor, living ordead, to Kevin Bacon in fewer than six links.
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