Kevin Bacon

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Autographed photo of Kevin Bacon greeting a crowd at Jefferson Square in Columbia, South Carolina in October, 2006 while filming Death Sentence.
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Autographed photo of Kevin Bacon greeting a crowd at Jefferson Square in Columbia, South Carolina in October, 2006 while filming Death Sentence.

Kevin Norwood Bacon (born July 8, 1958 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American film and theatre actor who has starred in Footloose, Stir of Echoes, Wild Things, JFK, and Apollo 13, among many others. He has been married to actress Kyra Sedgwick since September 3, 1988. They have two children, Travis Sedg and Sosie Ruth Bacon.

Contents

[edit] Life and Career

[edit] Early years

Born on July 8, 1958, Bacon, the youngest of six children, was raised in a close-knit family in Philadelphia. A former Park Avenue debutante, his mother, Ruth, taught elementary school and was an activist for liberal politics, while his father, Edmund, was a well-respected city planner. In characterizing their parents' approach to raising children, Bacon's older sister Karin explained in Premiere: "We were all given the sense that we should be independent, that we were never to feel needy." 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 to 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." [1]

Yet 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." [2] However, his movie debut in the fraternity comedy Animal House in 1978 did not lead to the instant fame he had hoped for, and Bacon returned to waiting tables and auditioning for small roles in theatre. He later refused the 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 1981-82 season.


What motivated his decision to stay in New York still has resonance for Bacon. "I think my decision had a lot to do with just being afraid," he explained to Chase in Cosmopolitan. "L.A. scared me. I call it the city of fear. I get scared when I land, and I live in fear there, and I think a lot of people do. I mean, I've had a hard time in New York City too, but aesthetically and spiritually, I'm an East Coast person." [3] With the support of his wife, actress Kyra Sedgwick, Bacon believes that he has come to terms with his apprehensions about Los Angeles and has thus strengthened his commitment to acting. "Our lives are still crazy, we still spend a ton of time out there, and I've finally admitted that the movie business means a lot to me," he told Chase. "I used to say, it's okay, I can do it, but it isn't that important, and then I realized I was out of my mind; this is what I do for a living." [4]

[edit] Acclaim and success

Known for having what Entertainment Weekly called "bone-dry humor and [an] average-Joe ability to tell it like it is," [5] Bacon has always been forthcoming about his lack of professional self-confidence, but he has never let it stop him from delivering powerful performances. In 1982 he won an Obie Award for his role in Forty-Deuce, a play about street hustlers, and soon after 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 Diner—-also starring Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, and Ellen Barkin—-that he made an indelible impression on film critics and moviegoers alike. Set in Baltimore during Christmas week of 1959, Diner depicts the lives of six young men in their early twenties who have been close friends since childhood but are gradually moving in different directions. By far the most aimless of the group, Fenwick gets increasingly drunk as the story progresses, deriving great pleasure from playing practical jokes on his friends and out-answering contestants on the television quiz show College Bowl from the security of his sofa. The New Yorker's Pauline Kael, who included Bacon's name on her list of the film's "amazing" performances, also noted that "with his pointed chin, and the look of a mad Mick, [he] keeps Fenwick morose and yet demonic." David Denby of New York found Fenwick "both attractive and creepily self-destructive," attributing much of Diner's success to the fact that it "offers a completed vision of life, ecstatic in its recovery of forgotten pleasures, melancholy in its knowledge of how small a chance these men ever had of reclaiming their freedom."

Bolstered by the attention that his performance in Diner received, Bacon went on to star in the 1984 box-office smash Footloose. Directed by Herbert Ross and packed with energetic music and dance sequences, the film tells the story of Ren McCormick, a streetwise Chicago teenager who, after moving with his mother to a repressive small town in the Midwest, is determined to reverse the town minister's ban on rock and roll made years earlier. 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." Part of the conflict centers around the relationship between the minister, played by John Lithgow, and his wild teenage daughter, played by Lori Singer, who falls in love with Bacon's character and joins forces with him to put on a dance in a neighboring town. Sporting a punk haircut for the role and a rebellious attitude not unlike Fenwick's in Diner, Bacon earned strong reviews for Footloose, appearing on the cover of People magazine soon after its release. David Ansen of Newsweek noted that Footloose "works because Bacon [is] always a fine actor," while Corliss found his performance to be "smart and appealing." The film itself, wrote Ansen, "has a lively, sweet infectious spirit," providing a "jolt of disposable but pleasant energy that makes you want to roll back the rug and boogie."

[edit] Career slump

Bacon's long-awaited exposure from these two films proved a mixed blessing for the actor, however, who found himself saddled with a new concern—-that he had become so strongly associated with his Diner and Footloose characters he would not be able to shake their images. His portrayal of Fenwick, Bacon explained to Mills in Cosmopolitan, "made enough of an impact that it was very difficult for me to get a lead in a movie. The perception was that I was incapable of being heroic, that I was offbeat, dark, nutty, and messed up." Nor did he welcome the teen-idol image that Footloose offered him, shunning other chances to play what he told Mills were "angst-ridden teenagers." For the next several years Bacon chose films that cast him against either type and experienced, by his own standards, a career slump. In 1988 he portrayed a newlywed who, ambivalent about marriage to begin with, faces the added burden of impending fatherhood in John Hughes's comedy She's Having a Baby, costarring Elizabeth McGovern. The next year he starred in a Christopher Guest comedy called The Big Picture, playing a film student whose excessive pride leads to trouble after he achieves instant Hollywood fame as a filmmaker. While The Nation found little else redeeming about the movie, it did comment on Bacon's "perfect face and unfailing charm as Nick," noting as well the actor's ability to "play just about anything." In 1990 no breakthroughs occurred for Bacon either. He saved his town from under-the-earth "graboids" in the comedy/horror film Tremors—-a role that People found him "far too accomplished" to play—-and portrayed an earnest medical student experimenting with death in Joel Schumacher's Flatliners.

Bacon's next project was to star, opposite Elizabeth Perkins, in the 1991 romantic comedy He Said, She Said, codirected by Ken Kwapis and Marisa Silver. As clashing newspaper reporters who are forced to write a column together, the two fall in love; making the film more interesting, however, is the fact that the story is told twice, first from the viewpoint of Bacon's character, which Kwapis directed, and then from the point of view of Perkins's character, directed by Silver. Despite its 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. "Until he meets Elizabeth, he sees women as sex objects...not people to respect or share your life with," he told Mills. "But he changes when he falls in love with the strongest woman he could possibly find. In some ways, this character is like me. What he's going through is maybe something I was going through ten or twelve years ago." After completion of He Said, She Said, Perkins had nothing but praise for her costar both on screen and off. "When Kevin first came on the set, I thought he was one of those actors who just breezes in and doesn't need to prepare for a scene. After a couple weeks, I realized that he does his homework, is extremely concentrated, and never misses a beat," she remarked in Cosmopolitan. "What you assume is not always the truth about Kevin. He can come off as suave, and people may mistake it for arrogance. But underneath, he's very compassionate and kindhearted."

[edit] Comeback

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 New York Times writer Trip Gabriel. "You can't afford to set up a $40 million movie if you don't have your star." His performance that year as gay prostitute Willie O'Keefe in Oliver Stone's JFK received tremendous critical acclaim; Premiere called his work "flawless," while the National Review referred to it as "stunning." Shining among an ensemble cast in a small but memorable role had its appeal for Bacon, whose career began to swing in a more positive direction. Encouraged by his JFK reviews, he went on to play another character role—-prosecuting attorney Jack Ross in the 1992 military courtroom drama A Few Good Men, starring Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson. Michael Sragow of The New Yorker found Bacon's performance to be the strongest in the film: "Kevin Bacon, as the prosecutor, gives the most full-bodied performance. You find yourself believing he is a career serviceman—-not because of his flattop haircut but because he's marinated in Marine tradition. His boyish competitive streak emerges from a saltier place than Cruise's." Bacon's newfound career momentum did not stop with these two films; that same year he returned to the theater to play, opposite Saundra Santiago, in Spike Heels, directed by Michael Greif. Time, which praised the play's "tart wit, feminist insight, and quirky detours of plot," also pronounced Bacon, who portrays a wealthy cad, its "standout" for his ability to blend "ribaldry, rudeness, rapscallion reprehensibility, and believable redemption."

It was not until his work on The River Wild in 1994, however, that Bacon began to feel more confident about the success of his professional comeback. He earned a Golden Globe Award nomination for his portrayal of a compulsive liar whose boyish charm turns diabolic when he overtakes the raft of a former river guide—-played by Meryl Streep—-and her family on a white-water rafting trip. As Wade, Bacon first flirts with Streep's character and then befriends her young son until it becomes apparent that what he really wants is her knowledge of the river to secure freedom for himself and his friend who are hiding out after a violent robbery. Describing it 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," Bacon had the added stress of worrying about Sedgwick and their children, who had joined him on location. Like the actors and crew, they had to come up the river each day in a helicopter, which would land on a raft and allow them to trudge to shore. "I'd hear somebody say, 'The Bacons are in the chopper,' and I'd see them waving, and then they'd come down," Bacon recalled in the same source. "It was terrifying because everything I loved was in that whirlybird." Dispelling any lingering suggestions that Bacon might not be leading-man material, director Curtis Hanson told the New York Times: "Kevin in our movie is playing a movie-star part. In another era—-if we were making this movie in 1950—-I would have wanted Robert Mitchum to play that part." Hanson, after reflecting on Bacon's earlier career, also ventured to make some predictions about his future. "Kevin was going through a period of his life, agewise, that is as fragile as being a child star....You can be hot for a year or two and then you can fade rapidly," he explained to Hanson. "Whereas what Kevin's doing now—-whether by design or by accident—-is he's building a very fruitful and long career...and he just keeps getting better."

But no matter how grueling the filming of The River Wild was, it could not compare to the hardships Bacon faced in preparing for his next film, Murder in the First. Based on a true story that occurred during the Depression, the film recounts the drama of Henri Young, a petty thief imprisoned in Alcatraz, who, after spending three years in solitary confinement, kills the inmate whose betrayal of him led to this punishment. Though Christian Slater, as his public defender, received top billing for the film, Bacon's character was at its dramatic center. To transform himself into Henri Young, Bacon lost 20 pounds, shaved his head, and wore contact lenses that completely covered his eyeballs and had to be removed every hour. "In every scene, the character suffers a different level of pain," he explained to Chase. "Because he spent three years in that dungeon trying to keep warm, I picked this extreme physicality for him when he comes out. I'm all hunched over, and I walk with a limp, and I had to pull myself into that twisted condition everyday." Helping Bacon through the physical and psychological wringer of the role was friend and fellow actor Gary Oldman, ironically playing a sadistic warden who routinely brutalizes Young. "You know, when somebody's thrown a bucket of cold water on you, and he's beating you with a blackjack, and the blood is flying, it helps if the person wielding the blackjack is someone you trust," Bacon told Cosmopolitan's Chase. "It lets you fly." For Bacon, the experience of being filmed naked for several weeks in a Los Angeles warehouse and encrusted with mud and live bugs was not one he will forget soon. Nor will director Marc Rocco, who told Premiere that working with Bacon was "the most rewarding experience I've ever had with an actor. Kevin Bacon is pregnant with his own love child. His performance thrills and amazes me." Most recently he starred with Ron Jerey in Get Loose.

[edit] Continuing success

This wave of success left Bacon with little time to rest in between projects. His subsequent film, Apollo 13, released in the summer of 1995, was a blockbuster. Preparation for the film, which tells the true story of an aborted space mission, involved some difficult stunt work. To simulate space travel, Bacon and costars Tom Hanks and Bill Paxton took several trips on huge NASA KC-135 airplanes, which fly in such precise parabolic curves that for several seconds the actors are weightless. Bacon, who liked this sensation no more than the daily exposure to icy wind and water on the set of The River Wild, joked in Entertainment Weekly, "I mean, I'm not a thrill seeker, but I keep getting into these situations."

Bacon reverted to his trademark typecast role once again, as a brutal and sadistic reform school warden in Sleepers in 1996. Like Murder in the First, Sleepers presented a gripping yet horrifying reality—a stark contrast to Bacon's ensuing appearance in a lighthearted romantic comedy, called Picture Perfect, in the following year. Bacon resurrected his oddball mystique also that year as a retarded houseguest in Digging to China and again as a disc jockey corrupted by the lure of payola in Telling Lies in America. As the executive producer of 1998's Wild Things, Bacon reserved a supporting role for himself, then went on to star in Stir of Echoes with director David Koepp in 1999 and in Paul Verhoeven's Hollow Man in 2000.

In 2005, Bacon began to appear in television commercials for the Hanes clothing company, alongside former professional basketball player Michael Jordan.

[edit] Personal life

Bacon is married to actress Kyra Sedgwick since 1988; they met on the set of the PBS version of Lanford Wilson's play Lemon Sky. "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," he explained to Cosmopolitan's Chase. "And I was able to keep supporting myself; that always gave me strength." Bacon and Sedgwick, whose film credits include Born on the Fourth of July, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, and Singles, have two children, Travis and Sosie, and believe in a tight family unit. They have made it a priority not to work on different films at the same time, and when Bacon went on location for The River Wild in 1994, his family accompanied him. Nor has the glow of fame surrounding Bacon since his recent film successes clouded his devotion to either his children or his wife. He prides himself on being a much more loving and available father than his own father was to him and shudders at the thought of losing Sedgwick because of overzealous career aspirations. "No place, no business could break up my wife and me. I would never give the movie business so much credit," he stated in Cosmopolitan. "To me, marriage is about committing yourself to one person. In my opinion, I got the hottest babe there is; I would never do anything to jeopardize that."

[edit] The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

Bacon is the subject of the trivia game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. It is based on the idea that, due to his prolific screen career, any Hollywood actor can be "linked" to another in a handful of "steps" based on their associations with Bacon. Although it has since been proven that there are other "better" centers of the Hollywood universe than Bacon, such as Sean Connery, Rod Steiger, or the prolific Michael Caine, Bacon's name remained the focus because he was the first one picked by the creators of the game, and because his name "Kevin Bacon" sounds like the original word in the phrase "Six degrees of separation." A person's number of degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon can be known as his or her "Bacon Number".

[edit] Music

In the late 1990s and into the 2000s Bacon joined his musician brother, Michael, in a duo ensemble, called Bacon Brothers. With three albums to their credit by 2001 and increasingly preoccupied with his new career diversion as a rock star, Bacon's tour schedule included eight concerts for the summer of that year, at venues from New York City, down the East Coast, and into the Midwest to Illinois and Missouri.

[edit] Filmography

[edit] Trivia

  • Kevin Bacon makes an appearance demonstrating techniques such as "the can opener" and "the scissors kick" in the 1979 book, Roller Disco Dancing by Kerry Kollmar & Melody Mason. Sterling Publishing Co.
  • An anatomically-correct computer model of Kevin Bacon's entire body was made for the movie Hollow Man. This model was later donated to scientists.
  • Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth and Rachel Blanchard depict a ménage à trois in their film, Where the Truth Lies. Bacon and director Atom Egoyan have condemned the MPAA ratings board decision to give the film their "NC-17" rating over the preferable "R". Bacon decried the decision, commenting: "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." [1]
  • Mr. Bacon will be directing his wife, Kyra Sedgwick, in episode 15 of the second season of her hit television series "The Closer."
  • Has played characters referred to as 'Smiling Jack' in two unrelated films. In Quicksilver (1986) his character's friend refers to him as Smiling Jack Casey while on the phone, and in A Few Good Men (1992) Tom Cruise greets him as Smiling Jack Ross.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Cosmopolitan. March, 1991, p. 92.
  2. ^ Cosmopolitan. March, 1991, p. 92.
  3. ^ Cosmopolitan. September, 1994, p. 178.
  4. ^ Cosmopolitan. September, 1994, p. 178.
  5. ^ Entertainment Weekly. January 27, 1995, p. 27.

[edit] External links

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