Biography for
Kevin Bacon

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Date of Birth

8 July 1958, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Birth Name

Kevin Norwood Bacon

Height

5' 11" (1.80 m)

Mini Biography

Kevin Bacon's early training as an actor came from The Manning Street. His debut as the strict Chip Diller in Animal House (1978) almost seems like an inside joke, but he managed to escape almost unnoticed from that role. Diner (1982) became the turning point after a couple of TV series and a number of less-than-memorable movie roles. In a cast of soon-to-be stars, he more than held his end up, and we saw a glimpse of the real lunatic image of The Bacon. He also starred in Footloose (1984), in She's Having a Baby (1988), in Tremors (1990) with Fred Ward, in Flatliners (1990), and in Apollo 13 (1995).

IMDb Mini Biography By: < elmic@post8.tele.dk>

Spouse

Kyra Sedgwick

(4 September 1988 - present) 2 children

Trade Mark

Often appears in large ensemble pieces, leading to the ease of many "six degrees" games

Frequently plays anti-heroic protagonists

Trivia

Chosen by Empire magazine as one of the 100 Sexiest Stars in film history (#61). [1995]

Dated Tracy Pollan.

Attended the prestigious Julia Reynolds Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School in Philadelphia with his brother, Michael.

Inspired a game called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, whereby people have to link any given actor to him by no more than six steps. For instance, to do Fred MacMurray, you could observe that MacMurray worked with Lee Marvin in The Caine Mutiny (1954), which is one step; and Marvin worked with Jane Fonda in Cat Ballou (1965), which is two steps; and Fonda worked with Jack Lemmon in The China Syndrome (1979), which is three steps; and Lemmon worked with Bacon in JFK (1991), which completes the link in four steps. Harder versions of the game exist, limiting the player to five, four or even three steps. The original version of this game existed for numerous years and the pivot-person was then Paul Erdos, a mathematician.

Attended the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts.

He was the first choice for the Charlie Sheen part in Being John Malkovich (1999).

Is part of The Bacon Brothers, with brother Michael Bacon. The band has released three albums: "Forosoco" (1997), "Getting There" (1999) and "Can't Complain" (2001).

He sang with brother Michael Bacon (who played guitar) in New York in a small club/coffee shop.

His father was Edmund Bacon, a famous Philadelphia city planner. His mother was Ruth Bacon, a teacher and liberal political activist.

Kevin's son, Travis Bacon (b. 1989), currently plays in the 4-member rock-punk-funk band Idiot Box.

Daughter, Sosie Bacon, was born on March, 1992.

Has never lived in Hollywood or Los Angeles.

The family dog, a mutt, is called Paulie.

Met wife Kyra Sedgwick on the set of Lemon Sky (1988) (TV).

Lives in NY with wife Kyra Sedgwick and their 2 kids.

In preparation for his role in Telling Lies in America (1997), he "hung out" in the radio studio with and based his on-air banter on his friend Jerry Blavat, the celebrated oldies DJ from Philadelphia and an inductee in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; aka the "Geator with the Heater".

Brother-in-law of Robert Sedgwick.

His father was a seventh cousin of President Richard Nixon.

Is a fifth cousin of William Thomas Hamill Jr., married to Virginia Suzanne Johnson, the parents of Mark Hamill.

American-born Canadian actor Philip Nozuka, is his nephew through wife Kyra's side of the family.

His line, "I am a G-damn genius," is quoted in both "Hollow Man" (2000) and "Trapped" (2002).

In "Quicksilver" (1986) and "A Few Good Men" (1992) his characters are both nicknamed "Smiling Jack".

Actor Girard Swan worked as his Stand In on the new Ron Howard film Frost/Nixon (2008).

Personal Quotes

There are two types of actors: those who say they don't want to be famous and those who are liars.

I think of myself more as a workhorse actor. It will be hot and cold and up and down, but no one will kick me out of the business.

[about his preference for being nude when at home] There's something therapeutic about nudity. Clothing is one of the external things about a character. Take away the Gucci or Levis and we're all the same. But not when the nanny is around. But I will with my wife and kids.

[on his wife, Kyra Sedgwick] Kyra is a woman who made all the wrong choices when it comes to being an actress. She got married too young, had a kid and then had another kid.

[on L.A.] That's where the industry is. There is a tremendous amount of business you can do just by walking through restaurants and just being there.

I want to see the numbers that prove that show-business marriages are any less successful than other marriages. It's just very public when they fail.

[on the Oscar season] I call it the bitter season, because year after year, I've seen it come and go and not been a member of the club. And yet I've continued to make a living as an actor.

I think of being an actor as kind of a young man's gig. It's emasculating, in a way, people messing with you and putting make-up on you and telling you when to wake up and when to go to sleep, holding your hand to cross the street. I can do it up to a certain point and then I start to feel like a puppet.

[on playing a pedophile in The Woodsman (2004)] I don't have people who would advise me against this based on some sort of "image". At some point you have to decide if you're going to be a personality or you're going to be an actor. If playing this kind of a role could have a negative effect on my public personality, I don't care. I'll play anything, if I think there's something compelling, or there's a director I'm dying to work with, or a part I hadn't done before or a co-star I think is great.

A long time ago, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a pop star. Then I started taking acting classes. I moved to New York when I was a teenager, and really wanted to be a serious actor. I wanted to do off-Broadway, I wanted to do [Anton Chekhov], [William Shakespeare]. I wanted to have a Meryl Streep kind of career. When Footloose (1984) came out, I became a pop star, but by then that's not what I wanted. I wasn't being taken seriously. I wasn't smart about the industry and the ways that you can parlay pop stardom into a serious acting career if you make the right choices. I spun my wheels for a while, and then I got this part in Oliver Stone's JFK (1991). It's a small part, but very character-driven: gay, fascist, I mean, it was extreme. That turned things around for me. I didn't even read for it. Oliver just looked at me and said, "Will you transform yourself for me?" And I said, "Yes". Off-Broadway I'd been doing that, but that doesn't mean anybody in the movie industry is going to see you that way.

You can sit around and complain that Hollywood doesn't make any good movies. But you can generate your own material. So I read books. I come up with ideas. I was the producer on The Woodsman (2004) to help get that off the ground. Sometimes that extends itself to directing.

I've heard people say you have to love the characters you play. I don't feel that way. I've played a lot of people that I don't love at all. What's important to me is to try to make them real.

And life has taught me that if I am to have a satisfying career, I have to take three things out of the mix. The first is the size of my part. The second is the size of the budget. And the third is the size of my salary. Once you get rid of those things, your possibilities exponentially explode. You get to work with the directors who matter. You get to make movies like The Woodsman (2004).

There are two types of actors: performers and personalities.

[on watching his early performances] I never go back and watch myself. I'll see a film when it's new, maybe twice, but then not for years. If I'm flicking channels on TV and one of them is on, I flick right past it. It's so hard. If I looked at it I'd go, "Aw shit, I should have done this, done that". A lot of stuff about my past work bugs me. I guess I'm only seeing the faults.

[on keeping a successful marriage] Keep your fights clean and your sex dirty.

[On preparing for his role in Apollo 13 (1995)] Ron [Howard] called me up and said, "we're going up on this zero-G airplane and we, uh - for research. You don't have to go. You don't have to go. Absolutely no pressure. If you don't want to go, you don't have to go. Tom's gonna go. Gary's gonna go. Bill's gonna go. I'm gonna go." You know, everybody was going to go, so of course I'm not going to look like an idiot, you know, I mean I... there is a certain element of my personality that is *slightly* male.

Initially, I wasn't offered the part. I was walking up the beach in Willowbridge, the British West Indies on Christmas Eve and saw this guy who I know peripherally. He's not in the film industry, but in Philadelphia real estate or something like that. He said, 'They sent me this script and asked me to invest in it' and told me there was another actor involved. That's all he said. He told me to take a look at it and let him know if it was a good investment. Normally, I would never take a screenplay under those conditions. You can't read everything. You'd spend your whole life reading scripts from people on beaches. I got home on January 2nd or 3rd and it was sitting there. I picked it up and read it and a barrage of feelings washed over me -- anger, disgust, confusion, and compassion, feeling angry with myself for feeling compassionate. I put it down and knew that it was probably going to be my next movie. (On The Woodsman)

All roles are hard in different ways. Some are physical. Actually the hardest role physically I did was the Hollow Man and I was invisible in the movie. But it was incredibly, physically taxing and it got delayed. Murder in the First was both physically and emotionally terribly difficult.

Let me say this that I don't complain much about it because 95% of celebrity is good. People are very nice to you, they put you up in really nice hotel rooms, they give you free shit, I mean it's basically good. If I'm in a situation, and this rarely happens anymore, where someone doesn't recognize me and treats me like everyone else, I'm horrified. I'm not used to it anymore. That being said, it does get old to have to always be a monkey in a zoo. In the day-to-day thing to have people looking, talking, grabbing, needing something--I don't know what it's like anymore to be anonymous. Until you give it up, it's hard to picture what it's like, but yeah there are times that I do wish that it would go away, if only for a moment. (On being a celebrity)

There's nothing I won't play. I won't draw the line at anything. Worrying about image is for celebrities, not actors. My concerns were more about not getting paid and whether we could make a compelling movie that people would go and see. I also knew it was gonna be a tough one to make, that it was really gonna suck. I had to go to a dark place. (On The Woodsman)

I worked for four days on JFK but it changed everything. It led to A Few Good Men, The River Wild, Murder In The First and Apollo 13. It was definitely a turning point.

It was one of the spookiest jobs I've ever had, but Alcatraz was not the problem. Most of the film was done in L.A. I'm in this four-by-six cell--wet, naked, covered in shit, live bugs in my hair, live rats chewing on my leg, Chained to the walls for a lot of it. Being beaten by Gary Oldman; of course, I can't think of anyone I would rather be beaten by. One day, it was four-thirty on a Monday morning, we'd been working all night, and the ground started shaking. We were right near the epicenter. It was a horrible experience. Here I was, naked, shackled in this cell, and just every day playing some new level of agony. It was the closest I'd ever come to losing it. I'd cry on the way to work. (On filming Murder in the First during the 1994 Northridge earthquake)

Most actors want to have the world look at us and love us, and those who say that that's not really a driving force for them, I don't believe.

Salary

Sleepers (1996)

$2,500,000

Where Are They Now

(June 2007) Currently plans to conduct a rap music collaboration with East Coast performers such as Lil Jon.

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