Kevin Bacon

Kevin Norwood Bacon is an American actor, director, producer, and musician, who is best known for his many roles, such as Ren McCormack in the 1984 Paramount Pictures musical drama film Footloose and Jack Swigert in the 1995 Universal Pictures space docudrama film Apollo 13. He also voiced the titular character of the 1995 Universal Pictures animated film Balto.

For Disney, he played Jimmy Dolan in the 1994 Hollywood Pictures film The Air Up There. He was also mentioned in Guardians of the Galaxy and portrayed himself in the 2022 Marvel TV special The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special.

Bacon was born and raised in a close-knit family in Philadelphia. He is the youngest of six children. His mother, Ruth Hilda (née Holmes), taught at an elementary school and was a liberal activist, while his father, Edmund Bacon, was an urban planner who notably served as executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission and authored the seminal text Design of Cities. Bacon attended Julia R. Masterman School in the Spring Garden section for both middle and high school. At age 16 in 1975, Bacon won a full state-funded scholarship to the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a five-week arts program where he studied theater under Glory Van Scott. The experience solidified Bacon's passion for the arts.

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." 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. He briefly worked on the television soap operas Search for Tomorrow (1979) and Guiding Light (1980–81) in New York. In 1984, Bacon finally gained recognition and fame when he starred in Footloose.

Kevin Bacon

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