Kevin Bacon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Kevin Bacon (disambiguation).
| Kevin Bacon | |
|---|---|
Bacon at the 2012 San Diego Comic-Con
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| Born | Kevin Norwood Bacon July 8, 1958 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Occupation | Actor, musician |
| Years active | 1978–present |
| Spouse(s) | Kyra Sedgwick (m. 1988) |
| Children | Travis Bacon Sosie Bacon |
| Relatives | Michael Bacon (brother) |
| Website | |
| www.baconbros.com | |
Bacon has also become an icon for the concept of interconnectedness (as in social networks), having been popularized by the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon". In 2007, he created SixDegrees.org, a charitable foundation.
Contents
Early life
Bacon, one of six children, was born and raised in a close-knit family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[3] His mother, Ruth Hilda (née Holmes; 1916–1991), taught at an elementary school and was a liberal activist, while his father, Edmund Norwood Bacon (May 2, 1910 – October 14, 2005), was a well-respected architect and a prominent Philadelphian who had been Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission for many years. At 16, in 1975, Bacon won a full scholarship to and attended the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts at Bucknell University,[4] a state-funded five-week arts program at which he studied theatre under Dr. Glory Van Scott. The experience solidified Bacon's passion for the arts.Acting career
Bacon left home at age 17 to pursue a theater career in New York, 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."[5] Bacon's debut in the fraternity comedy National Lampoon's Animal House in 1978 did not lead to the fame for which he had hoped,[citation needed] 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 1980, he had a prominent role in the now iconic slasher film Friday the 13th. He refused an offer of a television series based on Animal House to be filmed in California in order to remain close to the New York stage[citation needed] . Some of his early stage 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.In 1982, he won an Obie Award for his role in Forty Deuce, 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 – costarring Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Tim Daly and Ellen Barkin – that he made an indelible impression on film critics and moviegoers alike.[citation needed]
He performed that year as gay prostitute Willie O'Keefe in Oliver Stone's JFK. He went on to play a prosecuting attorney in the military courtroom drama A Few Good Men. Later that year he returned to the theater to play in Spike Heels, directed by Michael Greif.
In March 2012, Bacon was featured in a performance of Dustin Lance Black's play, '8' — a staged reenactment of the federal trial that overturned California's Prop 8 ban on same-sex marriage — as Attorney Charles J. Cooper.[13] The production was held at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre and broadcast on YouTube to raise money for the American Foundation for Equal Rights.[14][15]
Advertising work
In 2012, and 2013, Bacon has appeared in a major advertising campaign for the EE mobile network in the United Kingdom, based on the Six Degrees concept and his various film roles.Personal life
Bacon has been married to actress Kyra Sedgwick since September 4, 1988; they met on the set of the PBS version of Lanford Wilson's play Lemon Sky. He has said "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. And I was able to keep supporting myself; that always gave me strength."[5] Bacon and Sedgwick have starred together in Pyrates, Murder in the First, The Woodsman, and Loverboy. They have two children, Travis Sedgwick (b. 1989) and Sosie Ruth (b. 1992). The family resides on the Upper West Side of New York.[citation needed]Bacon has spoken out for the separation of church and state,[16][17] and told The Times in 2005 that he did not "believe in God."[18] However, he has also said that he is not anti-religion.[19]
Bacon and Sedgwick appeared in will.i.am's video "It's a New Day", which was released following Barack Obama's 2008 presidential win. The pair lost most of their savings in the Ponzi scheme of infamous fraudulent investor Bernard Madoff.[20][21]
They learned in 2011 via their appearance on the PBS TV show Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates that he and Sedgwick are 9th cousins, once removed.[22] They also appeared in a video[23] promoting the "Bill of Reproductive Rights," supporting among other things a woman's right to choose and access to birth control.[citation needed] As of November 2012, Bacon starred in adverts for the British mobile and Internet service EE.[citation needed]
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon
Main article: Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon
Bacon is the subject of the trivia game titled Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, based on the idea that, due to his prolific screen
career covering a diverse range of genres, any Hollywood actor can be
linked to another in a handful of steps based on their associations with
Bacon. The name of the game derives from the idea of six degrees of separation. Though he was initially dismayed by the game, the meme stuck, and Bacon eventually embraced it, forming the charitable initiative SixDegrees.org, a social networking site intended to link people and charities to each other.[24]The measure of proximity to Bacon has been mathematically formalized as the Bacon Index and can be referenced at websites including Oracle Of Bacon, which is in turn based upon Internet Movie Database data. Google even added a feature to their search engine, whereby searching for an actor's name followed by the words 'Bacon Number' will show the ways in which that actor is connected to Kevin Bacon.[25] A similar measurement exists in the mathematics community where one measures how far one is removed from co-writing a mathematical paper with the famous mathematician Paul Erdős. This is done by means of the Erdős number which is 0 for Paul Erdős himself, 1 for someone who co-wrote an article with him, 2 for someone who co-wrote with someone who co-wrote with him, etc. People have combined the Bacon Index and the Erdős number to form the Erdős–Bacon number, which is essentially the sum of the two.[26]
Music
Kevin formed a band called The Bacon Brothers with his brother, Michael. The duo have released six albums.Filmography
Main article: Kevin Bacon filmography
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