Kevin Bacon Biography

Now known for dramatic and even dark movie roles, Kevin Bacon first became a box-office star as a gotta-dance rebel in the MTV-styled hit Footloose (1984). Bacon started his acting career on the New York stage, had a stint in television soap operas and made a splash in the 1982 ensemble drama Diner. The surprise success of Footloose made him a star and kept his career going, but it was a small role in Oliver Stone‘s JFK (1991) that earned Bacon a reputation as a serious actor. Since then he has worked steadily as a versatile character actor and occasional star of dramas and thrillers. His movies include: Apollo 13 (1995, with Tom Hanks); The River Wild (1995, opposite Meryl Streep); Hollow Man (2000); Clint Eastwood‘s Mystic River (2003, with Sean Penn); and The Woodsman (2005, with his wife Kyra Sedgwick).

Bacon is also famous as the center of a modern-day parlor game called The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The object of the game is to link any movie star to Kevin Bacon in fewer than six steps, by way of movies in which they appear. For example, Mr. Ed‘s co-star, Alan Young is in the movie The Cat From Outer Space, with Roddy McDowall, who appears in The Big Picture with Kevin Bacon. Three steps from Mr. Ed to Mr. Bacon.