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Kevin Bacon's training began with the Manning Street Actor's Theatre in Philadelphia, his hometown. His first film, at age 20, was National Lampoon's Animal House, while his first regular TV work was on the soap opera The Guiding Light. After doing stage work--and winning an Obie Award for the off-Broadway play Forty Deuce--Bacon entered the teen-idol category with his leading role in 1984's Footloose. He endured several dodgy film vehicles before discovering that his weight as an actor more effectively fell in colorful secondary roles: among his more notable supporting-cast assignments were Willie O'Keefe in JFK (1991), the prosecuting attorney in A Few Good Men (1992), a cold-blooded villain in The River Wild (1994), Alcatraz lifer Henri Young in Murder in the First (1995), and astronaut Jack Swigert in Apollo 13 (1995). Following a supporting turn as a sadistic prison guard in the 1996 Sleepers, Bacon took the lead as a cynical disc jockey in Telling Lies In America, a 1997 coming-of-age drama written by Joe Eszterhas. He won positive notices for his performance, and followed it playing a quasi-sleazy office Lothario in the Jennifer Aniston comedy Picture Perfect. The next year, the actor took another stab at sleaze in Wild Things, earning a sort of camp status for his part in the enthusiastically trashy film. Also in 1998, he took on a role of an entirely different sort, playing a retarded man in the coming-of-age drama Digging to China. He continued to stay busy the following year, starring in the supernatural thriller Stir of Echoes and My Dog Skip, the story of a boy and his dog, set in the South during the 1940s. Bacon has long been married to actress Kyra Sedgwick, whom he met while they were both rehearsing for a PBS production of the play Lemon Sky in 1987. In addition to his fame as an actor, Bacon has earned a different kind of notoriety as the subject of the trivia game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," in which contestants link various movie stars to Bacon in as few steps as possible, based on the premise that he has appeared with a wider range of actors in more movies than virtually any other working actor. -- Hal Erickson |
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