Kevin Bacon’s journey into the world of acting started long before he became a household name. Born on July 8, 1958, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Bacon was the youngest of six children in a family where art and culture were staples. His mother was an elementary school teacher and a liberal activist, while his father was an architect. This environment fueled his passion for the arts from a young age.
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. “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.”
Kevin Bacon’s film career started with 1978’s National Lampoon’s Animal House, but it was 1984’s Footloose that made him a pop culture icon.
In 1990, Bacon had two successful roles. He played a character who saved his town from under-the-earth “graboid” monsters in the comedy/horror film Tremors, and he portrayed an earnest medical student experimenting with death in Joel Schumacher’s Flatliners.
In Bacon’s next project he starred opposite Elizabeth Perkins in He Said, She Said. Despite lukewarm reviews and low audience turnout, He Said, She Said was illuminating for Bacon. Required to play a character with sexist attitudes, he admitted that the role was not that large a stretch for him.
By 1991, Bacon began to give up the idea of playing leading men in big-budget films and to remake himself as a character actor. “The only way I was going to be able to work on ‘A’ projects with really ‘A’ directors was if I wasn’t the guy who was starring,” he told The New York Times. “You can’t afford to set up a $40 million movie if you don’t have your star.” He performed that year as gay prostitute Willie O’Keefe in Oliver Stone’s JFK and 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 1994, Bacon earned a Golden Globe nomination for his role in The River Wild, opposite Meryl Streep. He described the film to Chase in Cosmopolitan as a “grueling shoot,” in which “every one of us fell out of the boat at one point or another and had to be saved.”
His next film, Murder in the First, earned him the Broadcast Film Critic’s Association Award in 1995, the same year that he starred in the blockbuster hit Apollo 13. Bacon played a trademark dark role once again in Sleepers (1996). This part starkly contrasted with his appearance in the lighthearted romantic comedy, Picture Perfect (1997).
Bacon made his debut as a director with the television film Losing Chase (1996), which was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards, and won one. Bacon again resurrected his oddball mystique that year as a mentally-challenged houseguest in Digging to China[ and as a disc jockey corrupted by payola in Telling Lies in America. As the executive producer of Wild Things (1998), Bacon reserved a supporting role for himself and went on to star in Stir of Echoes (1999), directed by David Koepp.
Here, below is a selection of 20 photos of a young Kevin Bacon during the 1990s:
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