Kevin Norwood Bacon (born July 8, 1958) is an American film and theater actor whose notable roles include Footloose, Animal House, Stir of Echoes, Wild Things, JFK, Apollo 13 and The Woodsman.
Known for having what Entertainment Weekly called "bone-dry humor and [an] average-Joe ability to tell it like it is", Bacon has always been forthcoming about his lack of professional self-confidence, which has never stopped him from delivering powerful performances. In 1982, he won an Obie Award for his role in Forty-Deuce, a play about street hustlers, 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] Set in Baltimore during Christmas week of 1959, Diner depicts the lives of six young men in their early twenties who have been close friends since childhood but are gradually moving in different directions. By far the most aimless of the group, the surly, sarcastic Fenwick gets increasingly drunk as the story progresses, deriving great pleasure from playing practical jokes on his friends and outanswering contestants on the television quiz show College Bowl from the safety of his sofa. The New Yorker's Pauline Kael, who included Bacon's name on her list of the film's "amazing" performances, also noted that "with his pointed chin, and the look of a mad Mick, keeps Fenwick morose and yet demonic." David Denby of New York found Fenwick "both attractive and creepily self-destructive", attributing much of Diner's success to the fact that it "offers a completed vision of life, ecstatic in its recovery of forgotten pleasures, melancholy in its knowledge of how small a chance these men ever had of reclaiming their freedom."