Kevin Norwood Bacon (born July 8, 1958) is an American film and theater actor whose notable roles include Footloose, Flatliners, A Few Good Men, Apollo 13, Mystic River, The Woodsman, Friday the 13th, Hollow Man, and Tremors.

Bacon has been nominated for an Emmy Award, a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award and has been called one of the best actors to never receive an Oscar nomination.

Bacon, the youngest of six children, was born and raised in a close-knit family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A former Park Avenue debutante, his mother, Ruth Hilda (née Holmes; 1916–1991), taught elementary school and was a liberal activist, while his father, Edmund Bacon, was a well-respected architect. At 16, Bacon attended the Pennsylvania Governors School for the Arts, an invaluable state-funded five-week arts program which helped solidify Bacon's passion for the arts. From there, Bacon left home at age 17 to pursue a theater career in New York, where he was one of the youngest students ever admitted, and the youngest student to appear 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."