Bacon’s celebrity ambivalence

Kevin Bacon had one simple motive for starting a career in movies—fame, said Jane Mulkerrins in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). “Show me an actor who doesn’t want to be famous,” he says, “and I’ll show you a liar. Later, you realize that there’s more to it than just the acquisition of fame, and money and girls. But that is what drove me, initially.” Bacon quickly got the celebrity he craved. The 1982 cult classic Diner put him on the map, and the 1984 hit Footloose made him an international star. To this day, Bacon, 54, finds it almost impossible to enter a bar or party without the DJ playing the theme song to Footloose, or to walk down the street without fans accosting him to recite lines from Diner. He grew so weary of it that he asked a Hollywood makeup artist a couple of years ago to build him a prosthetic disguise, which he tested out at an L.A. mall. “I just wanted to see what it would be like not being famous,” he says, rather sheepishly. “People didn’t bother me, but they also ignored me. No one was nice to me—they looked right through me, and pushed in front of me at the register.” He hasn’t worn it since.

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