Bacon has won Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Awards, was nominated for an Emmy Award, and was named by The Guardian as one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination.

In 2003, Bacon received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Bacon, one of six children, was born and raised in a close-knit family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 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 and a prominent Philadelphian who had been Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission for many years. At 16, Bacon attended the Pennsylvania Governors School for the Arts, a state-funded five-week arts program which helped solidify Bacon's passion for the arts.[citation needed]

Bacon left home at age 17 to pursue a theater career in New York, where he appeared 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."

Bacon's debut in the fraternity comedy Animal House in 1978 did not lead to instant fame for which he had hoped, and Bacon returned to waiting tables and auditioning for small roles in theater. He briefly worked on the television soap operas Search For Tomorrow (1979) and The Guiding Light (1980–81) in New York. He refused an offer of a television series based on Animal House to be filmed in California in order to remain close to the New York stage[citation needed] . Some of his early stage work included Getting Out performed at New York's Phoenix Theater, and Flux which he did at Second Stage Theatre during their 1981–1982 season.

In 1982, he won an Obie Award for his role in Forty Deuce, 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]

Bolstered by the attention garnered by his performance in Diner, Bacon starred in the 1984 box-office smash Footloose. Richard Corliss of Time likened Footloose to the James Dean classic Rebel Without a Cause and the old Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland musicals, commenting that the film includes "motifs on book burning, mid-life crisis, AWOL parents, fatal car crashes, drug enforcement, and Bible Belt vigilantism." To prepare for the role, Bacon enrolled at a high school as a transfer student named "Ren McCormick" and studied teenagers before leaving in the middle of the day.[citation needed] Bacon did earn strong reviews for Footloose, and he appeared on the cover of People magazine soon after its release.

Bacon's critical and box-office success lead to a period of typecasting in roles similar to the two he portrayed in Diner and Footloose. Bacon would have difficulty shaking this on-screen image. For the next several years he chose films that cast him against either type and experienced, by his own estimation, a career slump. In 1988 he starred in John Hughes's comedy She's Having a Baby and the following year he was in another comedy called The Big Picture.

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 – a role that People found him "far too accomplished"[citation needed] to play – and portrayed an earnest medical student experimenting with death in Joel Schumacher's Flatliners.

Bacon's next project was to star 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.