Kirk Thomas Cameron was born in Panorama City, California, to
Barbara Cameron (née Barbara
Jeanne Bausmith), a homemaker, and
Robert Cameron, a teacher. Though his
parents initially did not project show business aspirations onto their
children, a family friend in the business noted to Barbara that both
Kirk and his sister,
Candace Cameron Bure, were cute
enough that they could easily pick up lucrative work in commercials.
After Cameron began appearing in TV ads for "Polaroid", "McDonald's"
and "Count Chocula" cereal, he found himself wound up in Hollywood's
notorious child-star mill, netting minor cute-kid parts in a handful of
TV movies, including a couple of Disney projects and two
Junge Schicksale (1972)
(1972-95). In 1983, he landed a regular gig, as a precocious kid, in
ABC's Two Marriages (1983), a
show that remained on the air less than a month. He found a more
winning formula in 1985 with
Unser lautes Heim (1985), playing
the oldest son of a family headed by a psychiatrist
(Alan Thicke) and a journalist
(Joanna Kerns), one in a sequence of family
network sitcoms characterized by with-it parents and
mischievous-but-squeaky-clean kids. On the show, Cameron played the
incorrigible but dumb "Mike Seaver" and his winning portrayal won over
a large number of teen fans. In spite of scathing critical notices,
"Growing Pains" ranked among Nielsen's top 20 network shows for its
first four seasons, rising to No. 5 in its 1987-88 year. On the heels
of his sitcom success, Cameron appeared in his first feature film in
1986, the
Robin Williams/Kurt Russell
glory-days comedy,
Rocket Man - Der Beste aller Zeiten (1986).
ABC would pump up Cameron as its "It" boy, and his trademark smirk in
coming years would grace covers of a raft of teen magazines. Meanwhile,
job offers cropped up to exploit his proverbial 15 minutes; he played
the son/father of Dudley Moore in
Wie der Vater, so der Sohn (1987),
one of Hollywood's periodic flavor-du-jour retreads of the mystical
parent/sibling body-switch comedies; netted the starring role in a
high-profile Pepsi Super Bowl XXIV commercial; rated top-billing in
Die große Herausforderung (1989), an overwrought,
widely-panned college drama about debate team wonks arguing against Roe
v. Wade; and did a guest-shot, alongside sister Candace, on her ABC
sister sitcom, Full House (1987)
(1987-1995). Firmly established as the resident star of "Growing
Pains", Cameron saw his pay jump to $50,000 a week and his fans sending
him some 10,000 letters a week. But his coming-of-age took an
unexpected turn, at least for everyone who worked with him. As he would
later recall it in his autobiography, "Still Growing", the family of
his first girlfriend initially exposed the 17-year-old to evangelical
Christianity. Cameron experienced what he would later describe as a
"life-changing encounter with Jesus" and declared himself "born again".
