Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon Are Cousins: 6 Degrees of Strange
Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon are cousins, according to a new report. The couple, married since 1988, were revealed to be distantly related to each other through a new TV show, "Finding Your Roots."
Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon being cousins is one of the few revelations the show's host, Harvard academic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., will discover on the air. It was he that first revealed to Zap2It.com that Sedgwick and Bacon had at least one distant relative in common.
The two "are indeed distant cousins," said Gates. "So talk about six degrees of separation, right?"
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The researcher mentioned the theory first coined by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy in 1929, who stated that any two people could be linked through mutual acquaintances, with a maximum of six steps in between any arbitrary pairing.
Bacon in particular has been affected by the theory before: a trivia game, called "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," alleges that any well-known Hollywood actor can be tied to Bacon's films in less than six steps. Bacon embraced the meme, starting a charitable organization, SixDegrees.org.
It seems that Sedgwick and Bacon, who have children Travis, 22, and Sosie, 19 are the first example of Gates' attempt to show how close American families actually are.
"I want … American [to] realize how united we are as a people," Gates said, explaining the purpose behind "Finding Your Roots." "There's so much animosity … and one of the things that I want the series to do is to show that, deep down, we are all Americans. We've been sleeping together from the very beginning of the country."
Gates' research into the American gene pool didn't originally start with Hollywood actors, though. He first studied African-American history in the early 2000s.
In "Finding Your Roots," the heritages of various other celebrities are made, including singer Harry Connick Jr. He found he was descended from an American Revolution privateer, while saxophonist Branford Marsalis discovered his ancestors included a German immigrant and a free black woman in 1851.
