Are Kevin Bacon & Wife Kyra Sedgwick Really Cousins?
The actor Kevin Bacon and his Wife Kyra Sedgwick have been married for over 30 years, but are they in fact long lost cousins?
Husband and wife Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick found out in 2011 that they are in fact ninth cousins, once removed after appearing on the TV show Finding Your Roots.
Read more about Bacon’s relationship with Kyra Sedgwick and their shared ancestry.
Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick
The actor and musician Kevin Bacon and his wife, actress Kyra Sedgwick, have been married since 1988. They met on the set of the television film Lemon Sky when Sedgwick was 22 and Bacon was 29.
Watch Bacon talk about when he and Sedgwick first met in the below YouTube video.
The couple have starred in a number of films together since tying the knot, including Pyrates, Murder in the First, The Woodsman and Loverboy.
Bacon and Sedgwick live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and have two adult children; actor and composer Travis Sedgwick Bacon and actress Sosie Ruth Bacon.
Both of the Bacon children starred alongside their parents in the film Loverboy when they were younger and all four family members have matching tattoos composed of their initials.
The happy couple have been married for over 30 years and seem to have defied the odds in a Hollywood world plagued by short marriages. Sedgwick posted the below throwback photo on Instagram to commemorate their wedding anniversary.
Finding Their Roots
Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick appeared on the TV show Finding Your Roots in 2011. The program is hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
Finding Your Roots first aired in 2012 and has since helped a number of well-known Americans discover their family history using genealogical research and genetic techniques.
Upon learning that she and her husband are ninth cousins, once removed, Kyra exclaimed “See. I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!”
Sedgwick has since revealed that she expected to find out she was related to her husband because “most white people are related, ultimately”. She also said “I wasn’t surprised, honestly,” adding “I had to act surprised.”
When Bacon learned the same news later in the show, Sedgwick reassured her husband that “as long as we’re not first cousins, it’s fine.” She was right, of course, given that ninth cousins, once removed share less than 0.01% of their DNA.
In addition to finding out that he and his wife are cousins, Kevin Bacon also learned that King Edward I is his 22nd great grandfather, Brad Pitt is his 13th cousin, twice removed and Barack Obama is his 12th cousin, three times removed.
Kevin Bacon’s father’s line can be traced back 12 generations to a Quaker named Henry Comly who was living in Bristol in 1663.
Kyra Sedgwick is a descendant of one of New England’s most prominent families and is directly related to William Ellery, one of the signatories of the United States Declaration of Independence.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., the host of Finding Your Roots, has shared that he hopes the series will help people realize that “deep down, we are all Americans,” saying “We’ve been sleeping together from the very beginning of the country.”
This idea fits very poetically with the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which posits that any Hollywood actor can be linked via their film roles to Kevin Bacon in six steps or less.
Bacon has said of the game “It’s a beautiful concept that we are connected,” adding “That we all, essentially, kind of climbed out of the same swamp. It’s fun to be at the forefront of that idea.”
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