Are Kyra Sedgwick and husband Kevin Bacon cousins? How the couple are related outside their 30-year marriage
Kyra Sedgwick and Kavin Bacon are one of Hollywood's 'It couples'. When they celebrated their 30th wedding Anniversary, Bacon told Entertainment Tonight, "Whatever you do, don't listen to celebrities on advice on how to stay married. That's my secret." Sedgwick resonates with the same idea, as was clear from her response to Piers Morgan asking the recipe for how to make a marriage work back in 2012. "I always get uncomfortable with that question," she explained, "because I always feel like, the secret to a happy marriage is to not take advice from celebrities about marriage." Maybe that is the key after all, but what the couple also has going for them is being related outside their three-decade relationship. The couple is, in fact, very distant cousins.
Bacon and Sedgwick married in 1988, after meeting on the sets of the television film 'Lemon Sky' when Sedgwick was 22 and Bacon was 29. Since then, they have starred together in Pyrates, Murder in the First, The Woodsman, and Loverboy, and also have two children together. Their eldest is a son, Travis Sedgwick Bacon (born June 23, 1989), and their younger child is actress Sosie Ruth Bacon who was seen in Netflix's '13 Reasons Why'.
The couple's not so shocking reveal came in 2011, when they appeared on the PBS show 'Finding Your Roots', hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., who's the Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. The test results revealed that Sedgwick and Bacon are ninth cousins, once removed, and the actress immediately exclaimed on the show “See. I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!” Sedgwick later explained at a Television and Critics Association panel that “I figured I was going to be related to Kevin Bacon — I mean, most white people are related, ultimately. I wasn’t surprised, honestly. Frankly, I figured that was part of the reason that they wanted to do both of us. I had to act surprised.”
On the PBS show, when Bacon had learned about being related to his wife, Sedgwick assured him saying "as long as we’re not first cousins, it’s fine.” Bacon also learned that King Edward I is his 22nd great grandfather, while Brad Pitt is his 13th cousin, twice removed, and even Barack Obama is his 12th cousin, three times removed. Sedgwick on the other hand descends from one of New England’s most prominent families, directly related to William Ellery, one of the signatories of the United States Declaration of Independence.
Maybe that's the secret to their long withstanding relationship that has pretty simple rules set by Sedgwick. "Keep the fights clean, and don't have sex with somebody else," she detailed to Good Housekeeping in 2010. "Monogamy is a given, like 'Put the toilet seat down.'" The next most important aspect of their relationship is sex, of course. "Sex is really important. That desire is there," she shared with Redbook in 2012. "The essence of it hasn't really changed. When he walks into a room, I'm still... I mean, my heart gets a little fluttery and I think, Oh! He's so cute. He's so hot. That's literally the first thing I think."