Kyra Sedgwick

In some ways, Kyra Sedgwick is the opposite of her husband. If Kevin Bacon is ubiquitous, Kyra Sedgwick is the sort of person who leaves you thinking, “Wait, have I actually seen Phenomenon or not?” She, too, has starred with a dizzying array of famous people—even Phenomenon gives you John Travolta, Forest Whitaker, Robert Duvall, and Brent Spiner—but it’s seldom in projects the average person has heard of. Yes, she was in a production with Helen Hunt, Paul Rudd, and Robin Weigert, but it’s a made-for-TV version of Twelfth Night that aired on Live From Lincoln Center in 1998.

The Sedgwicks are a longstanding Massachusetts family that has its own Wikipedia page. Many of her relatives have them, including her stepmother, Leni Stern (whose page is a stub, if anyone wants to expand it), a couple of her siblings, and her cousin Edie. (They also owned slaves if you go back far enough, according to Henry Louis Gates.) And if the Rosenwalds weren’t quite up there, well, young Kyra was raised with a certain amount of privilege. She became an actress, she says, because it enabled her to walk in other people’s shoes for a while. And she’s been a working actress since 1982.

Honestly, I would argue that Sedgwick’s career is proof that there are simply fewer opportunities for women in Hollywood to be, well, Kevin Bacon. We don’t expect gender parity in Twelfth Night, Gods know, because Shakespeare. But there are seven people who have been on all 109 episodes of The Closer, and Sedgwick is the only woman among them. I like J.K. Simmons, of course, and G.W. Bailey will never not be Rizzo from M*A*S*H to me, but come on. The Summer I Turned Pretty, on which Sedgwick appeared in five episodes, seems more balanced but still has three men and one woman who appear on every episode.

It’s honestly kind of depressing. The best chance that the number of women in a movie will be anything approaching fifty percent is if it’s About A Woman, and even then there’s no certainty. Especially when you start looking at minor characters, the kind of role Kevin Bacon plays. Now, I don’t know what kind of career Sedgwick wants. None of my usual sources detail that, and if she said on her Finding Your Roots episode, it’s been long enough since I’ve seen it that I don’t actually remember. But if a woman did want that career, it would be much harder to come by.

Ah, yes. Finding Your Roots. She and her husband did an episode together, because Henry Louis Gates does like his themes, and the pair of them are such a staple of Hollywood that they’re a theme all by themselves. Bacon had apparently hoped that Gates would not find a connection between the two, but it was what Sedgwick wanted most of all. She got her wish; while her Bacon number is quite obviously one—they met on the set of a made-for-TV movie and she appeared in his directorial debut, for starters—she is also his ninth cousin once removed. That is distant enough so that it doesn’t matter except to give her joy, and what more could you ask for?