Surprising Celebrity Relations

[*]actresses and reality stars Kim Richards (Escape to Witch Mountain, "James at 16", Tuff Turf) and her sister Kyle Richards (Halloween, "Little House on the Prairie", "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills") are the aunts of reality stars and sometimes actresses Paris Hilton ("The Simple Life", House of Wax, Repo! The Genetic Opera) and Nicky Hilton/Rothschild ("Fashion News Live", Pauley Shore is Dead, "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills"). Kim Richards was a bonafide child star. The rest of them are bonafide somethings.[/list]

And Zsa Zsa Gabor is the Hilton sisters' great-grandmother.

Kinda. That is one of those tenuous by-marriage-and-not-by-blood Hollywood relations. Zsa Zsa Gabor famously had nine husbands. Conrad Hilton, Paris and Nicky's Great Grandfather, was her second and did have a child with Zsa Zsa, which was her only offspring. But Paris' Grandfather Barron Hilton was the child from Conrad's subsequent marriage to Mary Adelaide Barron. Their son, Richard Hilton, is Paris' father. Paris' mother, Kathleen, her sister is the mother of Kim and Kyle Richards. None of them are related, by blood, to the Gabors. Zsa Zsa's daughter is the half-sister of Paris Hilton's Grandfather.

Oy.

Never knew (until recently) that Juliette Lewis was the daughter of Geoffrey Lewis.

Oui.

Discussed on the first page of this thread. https://www.movieforums.com/communit...182#post390182

[*]actress Blake Lively ("Gossip Girl", The Town, The Age of Adaline) may be the most successful thus far, but there are other Livelys in the business. Her older brother Eric had some mild success with small roles in American Pie and A Madea Christmas as well as a recurring role on "The L Word". But they also have three half-siblings in Hollywood, from their father's first marriage. Jason Lively was a child actor best remembered as Rusty Griswold in National Lampoon's European Vacation. Robyn Lively also started as a child actress and had teen and young adult roles in "Twin Peaks", "Doogie Howser, M.D." and "Chicago Hope" and is still working today. Lori Lively is also an actress with some television credits who is now mostly an acting coach. Their father Ernie Lively was an actor as well, with small roles going back to the 1970s. He played Blake's character's father in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
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OK, I think even the most casual of film fans realizes Michael Douglas is Kirk's son and Jane Fonda is Henry's daughter, but what are some of those less obvious familial relations in Hollywood. And not marriages, as those shift so darn often even the people involved have a hard time keeping 'em straight. Who are some blood relations you maybe didn't realize for years (or until you read this thread)?

• Even though they have the same last name, Randy and Dennis Quaid are such opposites in the looks department, there are probably many who don't put it together that these two are brothers. To date the only film where they've both appeared is in Walter Hill's The Long Riders (1980) that used real-life brothers to play the various siblings in the James-Younger Gang (James & Stacey Keach as Frank & Jesse James, David, Keith & Robert Carradine played the Youngers, Christopher & Nicholas Guest played Charlie & Bob Ford and the Quaids were the Miller Brothers).
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• Julia and Eric Roberts are brother and sister, though you hardly ever see them together. Eric hasn't traveled in the A-List circles for years, though big brother had an Oscar nomination before Julia had even booked her first movie. Even taking time off to start a family Julia is an Oscar-winning international superstar. They've only appeared in one film together, Blood Red (1989), a straight-to-videoer starring Eric where Julia has a small cameo-sized role, just before she hit it big in Pretty Woman. And now there is a new generation on the screen, as Eric's daughter Emma Roberts has been building a career, first as a child actress in the likes of Aquamarine and Nancy Drew, but transitioning into older roles in We're the Millers, Palo Alto, and "American Horror Story".
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• Oscar winners Warren Beatty & Shirley MacLaine are brother and sister. This will not be a surprise to anybody over the age of forty, but with neither making a whole lot of movies anymore it would be easy for a younger, newer movie fan to have missed the connection of these two Oscar-winning cinema icons with different last names.
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• I mentioned this in my Albert Brooks appreciation thread, but Albert and Bob Einstein (a.k.a. "Super Dave" Osbourne) are brothers. And yes, that does mean Albert's birth name is Albert Einstein. And yes, his parents did have a sense of humor. Dad was Borscht-Belt comic Harry Parke (a.k.a. Parkyakarkus), who literally died on-stage as he had a heart attack while sitting on the dias at a Friar's Club roast. Albert and Bob are in one film together: Bob has a great scene as a sporting goods salesman in Albert’s brilliant Modern Romance (1981). And while neither one of them is exactly a looker in Hollywood terms, the tall, lanky, gravely-voiced Einstein and Albert, much like the Quaids, don’t exactly look much like brothers, either.
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• Isabella Rossellini is the daughter of Ingrid Bergman and Italian neo-realist director Roberto Rossellini. This should be clear from the combination of Isabella's last name at the fact that she looks so much like Mom, but again younger filmgoers might never have made the connection (Casablanca and Rome, Open City are not the first things racing through ones mind as you watch say Blue Velvet). There are two really cool projects that highlight Isabella's link to her folks. The first is an episode of HBO's "Tales from the Crypt" called "You Murderer", a Bob Zemeckis directed piece years before Forrest Gump that has Isabella basically made up to look like Ingrid as a computer-generated Humphrey Bogart interacts with her (and John Lithgow). The second and even more dead-on is the short film "My Dad is 100-Years-Old", written and conceived by Isabella and directed by Guy Maddin where she has a surreal and really wonderful conversation with her father (represented as a gigantic, talking belly) as well as her Mom and film luminaries such as Hitchcock, Fellini and Charlie Chaplin (all played by Isabella).
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• Melanie Griffith is the daughter of Tippi Hedren, star of Hitchcock's The Birds and Marnie. They're both in the thriller Pacific Heights (1990) together, but Tippi has been more or less retired for years, focusing on her work with animal sanctuaries. These days Melanie mostly serves as a cautionary tale of cosmetic surgery run amok, but Dakota Johnson, her daughter with then-husband Don Johnson, is quickly becoming known, having starred on the too-short-lived sitcom "Ben & Kate" and will soon be everywhere as Anastasia Steele in Fifty Shades of Grey.
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• Jennifer Jason Leigh is the daughter of Vic Morrow and screenwriter Barbra Turner. Morrow worked steadily from the '50s to the '80s, starring in the TV series "Combat", and the movies The Blackboard Jungle and The Bad News Bears. He was infamously killed on the set of The Twilight Zone: The Movie in the segment directed by John Landis when a helicopter went out of control and decapitated Morrow and two young actors during a scene.
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• Griffin Dunne (An American Werewolf in London, After Hours and now a director) is the son of author/TV host Dominick Dunne. Griffin's sister (and Dominick's daughter) was Dominique Dunne, the actress who played the elder daughter in Poltergeist, who was killed months later in real life just as her star was rising by a crazed ex-boyfriend.
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• Miguel Ferrer (RoboCop, Traffic, "Crossing Jordan") is the son of Oscar-winning actor José Ferrer (The Caine Mutiny, Lawrence of Arabia, Cyrano DeBergerac) and singing star Rosemary Clooney. George Clooney is the nephew of Rosemary, which makes Miguel and George cousins.
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• Hopefully this family is pretty well known to most everybody and obvious, but director Francis Ford Coppola is the Uncle of Nic Coppola - who changed his name to Nicolas Cage. And Francis' sister, actress Talia Shire, her son is Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore's Max Fischer). This makes Francis Uncle to him too, and he and Cage are cousins. And of course they're both the cousins of Francis' kids, Sofia and Roman Coppola, who are both now directors themselves.

There are many others, but I'll save them for subsequent posts. So which have you found surprising?

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