.png)
8 hours ago
7
To mark Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday, a short film will premiere at this year’s Venice film festival. Entitled Flesh Impact, the film has been written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, and will star two versions of Monroe. The first, played by Ellen Burstyn, will apparently be “a version of Monroe the world never got to see”, while Dakota Johnson will play Monroe in her pomp.
Ahead of its premiere, a photo of Johnson dolled up as Monroe has been released. And it has to be said that the resemblance is actually pretty good. This could be down to one of two reasons. The first is that Monroe is so iconic that you could slap a wig and a beauty spot on Phil Mitchell and you’d immediately see who he was trying to emulate. Or it could be because Marilyn Monroe and Dakota Johnson are literally related.
No, really. A new press release from MyHeritage has revealed that Marilyn Monroe is Dakota Johnson’s ninth cousin three times removed. According to the release, “their shared ancestry traces back to Richard and Charity Tydings, 17th-century English settlers in Maryland. Marilyn descends from their daughter Pretitia, while Dakota and [her father] Don Johnson descend from her younger sister, Mary.”
This is incredible news indeed. What a scoop, casting one of Marilyn Monroe’s own relatives in a film about Marilyn Monroe. And a close relative, too. Ninth cousins three times removed. Take that, anyone who is only the 12th cousin six times removed of Marilyn Monroe. This is the real deal.
However, if you can believe such a thing, Johnson and Monroe are not the only miraculous relatives in Hollywood. For example, in the 2017 BBC series Gunpowder, Kit Harington played Robert Catesby, the leader of a Catholic group who planned the failed gunpowder plot in 1605. It’s a great, grim character to play – spoiler, he ends with his head on a spike – but the biggest news about the series was the fact that Harington was a descendant of Catesby. The website Famouskin claims that Harington is Catesby’s sixth cousin 11 times removed, although it’s worth pointing out that Harington’s family is so well to do that his 10th great-grandfather was James I – meaning that he is simultaneously related to a failed assassin and the assassin’s intended victim.
Another actor related to royalty is Benedict Cumberbatch. In 2016, Cumberbatch played Richard III in The Hollow Crown, a year after genealogists revealed that the actor was Richard’s second cousin 16 times removed. However, it turns out that Cumberbatch is also related to basically every other character he has ever played.
After appearing in Sherlock, Ancestry revealed that Cumberbatch was the 16th cousin twice removed of Arthur Conan Doyle. When the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game was released in 2014, Ancestry went to work again, declaring that Cumberbatch and Turing were 17th cousins, sharing an ancestor in the first Earl of Somerset. You may also remember that Cumberbatch starred in 12 Years a Slave. While not directly related to his character, Cumberbatch’s fifth great-grandfather Abraham was nevertheless an enslaver with a Barbados sugar plantation in his name.
As you can see, Ancestry really comes into its own on matters like this. For example, just one month after Taylor Swift announced her 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department, the website managed to discover that Swift was in fact related to a notoriously tortured poet, being the sixth cousin three times removed of Emily Dickinson. Last year, it was also claimed that Swift was the eighth cousin 11 times removed of King Louis XIV of France. Perhaps this will be a link covered in a future album called The Hubristic Monarchs Department.
But being related to royalty is boring. Being related to something supernatural, on the other hand, is much more fun. And so it came to pass in 2009 that Emma Watson, famous for playing a witch in the Harry Potter films, is actually related to a witch. The news came out of yet another Ancestry deep dive, revealing that Watson’s distant ancestor was Joan Playle, a woman who was convicted of witchcraft in 1592. Although she wasn’t executed for her crimes, Playle was nevertheless excommunicated from the church, although it might be worth pointing out that the evidence for her being a witch essentially begins and ends with the fact that she was unmarried.
Finally, the greatest ancestral link of them all. Shortly before the release of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, Ancestry managed to work out that Robert Pattinson, who played a vampire in the film, was distantly related to Vlad III, known as Vlad the Impaler or Vlad Dracula. Being a screen vampire who is literally related to Dracula is quite a flex, although it should also be pointed out that other relatives of Vlad include Prince William and Prince Harry, and George W Bush, so hopefully they’ll band together for any further sequels.
