Michael Pollan (the food writer) is brother-in-law to Michael J. Fox (whose wife is Tracy Pollan).
As evidenced by this fabulous Bud Light commercial.
Vonnegut hated Rivera before, during, and after the marriage and said he was happy they never had kids because he couldn’t bare the thoughts of Geraldo being further involved with the family.
Gore Vidal is a sorta-kinda-in-law of Jackie Kennedy and Lee Radziwill. Vidal’s mother Nina was married to wealthy D.C. aristocrat Hugh Auchinschloss and had two children with him (Vidal’s younger stepsiblings). After Hugh and Nina divorced Hugh married Janet Norton Bouvier, the financially challenged mother of Jackie and Lee, who became stepsisters to Vidal’s younger half-siblings. Though not technically related they knew each other through the siblings and commiserated on being the poor relations of a very rich family.
Vidal’s nephew by one of the half-siblings is actor/writer/director Burr Steers who has billed himself as a nephew of Jackie O but really isn’t any relation biologically. (His mother was once her stepsister.) Vidal’s father had a longtime romantic relationship with Amelia Earhart. Vidal is related to Al Gore, but there are probably people reading this who are just as closely related to Al Gore (it’s something like 7th cousins twice removed).
George Clooney is one of the closest living relatives of Abraham Lincoln. He’s a direct descendant of Lincoln’s mother’s sister. As Lincoln’s parents’ have no living descendants* and Abe has long been rumored to have been the son of a man other than Thomas Lincoln** the Nancy Hanks connection is about the closest incontrertible relationship. Tom Hanks (and by some accounts Bill Cosby’s wife, the former Camille Hanks) are also members of this family but further off.
*Abraham was one of three children. His sister Sarah died giving birth to her only child, who also died and their brother died in childhood. Abraham had three grandchildren by Robert Todd, his only son to survive to adulthood, but the family died out in the 1980s.
**Lincoln is rumored to have believed his father was somebody other than Tom Lincoln. Personally I think Abraham and Thomas looked alike- note among other things the deep ridges leading downward from their noses.
And speaking of genealogy, Winston Churchill and FDR and Douglas MacArthur and the George H.W. Bush family all descend from a 17th century Masachusetts farmer named Benjamin Barney. (Sometimes you’ll read that it was his far more recent descendant Sarah Barney Belcher who died in the early 19th century who was the common link, and she is a common ancestor of FDR and the Bush’s, but to add in FDR and Churchill you must go about three generations before her.)
Churchill claimed to have American Indian ancestry but I don’t know if that’s ever been proven. It wouldn’t surprise me if his mother claimed to have it whether she did or didn’t.
Kate Hudson and her mom Goldie Hawn are descendants of Declaration of Independence signer (and 1776 soloist) Edward Rutledge, and in fact Goldie’s father was named Edward Rutledge Hawn. Reese Witherspoon is a descendant of (fellow 1776 character but not soloist) John Witherspoon (as is her cousin Dane, a soap actor), and Jack Coleman of Dynasty and Heroes fame is a legitimate-line descendant of Benjamin Franklin.
Charlie Chaplin’s father-in-law was the playwright Eugene O’Neill. (Chaplin married Oona O’Neill when she was 18 and he was 54, after which Eugene O’Neill never spoke to his daughter.)
Here’s a weird one.
Lately I’ve been getting into Jimmy Pardo’s Never Not Funny Podcast – hilarious, but subscription … I digress.
One of the full length podcasts they put out for free was all about remembering Andrew Koenig. As I listened, Pardo talked, very emotionally, about Andrew who was his brother-in-law. I struggled to remember the story. He was talking about Andrew being missing and then being found, having committed suicide. He had been working on the podcast, videoing it for the subscription feed.
But it was when he mentioned more details of Andrew’s life, like having played Boner on Growing Pains that I sort of remembered the details. And I just stumbled across his very funny brother-in-law eulogizing him.
Weird.
And of course, Andrew was Walter ‘Star Trek’s Chekov’ Koenig’s son.
Is Jimmy Pardo is related to Don Pardo?
Good question … … apparently not, according to Wikipedia.
I found it amusing that one battled giant ants, and the other battled giant grasshoppers, in very similar movies.
Barney Frank and Shemp
The late Tony Hillerman, novelist, is said to be a second cousin to John Hillerman, actor, best known for his role as Higgins in Magnum P.I.
Oona and Charlie’s daughter Geraldine played her real life grandmother in the Robert Downey movie Chaplin (one of the best biopics ever imo).
Al Franken (supposedly a comedian and now a U.S. senator) is a cousin of Steve Franken, who 50 years ago played “that nasty nasty boy” spoiled rich kid Chatsworth Osborne JR on “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis”.
Wayne Newton has claimed to be a descendant of Rebecca Rolfe, a.k.a Pocahontas as did Edith Galt Wilson, second wife of President Woodrow Wilson, a controversial woman in her day because of what exactly was her role when Wilson was sick. Which wouldn’t be surprising given how the number of offspring appear after several generations and it’s been about 400years. But then, I happened to see Wayne Newton on an episode of “The Lucy show”. Egads, was his voice simply awful. Too bad, I always thought he was pretty cool in “License to Kill”.
Boris Karloff’s grandmother was a sister of Anna Leonownes, of “The King and I” fame with Thailand’s king Mongkut. How much of her story is true is a subject of dispute. Apparently when Karloff (born William Henry Pratt) was starting out actor,he tried to contact her, she replied "get lost, you’ll blow my cover,I don’t want people to know I am from a working class background).
I always feel it is appropriate that Camilla Parker-Bowles is a descendant of Alice Keppel, one of King Edward VII’s mistresses. Keep the whores in the family, Chuck.
No, they were both adopted by the same mom, but different dads. So they are technically half-sisters. The boy who played Willie Olsen on Little House was Melissa’s brother.
To make it a bit easier to follow:
Melissa Gilbert (Laura Ingalls) was adopted by Paul Gilbert and Barbara Crane.
These two people later adopted Jonathan Gilbert (Willie Oleson).
So these two had the same parents but were Jonathan and Melissa aren’t related biologically to each other, nor to their parents.
Then when Melissa was 8 her adoptive parents divorced
Barbara Crane then married Harold Abeles and Barbara gave birth to Sara Rebecca Abeles. Sara changed her name to Gilbert when she decided to go into acting in 1984
Doodles Weaver (vocalist with Spike Jones and his City Slickers) was the uncle of Sigourney Weaver.
Ira Glass (host of This American Life) is first cousin once removed of Philip Glass (avant garde composer).
Scientist Simon Baron-Cohen and Comedian/Actor Sasha Baron Cohen are cousins, despite the hyphen disappearing. There areseveral other prominent people in the extended family.
Danny Devito and Rhea Perlman (Cheers waitress) are married (ETA: to each other!).
Science Fiction author Ursula K. LeGuin is the daughter of famous anthropologist (well, famous for an anthropologist) Alfred L. Kroeber (her K. stands for Kroeber in fact) who was mentor to Ishi, the so-called last wild Indian in the USA.
Julia Louis-Dreyfuss is married to her former SNL castmate Gary Kroeger.
Not quite what the OP was looking for, but Jimmy Buffett and Warren Buffett are not any more related than two random men.
She’s married to Brad Hall. And by the way, David Spade (also from SNL) is the brother-in-law of the designer Kate Spade (her husband is his brother).