In the lead up to IABD I was making all kinds of tenuous connections between my posts and Anita Brookner. After reading Peta’s much deeper analysis of connections between Brideshead Revisited and Anita Brookner, I began thinking about the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game.
Are you familiar with the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game? To play, all you have to do is link any celebrity to Kevin Bacon within six degrees. I read an article years ago in The New Yorker that posited that this game works with Kevin Bacon because he has been in such a variety of projects and had not been typecast. The article stated that someone who made many more films and was far more famous, like John Wayne, won’t necessarily fare as well in the Six Degrees game because their were work was more specialized.
So I thought how many degrees of separation between Kevin Bacon and Anita Brookner. Using Diana Quick from the Brideshead post as a possible starting point, it was far easier than I thought it would be to connect these two dots. I bet there are other connections as well. Perhaps this will be a regular feature.
That’s only 5 degrees of separation. Can you do better?
hogglestock 
Hmmm, well, Kevin Bacon was in The Big Picture with Jennifer Jason Leigh who was in The Machinist with Anna Massey who starred in the BBC adaptation of Hotel du Lac (as I learned here, at this very web site). That would be 3!
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I won't even try but have two other things to say. Sappy? I love that movie. And I have a confession to make. All of these Brookner photos frighten me. I keep thinking she looks like someone who has committed a series of very clever crimes and gotten away with it. I know this is unfair. But I cannot help it.
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I won't even attempt to do this, but I like the circuitous route!
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Anna Massey was in the BBC version of Hotel du Lac.
She was also in The Machinist with Christian Bale
who was in Batman Begins with Sarah Wateridge
who was in Where the Truth Lies with Kevin Bacon.
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Googie Withers, also in Hotel du Lac, has just died in Australia.
Not much to do with Kevin Bacon.
I'm no good with maths, so I can't work out the degrees, but
Kevin Bacon co-starred with
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with Meryl Streep in The River Wild
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with Me, theatre apprentice, in a NY theatre
Seriously.
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This is the perfect game for a road trip. We played hours of it and made it harder by including European movies.
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me—>kevin's sister—>kevin.
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Ted: You are either a genius or you don't get out enough. I was going to look into the Anna Massey connection, but now there is no need.
Frances: I understand about the photos of Brookner, but I don't understand about Love Actually. But I know that one person's delight can be another's cinematic lobotomy.
Mystica: Crazy isn't it?
Jim: Good try but Ted beat you by one using the same Anna Massey film.
Margaret: The is some connection, now we just need to introduce you to Anita Brookner.
Alex: I would terrible at the game because I don't know much about film.
Pigtown: Are a regular lurker of my porch or were you googling your friend's brother?
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I had a friend in high school who was *obsessed* with the TV show The X-Files and came up with a similar game (six degrees of The X-Files). If you can connect Brookner to that show, I'll give one of her books a shot in the next week or so. (I wanted to participate in IABD but had family stuff come up.)
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