American actor Edward Norton discovered that the historical Indian Pocahontas (1595-1617), daughter of the leader of the Powhatan territory, is his 12th great-grandmother.
The film producer also got the information during Tuesday’s episode of the PBS genealogy show “Finding Your Roots,” hosted by historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.
“It makes you realize that you are a small part of human history,” Norton said during the show’s broadcast.
The historian assured the actor that the English colonist John Rolfe and Pocahontas were part of his family tree and that they were married on April 5, 1614 in Virginia.
During the program dedicated to tracing the ancestral stories of celebrities, it was also revealed that the artist’s third great-grandmother, John Winstead, owned a slave family made up of a man, a woman and five girls.
Norton confessed that he was not proud of that part of his story and that it made him “uncomfortable”.
“It is not a judgment on your own life, but it is a judgment on the history of this country and first you have to recognize it and then face it. (…) When you read ‘eight-year slave’, you just want to die”, stressed the protagonist of the film “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”, which was released in 2022.
“Fight Club” (1999), “The Root of Fear” (1994), “Forbidden America” (1998), and “Birdman” (2014) are some of Edward Norton’s best-known works.
Source: TSF
