Composure in the face of tragedy
Natalie Portman did far more than dress the part in Jackie, writes Amy Kaufman.
Walk into any college dorm and you’ll find one of them – Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Jackie Kennedy. There, covering the cinder blocks, is almost always a black-and-white poster of a glamorous icon still recognised more for her beauty than anything else.
But in her freshman dorm room at Harvard University, Natalie Portman left her walls bare.
‘‘I feel like I had that seriouskid thing,’’ she said, rolling her eyes at herself. ‘‘I didn’t have style icons. The people I was into were, like, Jane Goodall. I loved Audrey Hepburn, but I was into what she did for kids with Unicef and stuff.’’
The irony, of course, is that at 35, Portman has become something of a style icon herself. She’s one of the faces of Dior, selling perfume in gauzy ads with French music and garden roses. And she is frequently recognised as one of the best-dressed stars in Hollywood, walking the red carpet in exclusive couture gowns.
But she often has trouble reconciling this part of her identity. Recently, while pregnant with her second child, she has become increasingly upset over the amount of time it takes to have her hair and makeup done before promotional events. ‘‘I could write a book in the time that I’m sitting there,’’ she said. ‘‘I fight with that.’’
It was a feeling she had to let go of while shooting her latest film, Jackie, which chronicles the first lady’s life in the days following John F. Kennedy’s savage 1963 assassination. The movie attempts to illuminate just how big a role Jackie Kennedy played in shaping her husband’s legacy through her involvement in planning his funeral proceedings. But it also does not shy away from her reputation as a fashion staple known for her pillbox hats and crisp wool suits – one of which she famously wore in public even after it had been stained with JFK’s blood.
Pablo Larrain, the film’s Chilean director, felt Kennedy’s love of beauty was so integral to her character that he requested Portman utter ‘‘I love beauty’’ at some point during the shooting of every scene.
‘‘It never ended up in the film, but I feel like you really get a sense of the fact that Jackie was a true aesthete,’’ said Portman, opting to sit in a straight-back office chair instead of on a plush sofa. ‘‘She took so much sensual pleasure in fabric and things. To take pleasure in nature, in art, in music – that’s aesthetic, and that can make you feel connected to something. To see the world as a beautiful place full of wonder, even when you’re bombarded with a lot of negative events.’’
Just one week before Jackie was set to start filming in Paris, the production was bombarded with a dark cloud of its own: A series of co-ordinated terrorist attacks ravaged the city, leaving 130 dead. Portman had by then been living in France for a couple of years, since her husband, Benjamin Millepied, became the director of the Paris Opera Ballet. And she felt something in the air shift.
‘‘The whole city was in shock,’’ she recalled. ‘‘Police were everywhere. People were scared to walk outside.’’
She wondered how she could possibly start making a movie – if it was the right thing to do. And then she returned to the story at
‘‘ She took so much sensual pleasure in fabric and things. To take pleasure in nature, in art, in music – that’s aesthetic, and that can make you feel connected to something.’ ’ NATALIE PORTMAN ABOUT HER CHARACTER JACKIE