Playing JACKIE
Natalie Portman is just one of many actresses who’ve played first ladies on the large and small screen. By Neil Pond
For one of the most buzzed-about movie performances this awards season, an Israeli-born actress and a Chilean director teamed up for an all-American tale about one of our greatest White House icons. In
Jackie, Jerusalem-born Natalie Portman plays Jackie Kennedy in the aftermath of the 1963 assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy. Director Pablo Larraín’s first English-language film, released in December 2016, was widely lauded by critics.
In the film, Jackie spins the lasting mythology of her late husband’s administration through interviews with an unnamed magazine reporter (Billy Crudup), casting it in a golden “Camelot” glow.
“She was so smart,” says Portman, 35, nominated for an Oscar for the role. “[She] really understood that the people who write history are the people who really define it. The story you write is more important than what actually happened, if you come up with a good enough tale.”
Portman studied audio and video interviews of Jackie to learn, in particular, how to convey her unique accent. “There’s the New York of her childhood, the Long Island, sort of Bouvier side, the eccentric Grey Gardens kind of family—she says things like tahhlk. And then this kind of prep school, finishing school aspect, almost Mid-Atlantic, like rahhhther. And her L’s were light, almost like a faux-British thing. It’s a real unusual mix.”
There have been more than 50 portrayals of Jackie in movies and on TV. Do you remember these?
After six years of playing one of Charlie’s Angels, Jaclyn Smith took on the title role in the ABC TV movie Jacqueline Bouvier
Kennedy (1981), which focused on the firstlady-to-be’s life before, during and after meeting “Jack” Kennedy. Orange Is the New Black’s Blair Brown played Jackie Kennedy in the five-hour NBC miniseries Kennedy (1983), starring Martin Sheen as the 35th president and timed to the 20th anniversary of his assassination.
Roma Downey, who’d soon go on to be in Touched by an Angel, was Jackie Kennedy alongside Stephen Collins’ JFK in the NBC miniseries A Woman Named Jackie (1991). The three-night event spanned Jackie’s life from college through the White House years and her marriage to Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.
Jill Hennessy—Jane Fellows in TV’s Madam Secretary and Dr. Jordan Cavanaugh in Crossing Jordan—was cast as Jackie in the two-part NBC miniseries Jackie, Ethel, Joan:
The Women of Camelot (2001), about the lives of the three Kennedy brothers’ wives.
The fact-based movie Thirteen Days (2001) featured model-turned-actress Stephanie
Romanov as Jackie Kennedy to Bruce Greenwood’s JFK—and Kevin Costner as political consultant Kenneth P. O’Donnell, who helped steer the American diplomatic team through a tense confrontation with the Soviet Union over the deployment of intercontinental ballistic weapons in Italy, Turkey and Cuba— less than 100 miles from Florida.The Cuban Missile Crisis, as it’s known, came perilously close to escalating to full-scale nuclear war.
The role of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis in America’s Prince: The John F. Kennedy Jr. Story (2003), a TBS television movie about JFK’s son, was played by British actress Jacqueline Bisset, a big star in the 1970s movies Airport, The Deep and Murder on the Orient Express. Criminal Minds alum Jeanne Tripplehorn was Jackie in the HBO TV movie Grey Gardens (2009), about the first lady’s eccentric aunt and cousin, “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale ( Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore, respectively). Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013) was a historical drama about Cecil Gaines, who served eight U.S. presidents in the White House as their butler. Minka Kelly portrayed Jackie opposite James Marsden as John F. Kennedy. In Parkland (2013), a movie about the intersecting lives of several characters around the Kennedy assassination, Kat Steffens ( Jackie) was part of an ensemble that also included Zac Efron, Billy Bob Thornton, Ron Livingston and Marcia Gay Harden.
Ginnifer Goodwin, now starring as Snow White in the TV series Once Upon a Time, was Jackie in the National Geographic Channel’s TV movie Killing Kennedy (2013), based on the best-selling book by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard about JFK (played by Rob Lowe) and his assassination. “I just didn’t think I resembled her at all,” Goodwin says. “But our hair and makeup team did an amazing job.”
Next up to play Jackie is Katie Holmes, who will star in the upcoming Reelz TV miniseries The Kennedys: After Camelot, focusing on Jackie’s life following the death of President Kennedy. Holmes will be reprising her role from the 2011 Reelz miniseries The
Kennedys. “It was really an honor to play her,” Holmes says. “She changed the way first ladies were perceived and how our country was perceived when JFK was in office.”