Los Angeles Times

Playing JACKIE

Natalie Portman is just one of many actresses who’ve played first ladies on the large and small screen.

- By Neil Pond

F or 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.

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 ??  ?? Jacqueline Kennedy (far left) as portrayed by (from left) Natalie Portman, Jaclyn Smith, Blair Brown, Jeanne Tripplehor­n, Ginnifer Goodwin and Katie Holmes
Jacqueline Kennedy (far left) as portrayed by (from left) Natalie Portman, Jaclyn Smith, Blair Brown, Jeanne Tripplehor­n, Ginnifer Goodwin and Katie Holmes

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