The tough task of portraying Jacqueline Kennedy
Portman opted for ‘emotional truth’ instead of impersonation in her portrayal of a Camelot icon, Bob Thompson writes.
Portraying Jacqueline Kennedy was hardly a lifelong ambition for Natalie Portman. But when she was offered the role in the biopic Jackie, she couldn’t resist.
“I hadn’t really thought much about her, to be honest, before thinking about the character,” Portman says.
The 35-year-old eventually became hooked on the subject and is now in the Oscar conversation for her efforts.
The movie, which depicts Jackie in public and private life, shows her in the early White House years, during the traumatic November 1963 assassination of her husband, John F. Kennedy, and coping with the unsettling aftermath.
For background, Portman read 12 biographies “to get different people’s points of view.” She also checked out YouTube clips of Kennedy, especially as the hostess of the now iconic White House tours.
More helpful were the Life magazine interviews done after the assassination with her husband’s special assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
“It’s actually the transcripts of her interviews with Schlesinger, and it’s amazing because it’s word for word exactly what they said to each other,” Portman says.
“He was a friend of theirs, so I could also hear her private voice.”
What the actress wanted to avoid was doing a Jackie impersonation. And although she does resemble Jackie in the film, Portman gives most of that credit to the hair, makeup and wardrobe artists who reimagined Jacqueline Kennedy’s trendsetting style.
“This is not my strength to learn a voice, learn an accent, move like a person,” Portman says.
“I’ve never been a mimic or an imitator. It’s not my skill.”
In fact, Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain, directing his first Englishlanguage movie, was more ambitiously analyzing Jackie’s public image and her private truth.
“Pablo allowed (Jackie), to be explored,” Portman says. “There are all these fragments of a person in different situations with different people, and different roles, which allowed for a very complete portrait of a woman.”
For instance, at the start of Kennedy’s campaign for president, Jackie was considered a snob and a political liability. “They said, ‘Oh, she speaks French and she wears these fancy clothes, and she does her hair funny.’ ”
As the first lady, she successfully reversed the negative image with a single-minded determination and purpose.
“And everyone started wearing their hair like her, and women started taking French classes,” she says. “It became a whole thing.”
Certainly, the actress can relate to some of the Jackie circumstanc- es, but only to a degree. “I think I am a public figure — but on a different scale, of course,” she says. “I’m no icon and I’m not a symbol.”
Indeed, Jacqueline Kennedy lived through “such harrowing events” that almost no one could directly understand her experience. She was, after all, next to her husband when he was shot — “his head exploding in her lap” — and then had to remain focused for a nation at the funeral shortly afterward.
“I’ve mourned and grieved in my life, so I can bring some of that — which of course doesn’t include the horror and violence of what she lived through,” Portman says.
Despite that anguish and pain, Jackie remained dedicated to honouring her husband.
“She was the architect of the entire proceedings,” says Portman of the president’s state funeral three days after the assassination. “She really did everything that went on in terms of the planning, and it was really her design.”
All things considered, Portman says that Jackie was more than just well educated. “She was completely controlling how the story was going to be told, and she understood history well enough to know that whoever tells the story is the one who makes history,” Portman says.
Telling Jackie’s story was more about finding her human side.
“There were a lot of liberties taken and we’re not claiming that every word that was spoken (in the film) actually was spoken,” Portman says.
“But sometimes through the art of fiction, you can get at a truth that might be higher than factual truth with an emotional truth, and that’s what we’re hoping for.”