News feed
Credit: Instagram @entertainmentweekly
Emma Stone became the spotlighted favourite for next year’s Best Actress Academy Award after her film with Ryan Gosling, La La Land, reviewed strong in Venice. But in just a few days, Natalie Portman shook Stone’s golden hopes, the actress earning stellar reviews in the Italian city for her role as Jackie Kennedy in Jackie. Now up for sale in Toronto, eager distributors waiting to watch the film next week are already in bidding wars for hits rights – and if its released in 2016, will be a sure-fire Best Actress win for Portman come awards season, critics predict.
The film centres around the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s brutal and very public assassination in Texas in 1963 as he rode in the presidential motorcade through downtown Dallas with his wife, Jackie. The president was shot once in the back and once in the head by alleged lone assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Portman – who adopts a thick, posh accent – shines as she paints the portrait of the internal struggle of a grieving first lady in the public spotlight. Exhausted, conflicted and as Variety reports, “diamond hard”, a staunch Jackie fights through to help her children and protect her husband’s legacy. Directed by Pablo Larrain who chose to focus in on the four days after the assassination and to tell it in a non-linear fashion, Portman told Vanity Fair Larrain was looking to create a psychological project of who the human being was in Jackie Kennedy and not the icon we all think we know.
“I got to combine the research of looking at every video I could find and reading every book I could find and listening to audio tapes of her interviews,” said Portman when asked how she prepared for the role.
The last actress to wear the pink pillowbox hat was Katie Holmes in TV show The Kennedy’s After Camelot (a play on Jackie’s famous speech where she likened her husband’s term in the White House to King Arthur’s mythical Camelot). Rachel Weisz (of The Lights Between Oceans in Venice) was originally offered the film role but pulled out. The film is currently listed as a 2017 release in Australia.
