We’ve now learned who will be joining Sarah Pidgeon’s Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy in Ryan Murphy’s hotly anticipated forthcoming series American Love Story, dramatizing the lives, love, and (we have to presume) tragic deaths of CBK and her husband, John F. Kennedy Jr., in the 1990s. While newcomer Paul Anthony Kelly will star as the latter—a rakish attorney, magazine publisher, and all-around man-about-town—one Naomi Watts, who only recently played Babe Paley in Murphy’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, is set to go raven as John John’s mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Watts would be, of course, only the latest in a long line of actresses to transform into the much-admired (and much-copied) style icon: portrayals of Jackie in film and television have stretched back more than 40 years. Here, as we await further news from Murphyland, we revisit some of the most memorable depictions of the late Jackie O. so far.