The History Channel announced this week that Katie Holmes will play Jackie opposite Greg Kinnear’s JFK in a 2011 miniseries, The Kennedys. “Our goal was A-list auspices behind and in front of the camera,” History Channel General Manager Nancy Dubuc told Variety. “We could not be more pleased that these incredibly talented actors have agreed to sign on to the miniseries.” Despite the critics, Holmes, who has steadfastly stood by her husband Tom Cruise during his professional highs and lows, knows a thing or two about Jacqueline Kennedy-type loyalty. Although Kinnear was nominated for an Oscar for his role in As Good as It Gets, his most recent big-screen part in Miley Cyrus’ feature debut The Last Song, has left some questioning whether or not he’s cut out to play the beloved former president. Time will tell how the two fill their very big shoes when the History Channel’s The Kennedys runs as an eight-hour scripted miniseries in 2011.
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Based in part on Robert F. Kennedy’s book Thirteen Days, the 1974 made-for-TV movie The Missiles of October chronicled the Kennedy administration during the Cuban Missile Crisis and earned William Devane as JFK and director Anthony Page Emmy nominations. “Devane makes a definitive JFK, capturing both the look and the sound of the president,” one reviewer wrote of the actor’s performance. “Martin Sheen, as brother Bobby Kennedy, occasionally slips up with the Bostonian accent, but otherwise captures RFK’s intensity and humor well.”
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Twenty-seven-year-old Patrick Dempsey played the McDreamy younger JFK in a two-part 1993 TV movie JFK: Reckless Youth. “They actually turned me down the first time I went in,” the actor confessed to the L.A. Times. “He literally was the first person we met,” the project’s producer and director Harry Winer explained. “We had had our arms twisted to meet him because he was so contrary to what I expected in the image of John Kennedy.” But after studying up on the man behind the legend, dropping a whopping 20 pounds in three weeks, and practicing his accent, Dempsey eventually earned the leading role in the TV adaptation of Nigel Hamilton’s 1992 bestselling Kennedy biography. Not only did he win over Winer, but critics as well. “Patrick Dempsey captures Kennedy’s charming cockiness and assays the family’s upper-crust Boston accent without turning it into a comic impersonation,” Entertainment Weekly reviewed.
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Ever since the documentary Grey Gardens unveiled the decrepit world of Jackie’s cousins, “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Beale, an entire subgenre of Kennedy fascination has cropped up around the pair. Most recently HBO put out a miniseries version of the documentary in 2009 starring heavy-hitters Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore, who won a Golden Globe for her role as Little Edie. However, with just a few minutes on screen Jeanne Tripplehorn managed to turn heads for her dead-on performance as Jackie Kennedy in what one reviewer called “the movie’s best scene.” Looking both sympathetic and uncomfortable as she visits her unhinged cousins, Tripplehorn pulled off what is widely considered one of the better on-screen portrayals of the former first lady.
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Ex-Charlie’s Angel Jaclyn Smith did her best to imitate Jackie’s public persona in the 1981 made-for-TV movie Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy , but the script “limit[ed] her to a curiously inhibiting propriety,” The New York Times said. Her JFK, James Franciscus, had “even less to work with, serving merely as the vehicle on which Mrs. Kennedy is presumed to ride to greatness.” Though ABC’s scriptwriter had said he wanted to craft a positive portrait of a woman “very much maligned,” he did not, in the Times’ estimation, succeed. “The extent of Mrs. Kennedy's charisma is perhaps arguable, but this television portrait has done her the unjustified disservice of making her dull.”
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In a case of eerie timing, PT 109 was released in June 1963, just months before President Kennedy’s assassination. The film chronicled Kennedy’s heroics as a lieutenant on a PT 109 boat during World War II and starred Cliff Robertson as the future president. “As represented by Cliff Robertson, [Kennedy is] a pious and pompous bloke who stands up straight, looks at you squarely and spouts patriotic platitudes,” wrote a New York Times reviewer at the time, adding an unfortunate angle to rumors that the White House had full approval of the movie’s cast list.
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The 2002 TV movie focused on the five pivotal years in between the assassination of President Kennedy, played by Weeds actor Martin Donovan, and his younger brother’s decision to run for office in 1968. Though Linus Roach, who portrayed Robert Kennedy, resembled the politician less than perhaps any other actor who has stepped into the role, he earned solid reviews for his portrayal of a conflicted and grief-stricken heir to the political dynasty. Audiences were less enthusiastic, however, about scenes in the film featuring Donovan as the ghost of President Kennedy.
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Based on a bestseller by Donald Spoto, the 2000 TV movie Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis follows Jackie, played by Joanne Whalley, from her privileged upbringing to meeting the Senate candidate John F. Kennedy (Tim Matheson), the loneliness that followed as her husband maintained his bachelor lifestyle, the tragedy of his assassination, her unhappy marriage to Aristotle Onassis, and finally a successful career as a book editor. "Whalley gets it very right indeed in a touching performance that unerringly captures the title character's soft-spoken shyness and self-effacing charm," one critic wrote.
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