NEED TO KNOW
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Claire Danes recalled meeting Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy thanks to her friendship with designer Narciso Rodriguez during a roundtable conversation for The Hollywood Reporter
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Drawing on her memory of Bessette, Danes told Sarah Pidgeon what she thought of Love Story
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Rodriguez, who has been designing for Danes since she was 17, once described Bessette as “the love of my life”
Claire Danes just gave Sarah Pidgeon the ultimate stamp of approval.
Pidgeon, 29, played Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy in FX’s Love Story, alongside Paul Anthony Kelly as JFK Jr., and Danes shared a rare comment about her own time spent with Bessette before she died in 1999.
“I remember her,” Danes, 47, said of Bessette during a roundtable conversation with Pidgeon, Kerry Washington, Rhea Seehorn, Carrie Coon and Chase Infiniti for The Hollywood Reporter. “I knew her.”
Pidgeon said she had “no idea” that the Beast in Me star had a relationship with Bessette, and Danes explained, “Narciso Rodriguez is a good friend of mine, and I met her through him a number of times.” Rodriguez, 65, designed Bessette’s wedding dress and was a close confidant to her throughout her life, so much so that he was also depicted in Love Story.
“I remember her pretty vividly,” Danes said of Bessette. She then told Pidgeon of her portrayal of the iconic ’90s It girl: “You did a great job.”
“Thank you. That means a lot to me,” Pidgeon said.
Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette in ‘Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette’; Carolyn Bessette arrives at the Whitney museum
Credit: Eric Liebowitz/FX; Andrew Savulich/NY Daily News Archive via Getty
Rodriguez has continued to praise Bessette for her “innate style” over 25 years after her death. “Until my children were born, she was the love of my life,” he said during a 2024 speech at WWD’s Apparel & Retail CEO Summit.
Her style was “no accident,” the designer continued. “She considered everything. She thought about things, but she had innate style and she looked amazing.”
Rodriguez has a similarly close tie to Danes, whom he has been designing for since she was 17. In a 2018 tribute to Rodriguez for Vogue, Danes recalled her earliest memory of him: when he designed a dress for her for the 1997 Oscars.
“I was 17. And I, like many 17-year-olds, was pretty sure I knew everything there was to know about all of the things in the world,” she recalled. “He asked me in a soft voice what I had in mind. I have no idea what I actually said, but I know what I was thinking: Sexy! Red! Strappy! In sum, Sophisticated. That is when he began, in his brilliantly discreet way, to school silly, 17-year-old me.”
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Lee Radziwill, Carolyn Besette-Kennedy and Narciso Rodriquez attend the ‘George’ magazine second anniversary party on November 6, 1997 in New York.
Credit: Steve Eichner/Penske Media via Getty
“Lesson number one was to dress my age, which is, essentially, sartorial code for knowing thyself. Thank goodness one of us had a clue,” she continued. “That clue turned into one of the most beautiful dresses I have ever worn. In fact, it wasn’t even a dress. It was a pale-blue cashmere tee, tucked into a silk bias skirt, perfectly finished with a diamond necklace that looked like a string of daisies.”
Over the course of their “decades-long friendship,” Danes wrote that Rodriguez has “designed too many beautiful dresses to count” for her, including “the one I wore when I walked down the ultimate carpet: the wedding aisle.”
Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette is now streaming on Hulu.
Read the original article on People
