The loves of Jackie Kennedy Onassis - the New York socialite who was first married to US President John F Kennedy, and later to Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis after she became widowed - have been well documented. Yet it is another romantic frisson in her life that provides the inspiration to a new film about the style icon, 37 Heavens.
Starring Gemma Arterton as the former First Lady, the film depicts a period in Jackie's life between husbands, when she was dispatched by her former brother-in-law Senator Robert Kennedy on a charm offensive to Cambodia in 1967. As well as staying with the country's Prince Sihanouk, who acted as her royal tour guide to sights such as Angkor Wat, the trip was also the time in which her little-talked about relationship with David Ormsby-Gore, Lord Harlech (played by Guy Pearce), a British diplomat who accompanied her on the mission, blossomed.
The two had known each other for several years, as Ormsby-Gore had worked in JFK's White House. While Kennedy had been widowed for four years at the time of the trip, following the assassination of her first husband in 1963 when she was just 34, Lord Harlech had been widowed mere months, after the death of his wife Sylvia in a car accident in February of that year.
The couple never publicly addressed their relationship, but it was reported that Lord Harlech had proposed to Kennedy, who refused him, in 1968. In letters that surfaced after their deaths, Kennedy wrote: 'If ever I can find some healing and some comfort — it has to be with somebody who is not part of all my world of past and pain... I can find that now if the world will let us.'
Ultimately, Kennedy married Onassis instead, in October 1968. Meanwhile Lord Harlech went on to wed American socialite and Vogue editor, Pamela Colin, in 1969, with Princess Margaret, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire and J. J. Astor in attendance.
Filming on 37 Heavens is due to begin in 2022.
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