Natalie Portman May Star As Newly Widowed Jackie Kennedy In JFK Assassination Film

Oscar winner Natalie Portman may have won the coveted role of Jackie Kennedy. According to Deadline, the 31-year-old is in talks to star as the glamorous first lady in “Jackie.” If cast, Portman will join a long line of actresses such as Jacqueline Bisset, Jill Hennessy and Katie Holmes who have played the iconic figure.

In April 2010, Entertainment Weekly announced that Rachel Weisz had been cast as Jackie O in the film. Her then-fiancé, Darren Aronofsky, who would later direct Portman in “Black Swan,” was set to direct and produce the project.

Weisz later spoke about the film in an interview with MTV.

"It’s a very beautiful script," she said. "I think it’s the four or five days after the assassination and how [Jackie] deals with the assassination and the funeral. It’s not a biopic. It’s about that short period of time.”

According to Collider, the then-untitled film fell apart after Weisz and Aronofsky split in late 2010.

The script was written by longtime TV producer Noah Oppenheim, who is set to make his screenwriting debut next year with the memory-loss drama “The Maze Runner.”

The film covers Jackie’s life during and immediately after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas, on Nov. 22, 1963. Based on what she endured during that time, “Jackie” has the potential to be both riveting and unsettling.

Footage of Jackie cradling her husband’s bloody head after he was shot has become one of the most iconic, albeit horrifying, images in U.S. history.

Hours after he was pronounced dead, a dazed and solemn Jackie famously stood beside Vice President Lyndon Johnson as he was sworn into the presidency.

According to the Independent, the grief-stricken 34-year-old refused to remove her blood-spattered pink dress, saying, "I want them to see what they have done to Jack."

In a 1994 Chicago Tribune article titled “Dignity, Grace Were Hallmarks Of The Jackie Era,” Charles M. Madigan notes that as Jackie planned her husband’s state funeral, she became a symbol of courage for a grief-stricken nation.

“She was a young woman, only 34, when her husband was assassinated,” said Madigan. “But through the tragedy of Dallas and the agonies of the days that followed, she was transformed, as the nation watched, into a woman of almost mythical poise and strength, a symbol first of her own loss and then of the nation's unity in its inconsolable grief.”

At the time of the tragedy, Jackie was still mourning the loss of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, her third child who died of hyaline membrane disease on Aug 7, 1963 -- just two days after he was born.

Fox Searchlight Pictures is the studio behind “Jackie.” No director is currently attached to the project.