A NEW PRIVATE PRINCESS

When Sarah Pidgeon signed on to play Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy in one of the year's most sought-after roles, she had a feeling it would change her career. But when filming for Love Story began and the parallels to her main character appeared-the obsessive, sometimes critical, takes from fans, the incessant flock of paparazzi-it illuminated what she didn't want from fame.

- BY HALIE LESAVAGE

No one really knows her name just yet or recognizes her face, so actress Sarah Pidgeon and I walk like two friends recording a "Spend a Day in New York City's West Village With Me" TikTok.

We duck into a basement-level crafts store, where she holds up different colors of yarn to her face for a scarf she hopes to make. I offer suggestions that seem to match her bright-blue eyes. When two shopkeepers chime in, she goes with their advice and lands on a steely gray.

We continue our easy stroll up picturesque Hudson Street, where November leaves fall in slow motion like paid extras, and we eventually sit down at Anton's, a wine bar and café, where the head waiter does know Sarah by name (she's a regular) and who interrupts our meal three times with reminders to eat the bread. Pidgeon and I chitchat about where she grew up (Birmingham, Michigan, a Detroit suburb); her first adult pet (Tinky-Winky, a kitten that now lives with her mom in Ann Arbor because filming got too busy); her recommendations as an Anton's aficionado (definitely one of the pastas). It's all so normal that I almost don't want to draw attention to why we're really here: the project with the potential to blow up Pidgeon's entire spot.

We're meeting five days after she's wrapped Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, the Ryan Murphy-helmed FX series chronicling the famous couple's romance before their untimely deaths in a 1999 plane crash. It's only because I've been studying Pidgeon ahead of our sit-down that I recognize she's still halfway in CBK mode. Her hair is dyed light blonde, with the faintest hint of her chocolate-brown roots creeping into view. Her tiny black sunglasses match the slim frames her character wore in the same neighborhood, 30 years ago. (Later, she'll admit that she took a pair home from the Love Story wardrobe department.) Even the black turtleneck and bootcut jeans she wears are reminiscent of her character's closet.