Where Daryl Hannah is now as love story revisits coupling with JFK Jr.

In FX's Love Story, Carolyn Bessette stresses over the possibility that it might not work out with John F. Kennedy Jr. and she'll "forever be known as JFK Jr.'s ex."

That was less of a concern for Daryl Hannah, who was one of Hollywood's hottest actresses by the time she started dating the political scion in 1988. And despite the intense fascination with their coupling at the time—and the renewed interest now, thanks to the Ryan Murphy-produced Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette—it didn't seem to be much of an issue after they finally went their separate ways in 1994.

Yes, that's a couple of years after John met Carolyn, meaning Daryl (who's played by Dree Hemingway, daughter of Mariel Hemingway and great-granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway) mainly serves as an obstacle to the main event in the series.

While the production didn't reach out to Daryl to further inform the inspired-by-true-events story, producer Nina Jacobson told Gold Derby, "We always try to come from a place of compassion. Given how much we're rooting for John and Carolyn, Daryl Hannah occupies a space where she's an adversary to what you want narratively in the story."

Daryl, however, was a movie star, and therefore—unlike Carolyn, a sales associate for Calvin Klein specializing in celebrity clientele when she met John—wasn't as fazed by paparazzi or tabloid interest in her love life.

Despite how she comes off as John's obvious mismatch, "we still try to really show respect to the fact that she does have a fluency with this world that Carolyn doesn't have," Nina explained. "She is able to swim in his tank in a way that is much more difficult for Carolyn."

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Still, dating JFK Jr. did come with a whole new level of attention.

"It’s getting really annoying. I get asked about it all the time,” Daryl told Entertainment Weekly in 1993. “This morning, I call up my plumber, and even he asks me. Oh, brother, I’m just trying to get my pipes fixed. Why can’t people talk about something else?”

The now 65-year-old star of Splash and Roxanne first crossed paths with John in the 1970s when they were teenagers on respective family vacations on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. They then spent most of the 1980s involved with other people, John dating—to name one of his many girlfriends—Christina Haag while Daryl was living with musician Jackson Browne.

But the pair reconnected at the 1988 New York wedding of John's aunt Lee Radziwill and her third husband, filmmaker Herbert Ross, who had just directed Daryl in Steel Magnolias.

Not long after People named him Sexiest Man Alive that September, John and Daryl were fixed up by her stepfather, producer and Democratic Party donor Jerrold Wexler. They were off and on for the next six years while still entangled with others. In October 1992, John flew to California to support Daryl after she and Jackson broke up, then took her back to New York with him.

Meanwhile, he had started dating Carolyn over the summer and, while there were other reasons as to why their love story initially fizzled, she was further put off by headlines that John and Daryl's romance was back on.

During the years they dated, one of the rumored sticking points in their relationship was how Jacqueline Kennedy supposedly felt—i.e. not great—about her son dating the actress.

"It's just not true," Daryl said in 2004 on The Howard Stern Show of stories that she and Jackie didn't get along, making an extremely rare comment about that period of her life. "People just don't know necessarily why we broke up, so people speculate, and then, I guess, that's the only kind of idea they could come up with. And it gets repeated over and over, and then it becomes accepted as truth. It has no bearing on reality whatsoever."

She added, "I had a really great relationship with her. I won't go into some of the more personal details."

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As for her connection with John, she has also left that open to interpretation, never divulging details about their time together.

Daryl was "awesome," Amelia Barlow, a daughter of John's friend John Perry Barlow, recalled in RoseMarie Terenzio and Liz McNeil's 2024 book JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral History. And the Wall Street actress' relationship with John "felt fantastical, adventurous. It felt somewhat young and a little bit maybe naive or immature, compared to his relationship with Carolyn."

Not long before Jackie died in May 1994, Daryl's dog was fatally hit by a car on John's watch in New York, and he flew to L.A. to bring her the pup's ashes. Friend Steve Gillon said in the oral history that John was "deeply resentful that Daryl dragged him out there to attend a funeral for her dog when his mother was dying of cancer."

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Carole Radziwill said, per the book, that she took Daryl shopping to buy "a proper funeral dress" to attend Jackie's memorial service. "I could see it was over. John could barely look at her. I think she knew, too."

John told friends a month after his mother died that he and Daryl "should have been over long ago," according to J. Randy Taraborrelli's 2019 book The Kennedy Heirs: John, Caroline, and the New Generation.

Carole said that, by the time she married John's cousin Anthony Radziwill in August 1994, he "had quietly rekindled his romance with Carolyn.

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But while she had been involved in one of the most chronicled romances of its day, Daryl moved on with her life. She did not attend John and Carolyn's funeral in 1999 or issue any statement, nor has she ever uttered a cross word in public about her ex.

Eventually she became as known for her environmental activism as she was for acting. The Kill Bill alum famously talked up alternative fuels after having her 1983 Chevy El Camino converted to biodiesel, noting that her car frequently smelled like donuts or French fries because it ran on vegetable oil.

Daryl's parents broke up when she was 7, she told The Times in 2005, and "from that day I started realizing that the world functions differently from how I was taught in Sunday school and I wanted to be more in sync with it. I have always felt there must be ways to live in harmony with nature without having to live a sacrificial existence. You shouldn’t have to be too spartan to do it.”

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She was also arrested in 2011 and 2013, both times in Washington, D.C., during protests against the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

In 2017, Daryl was one of numerous women who accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual misconduct, telling the New Yorker's Ronan Farrow that her career "experienced instant repercussions" after she told people about her alleged experiences with the producer in the mid-2000s.

"I think that it doesn’t matter if you’re a well-known actress, it doesn’t matter if you’re 20 or if you’re 40, it doesn’t matter if you report or if you don’t, because we are not believed," Daryl said. "We are more than not believed—we are berated and criticized and blamed."

She was "a private person, with a rule of speaking to the press only for professional reasons," the actress explained. But she wanted to tell her story because she felt "a moral obligation to support the women who have suffered much more egregious transgressions."

Never one to say much about her love life, Daryl's boyfriends after JFK Jr. included Val Kilmer (“Lord knows I’ve suffered heartache," the late actor wrote in his 2020 memoir I'm Your Huckleberry. "But Daryl was by far the most painful of all") and then she married Neil Young in 2018. It was her first trip down the aisle and his third.

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Among their various collaborations, she was nominated for a Best Musical Film Grammy in 2023 as director of the documentary A Band a Brotherhood a Barn, about her husband and his band Crazy Horse.

She also directed the recent concert documentary Coastal, telling the Telluride Times in April 2025, “It's just such a beautiful openness that he has in those moments that you rarely see from Neil. I wanted to highlight Neil’s authenticity, openness and vulnerability as a person, musician, and performer."

When Daryl first directed the now-80-year-old in the 2018 Netflix film Paradox, Neil told The Independent of his wife, "I didn’t worry about what she was doing because I knew it was going to be good. I don’t know how many people know how brilliant she is, probably more of them are concerned about what she looks like than what’s going on in her mind.”

See more of what Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette got right—and what it made up—about JFK Jr.'s relationship with Daryl and much more: