Elisabeth Moss is set to portray one of the most mysterious members of America’s iconic political family, the Kennedys.
The Handmaid’s Tale star, 35, will bring to life the late Rosemary Kennedy, who underwent a lobotomy at the age of 23, in new film A Letter From Rosemary Kennedy.
Rosemary was one year younger than her brother President John F. Kennedy, and the third child of Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald’s nine children.
Director Ritesh Batra told The Hollywood Reporter in a statement, “The movies about the Kennedy family are deservedly stormy affairs, but here’s a story about the storms within all of us. This is why I am excited to tell this story and to collaborate with Elisabeth, a fabulously talented actor.
Born in 1918, Rosemary was mentally impaired and struggled to fit in with her highly ambitious family.
Her nephew, Timothy Shriver, spoke to PEOPLE in 2014 and said, “The shame of her disability was our family secret.”
Shriver wrote about Rosemary in his book Fully Alive. “She grew up in a time where there was enormous shame surrounding children with special needs,” he said. Shriver is the son of Rosemary’s sister, Eunice Shriver. “People didn’t want to admit it.”
Rosemary struggled with rages and ran away in the middle of the night. At 18, she was still at the fourth-grade level while her other siblings were advancing in academia and politics.
When she was 23, her father scheduled a lobotomy without telling his wife. It had disastrous consequences as the beautiful Kennedy sister was left with the mental capacity of a toddler.
After the lobotomy, the Kennedy patriarch sent Rosemary to live at Saint Coletta’s, a Catholic facility for the mentally disabled in Jefferson, Wisconsin, where she lived for six decades.
She died there in 2005 at age 86. Her father never visited her again, and her siblings rarely spoke of her.
“I don’t know how other than just from sheer devastation he could allow her to disappear so much from his life,” Shriver said at the time. “He had to be destroyed by it. That’s the only way I can explain it. It’s an incredibly heartbreaking story of a dad trying to help his daughter and hurting her. What could be worse?”