Jackie Onassis

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Jackie Onassis was best known as the wife of US President John F Kennedy. Her youth and style brought an aura of glamour to the White House, and Kennedy's assassination in 1963 left her the nation's most tragic widow. Five years later she married Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.

Daughter of Jack Bouvier (a stockbroker of French ancestry) and Janet lee (whose father was a wealthy Irish-American financier), she attended Vassar and George Washington University, then took a job as a photographer for a Washington newspaper. Her marriage to Kennedy in 1953 was the social event of the year. Regarded as the epitome of good taste, her classic clothes and carefully groomed look were copied by women throughout the nation when she became the First Lady.

After the death of Onassis she commuted between New York - where she worked as commissioning editor with the book publisher Doubleday - and her estate on Martha's Vineyard. In 1994 she died of lymphatic cancer in her Fifth Avenue apartment, surrounded by family and friends.