Dree Hemingway, the Love Story actress playing women who can answer back

Dree Hemingway

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	December 4, 1987 Sun Valley, Idaho, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	The Disaster Artist, While We're Young, Starlet
Awards	Independent Spirit (shared)

While she was making Love Story, Dree Hemingway wrote a letter to the woman she was playing. She called it a love note: admiration for Daryl Hannah as an actress and as a woman, no request to meet, no expectation of a reply. None came. A few weeks after Ryan Murphy’s series began streaming, Hannah answered in public instead, with a guest essay in The New York Times saying the character bore no remotely accurate resemblance to her life, her conduct or her relationship with John F. Kennedy Jr.

It was an awkward place for an actress whose whole working life has been a study in being looked at. She was a runway model before she was anything else. Her breakthrough was a young adult-film performer in the San Fernando Valley. Her widest audience came playing a woman whose love life the tabloids photographed for years. And her newest credit is as a producer on a film about the last, worst years of the great-grandfather whose surname opens every door for her and explains nothing about what she does once she is through it.

Dree Louise Crisman Hemingway was the elder daughter of Mariel Hemingway, Oscar-nominated for Woody Allen’s Manhattan, and Stephen Crisman, and her birth on December 4, 1987, in Sun Valley, Idaho, put her a few miles from the Ketchum house where Ernest Hemingway spent his final years. She grew up in Ketchum and went to Ernest Hemingway Elementary School. Her aunt, the model and actress Margaux Hemingway, died when Dree was eight. Her younger sister is the artist Langley Fox. The family later moved to Westlake Village, in California, where she spent two and a half years at Oaks Christian High School before leaving to model full time; at 15 she was presented at the Bal des débutantes in Paris.

Fashion came quickly. She made her runway debut for Givenchy in Paris in March 2009, walked Calvin Klein’s resort show in New York and opened Topshop’s London show that September. Within a year she was the face of Gianfranco Ferré and of a Salvatore Ferragamo fragrance, and campaigns followed for Gucci, Valentino and Chanel, along with covers for several national editions of Vogue. In 2016 she became the Playmate of the March issue of Playboy, the first in the magazine’s history without nudity, following her mother as a second-generation Playboy model.

Sean Baker knew her only from fashion pages when he cast her in Starlet. She played Jane, an adult-film performer who buys a thermos at a yard sale from an 85-year-old widow, Besedka Johnson, and finds a pile of cash inside. To prepare, she spent time with performers from the industry. The film opened at South by Southwest in March 2012, went on to the main competition at Locarno, and Manohla Dargis called it “a thrillingly, unexpectedly good American movie” in The New York Times. In February 2013 the ensemble shared the Robert Altman Award at the Independent Spirit Awards. Johnson, in her only screen role, died a year after the release. Hemingway still says she owes “my whole entire career” to Baker, who later took the Palme d’Or and the Oscars with Anora.

What followed was a working actor’s decade in American independent film. She had small parts in Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip and Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young, and leads in Logan Sandler’s Live Cargo, opposite LaKeith Stanfield in the Tribeca competition, and Nadia Litz’s The People Garden, with Pamela Anderson. Michelle Morgan’s It Happened in L.A. took her to Sundance, Russell Harbaugh’s Love After Love back to Tribeca, and Nicol Paone’s The Kill Room put her on screen with Uma Thurman and Samuel L. Jackson. She also appears in Barbara Kopple’s Running from Crazy, the documentary in which her mother walks through the family’s history of depression, addiction and suicide.

The honest account is that for more than a decade Starlet remained the reference point, and the work that came after rarely reached people outside festival audiences. Love Story changed the scale and complicated the reception. Her Hannah is the girlfriend the series needs out of the way before Carolyn Bessette arrives, and Vulture described the portrayal as bordering on caricature. Hannah denied the cocaine use and the behaviour the show gave her. Hemingway did not defend the script. “It’s a really sensitive thing to play somebody, a real person,” she told Entertainment Tonight, adding that she loved Hannah. She has explained that she deliberately avoided Hannah’s films and studied only interviews with a dialect coach, because she was not trying to play the actress. The choices Hannah objected to were written by Murphy and Connor Hines; the face attached to them is Hemingway’s, and her deference, generous as it is, does not settle what a dramatization owes the living person at its centre.

The series itself landed hard. Love Story premiered on February 12, 2026, on FX and Hulu, with Disney+ carrying it internationally, and became the network’s most-watched limited series on streaming; Hannah appears in its first three episodes. In August she fronted JW Anderson’s Twisted Denim campaign with her partner, Nick Delli Santi, photographed together for the first time by Sam Khoury. She has a young daughter.

The more personal project was announced in November 2025. Hemingway is an executive producer of The Hemingway Files, which Jessica M. Thompson is set to direct from a script by Cory Todd Hughes and Adrian Speckert, with Jeremy Bolt producing. It follows the writer’s last years, as his friends A.E. Hotchner and Duke MacMullen try to steady him through his mental decline, a strained relationship with his trans daughter Gloria and his growing conviction that the FBI was watching him. Her stated aim is to see him “not as an icon, but as a father, a friend, and a man trying to hold on to himself.” She has said there is no role in it for her.

Her next screen job goes in the opposite direction from the Kennedy glamour. In October 2026 she was cast with Trine Dyrholm, of The Celebration, and Christian Slater in Incidents of Intimacy, the first feature by the Danish artist Jesper Just and the second film in Zentropa’s Dogma25 collection, which revives the 1995 Dogme manifesto with a new set of rules on how films may be made. Nordisk Film will distribute it, followed by Netflix in the Nordic countries. After a year spent answering for a real woman’s life, Hemingway’s next character is one nobody can write in to correct.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, actresses, Sean Baker, Dree Hemingway, Love Story, Daryl Hannah

Related People

Anne Hathaway

Laura Dern

Rooney Mara

Allison Janney

Rosemarie DeWitt

Jean Smart