Considered the prettiest of the Kennedy family’s five sisters, Patricia Kennedy Lawford was no stranger to attention even as a child and a young woman.
With poise and an aristocratic bearing, she campaigned for three of her brothers–John, Robert and Edward–and also struck out on her own, marrying Hollywood actor Peter Lawford in a wedding that drew a crowd of thousands to the church.
Mrs. Lawford, one of the fabled Kennedy clan’s four surviving children, died of complications from pneumonia Sunday at her home in New York. She was 82.
She was “irreplaceable,” Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) said in a statement announcing her death.
“Everyone who knew Pat adored her,” said Kennedy, who was at his sister’s side when she died, along with Mrs. Lawford’s two sisters, Eunice Shriver and Jean Kennedy Smith, and her three daughters, Sydney, Robin, and Victoria.
Mrs. Lawford founded the National Committee for the Literary Arts at Lincoln Center in the early 1980s, and also had worked with the John F. Kennedy Library and the National Center on Addiction in New York City.
Mrs. Lawford brought Hollywood glamor to the Kennedys with her 1954 wedding to a movie star. The marriage was among the early intertwinings of Hollywood and politics, and formed a link between the Kennedys and Lawford’s buddies in the Rat Pack, including Frank Sinatra.
Mrs. Lawford worked on her brother’s presidential campaign in 1960, and on the Senate and presidential campaigns of Robert and Edward. When Robert Kennedy was shot while campaigning in 1968, she was at his side in the hospital when he died.
In 1966, she became the first of the Kennedy children to divorce. Mrs. Lawford then moved to New York City and turned to philanthropic work.
