Jessica Chastain buys gorgeous Manhattan classic where Leonard Bernstein raised family while writing 'West Side Story'

Jessica Chastain buys gorgeous Manhattan classic where Leonard Bernstein raised family while writing 'West Side Story'
Chastain and her boyfriend at the 2013 Oscars.
Chastain and her boyfriend at the 2013 Oscars.

Jessica Chastain could hardly seem more charmed.

She's a redheaded bombshell who effortlessly radiates Old Hollywood — the gutsy kind embodied by, say, Lauren Bacall or Katharine Hepburn — even as she wins praise as one of the modern generation's finest actresses. Her paramour is an Italian count (!) and a high-fashion executive who worked at Armani. And she's a vegan animal-rights activist who isn't afraid to speak her mind. "I think there is a huge problem in American cinema: stories about women aren’t nurtured or celebrated or brought to the screen as often as stories about men," she told the Telegraph late last year, months before Patricia Arquette's news-making Oscar speech on wage disparity. "There’s a real inequality, and it can’t be justified."

Now she and Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo have a picture-perfect home to match.

They just bought a true Manhattan classic: a duplex at the Osborne, kitty-corner from Carnegie Hall on West 57th Street. Conductor Leonard Bernstein and his family lived in the unit from 1952 until 1961, and Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim wrote their musical "West Side Story" in Bernstein's studio at the Osborne. Cabaret legend Bobby Short lived there for about a decade too. "I used to hear him play all the time," the neighbor directly upstairs, Davida Deutsch, told the Real Deal blog in 2009. “That part was fantastic.”

Chastain, a graduate of the Juilliard School, settled on the co-op after a yearlong search partly because of its musical-theater history, sources told the New York Post. She bought it from composer Adam Guettel, whose maternal grandfather was Richard Rodgers (of Rodgers and Hammerstein) and whose mother, composer Mary Rodgers Guettel, was Juilliard's chairman during Chastain's tenure.

The duplex was listed at $5,250,000; Chastain paid $5.1 million, said the Post, which first reported the purchase.

Click here or on a photo to see the Manhattan classic just purchased by Jessica Chastain.

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