“Girls” star Zosia Mamet has lifted the shoebox lid on a Netflix-worthy mystery surrounding the enormous “gumball”-sized canary diamond ring she now wears on her wedding finger—revealing how the dazzling bauble was secreted away in a broom closet by her late grandmother, who only shared its existence when she was on her deathbed.
The ring, which now adorns Mamet’s left ring finger, along with the wedding band she exchanged with her husband, Evan Jonigkeit, at their 2016 ceremony, remains shrouded in secrecy to this day, although the actress says that hasn’t stopped her from forming a close connection with the jewel.
Speaking to The New York Times, the 37-year-old recalled how the ring was first unearthed, revealing that even her mother, actress Lindsay Crouse, had been completely unaware of its existence until her own mom, Anna Erskine Crouse, asked her to find it, just days before she died in Manhattan at the age of 97.
“My mom was sitting up with [my grandmother] one night, and she was, at this point, just in and out of lucidity,” Mamet revealed. “She woke up in the middle of the night and grabbed my mom and was like, ‘Where’s my canary diamond?'”
Mamet noted that nobody in her family had ever seen her grandmother wearing a canary diamond. So, they asked Lucy, a woman who had been working for her grandma for 40 years—and who immediately knew of the gem she was referring to.
“Lucy went into the broom closet and pulled down a shoebox. And in this shoebox that had crumpled newspaper in it was this ring, loose,” the “Girls” actress explained.
But while the family had managed to track down the jewel, its origins remained far more elusive, with Mamet noting that her grandmother had been married twice in her life—but neither of her spouses were still alive at the time to shed some light on the story behind the diamond.
Experts have told Mamet and her relatives that they believe the ring is “pretty old,” dating back as far as the 1910s, largely because of a very unique design detail that is rarely seen in stones used in the modern era.
“It also has this crazy thing that is very rare now; because they don’t really teach how to do this anymore because it’s so hard to do without shattering the stone,” she shared.
“If you look directly down into it, there’s a tiny hole in the very bottom of the diamond where it turns into a little point, which they used to do because when light hits it, it makes it sparkle more.”
Ultimately, Mamet’s mother gave the ring to Evan to give to the actress, who revealed that it ended up replacing the ring he had given her when he proposed.
“She gave it to him, and he was like, ‘Do you want this to be just … we’ll just say that this was your engagement ring?’ And I was like, ‘I do,'” she revealed.
Mamet—whose father is famed playwright David Mamet—noted that she believes the ring gives her “a lot of power,” noting that she is a “big believer” in jewelry holding on to the feelings and achievements of its past owners, both good and bad.
When it came to her grandmother, the actress described her as a “complicated person” who had “lived through a lot of pain,” but who always maintained a sense of power and independence that Mamet now believes lives on in her ring.
Despite her “tricky” side, Mamet said that she continues to “live in awe” of her grandmother, who was credited with founding the budget-friendly Broadway ticketing service, TKTS, which was created to offer more affordable entry into the world of theater.
When she died, Anna was living in a three-bedroom apartment in the Lenox Hill neighborhood of Manhattan—a property that was last sold for $5.5 million in 2014, one year after her death.
Mamet did not reveal whether this property was the location of the broom closet in which her mother discovered the ring.
However, the actress has herself largely turned away from city living, selling the Upper West Side apartment she shared with Jonigkeit for $1.2 million in 2022, three years after they listed it for $1.3 million.
The couple then focused their energies on renovating a picturesque cabin in the Hudson Valley, which they purchased in 2014 as a fixer-upper project.
“It was a rugged sort of camping experience,” Jonigkeit said of the renovation in a 2019 interview with People. “We were sleeping on plywood subfloors. We didn’t have a refrigerator. We didn’t have electricity for a period.”
Records indicate the couple sold that property in 2022 for the sky high price of $1.4 million—almost triple what they had paid for it eight years earlier.