People
Grace Kelly, Princess Monaco (Grace Patricia Kelly; 12 November 1929 – 14 September 1982)
In a film career that lasted barely five years, Kelly worked with some of the most prominent leading men of the era, including Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Ray Milland, James Stewart, Bing Crosby, William Holden, Cary Grant, Alec Guinness, and Frank Sinatra.
And along the way, she became one of Alfred Hitchcock's favorite leading ladies and one of the twentieth century's most enduring style icons, lending her name, unofficially but permanently, to one of fashion's most famous handbags.
Biography
Grace Patricia Kelly was born in Philadelphia on 12 November 1929, the daughter of John B. Kelly Sr., a self-made construction magnate and former Olympic rowing champion, and Margaret Majer Kelly, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Her father viewed acting, her chosen ambition, with real disdain, once describing it as barely a step above streetwalking. Her uncle, the playwright George Kelly, had already won a Pulitzer Prize, and it was his own play, The Torch Bearers (1923), that gave Grace her stage debut in 1949.
Grace graduated from Philadelphia's Stevens School in 1947; her senior yearbook Her graduation yearbook listed her favorite actress as Ingrid Bergman, her favorite actor as Joseph Cotten, and predicted she would become "a famous star of stage and screen."
She modeled to fund her studies at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, appearing in advertisements for Old Gold cigarettes and on the covers of Cosmopolitan and Redbook. At her father's insistence, she lived at the Barbizon Hotel for Women in Manhattan, and she later wrote that she had "wonderful memories of the three years I spent at the Barbizon."
At 19, her graduation performance was as Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story. Her uncle would continue to advise and mentor Kelly throughout her acting career.
Broadway proved difficult. One of her early directors, Don Richardson, later said she would never have made it in theater at all, possessing, in his words, great looks and style but no vocal power. Grace's film debut came instead, a small role as a "cool wife" in Fourteen Hours (1951), shot in just two days.
In 1951, Hollywood producer Stanley Kramer offered Grace Kelly a role co-starring opposite Gary Cooper in Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952), a Western filmed in Columbia, California. She was cast as a "young Quaker bride", and wore a "suitably demure vaguely Victorian dress", alongside Cooper, who was 28 years her senior. The movie was released in the summer of 1952. High Noon garnered four Academy Awards, and has since been ranked by some reviewers among the best films of all time.
Grace Kelly signed a seven-year contract with MGM in 1952 under two conditions: first, that one out of every two years, she had time off to work in the theatre; and second, that she be able to live in New York City.
In November 1952, Kelly and the cast arrived in Nairobi to begin the production of the film Mogambo (1953). The male lead was Clark Gable.
Kelly later told Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper, "Mogambo had three things that interested me: John Ford, Clark Gable, and a trip to Africa, with expenses paid. If Mogambo had been made in Arizona, I wouldn't have done it."
The film left Grace Kelly heart broken, but brought her a Golden Globe and her first Academy Award nomination.
Soon afterwards, she met another man, the Russian Born American fashion designer Oleg Cassini. Cassini was fascinated by Kelly after seeing her in her movie Mogambo (1953).
Cassini sent red roses to Grace Kelly day after day, signed only "the friendly florist," before finally identifying himself. But the courtship did not last. Kelly's parents did not think Cassini a suitable beau for their daughter.
In 1954, Grace Kelly made three films that defined her screen persona: two thrillers for Alfred Hitchcock, Dial M for Murder and Rear Window, and The Country Girl, a deliberate departure from her polished image, playing a disillusioned, dowdy wife, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
In Rear Window, Grace Kelly played the role of Lisa Fremont, a wealthy Manhattan socialite and fashion model who "never wore the same dress twice". This marked her first performance as an independent career woman.
Alfred Hitchcock brought her elegance to the foreground by changing her dresses many times, including: "glamorous evening short dresses, a sheer negligee over a sleek nightgown, a full-skirted floral dress, and a casual pair of jeans".
The following year, Grace Kelly went to the French Riviera to reunite with Hitchcock for the film To Catch a Thief, opposite Cary Grant, That would be her last film for Hitchcock.
It was on the set of a Hitchcock production that Grace first became fascinated with a particular Hermès handbag, a large, structured design known as the Sac à Dépêches.
In 1955, invited to represent the American delegation at the Cannes Film Festival, Grace met Prince Rainier III of Monaco during a photoshoot arranged for a magazine feature. Rainier, who needed to marry and produce an heir or risk Monaco reverting to French control, had described his ideal bride as someone he could picture "with long hair floating in the wind, the color of autumn leaves."
In 1956, Grace Kelly made the film The Swan, opposite Alec Guinness and Louis Jourdan, in which she portrayed Princess Alexandra.
Grace Kelly's final film was the musical film High Society, a re-make of MGM's The Philadelphia Story (1940). She portrayed Tracy Lord again (as she did on stage in The Philadelphia Story when she was 19), a woman leaving a socially prominent man to remarry her former husband, just as Kelly herself was preparing to leave acting behind entirely to marry a prince in real life.
After a year-long courtship, Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier married at Monaco's Cathedral of Saint Nicholas on 19 April 1956, in a ceremony the press dubbed "the Wedding of the Century." Her gown, designed by the MGM costumer Helen Rose from twenty-five yards of silk peau de soie and antique Brussels lace, remains one of the most referenced bridal dresses in history, its influence still cited decades later, including in the wedding gown Kate Middleton wore to marry Prince William.
That same year, photographed shielding a visible pregnancy behind her favorite Hermès bag, Grace Kelly unintentionally gave the design its permanent name: Hermès rechristened it the Kelly bag, and it has carried her name ever since.
Grace had three children with Rainier: Princess Caroline, born 1957; Prince Albert, born 1958; and Princess Stéphanie, born 1965.
She never returned to film acting, though Alfred Hitchcock reportedly tried for years to draw her back for Marnie; some accounts suggest she was tempted, but that Rainier ultimately discouraged it.
Princess Grace and her husband Prince Rainier with their three childrenAs Princess of Monaco, Grace built a substantial philanthropic legacy, founding the Princess Grace Foundation-USA in 1964 to support emerging artists, and leading the children's rights organization AMADE Mondiale in partnership with UNICEF and UNESCO. Her final professional credit was narrating the 1977 documentary The Children of Theatre Street.
On 13 September 1982, driving her Rover P6 with seventeen-year-old Stéphanie in the passenger seat along the steep, winding Moyenne Corniche road above Monaco, Grace suffered a stroke and lost control of the car, which plunged down a cliffside embankment.
Stéphanie survived with a fractured vertebra. Grace, gravely injured, never regained consciousness, and was taken off life support the following day. She died on 14 September 1982, at fifty-two.
The precise circumstances of the crash, including lingering, unresolved questions about who was actually driving, have never been fully settled, and remain, more than forty years on, one of Hollywood's enduring unanswered stories.
Princess Grace's funeral was held at the Cathedral of Our Lady Immaculate in Monaco-Ville, on 18 September 1982. Over 400 people attended, including Cary Grant, Nancy Reagan, Danielle Mitterrand, Empress Farah of Iran, and Diana, Princess of Wales.
After a Requiem Mass, she was buried in the Grimaldi family vault of the Cathedral, the same church where she had married Rainier twenty-six years earlier, and where Rainier himself would be laid to rest beside her more than two decades later.
