Grace Kelly

Grace Kelly: Eleven Films, Then a Principality

Something over thirty million people watched the wedding on television in April 1956 — an audience that led one account to call it the first modern event to generate media overkill. The bride was twenty-six. She had been making films for five years, had won an Academy Award the year before, and was retiring. It is one of the strangest career shapes in the history of American cinema: a complete body of work assembled in roughly sixty months, then closed permanently in favour of a job in a small Mediterranean principality.

East Falls

Grace Patricia Kelly was born on 12 November 1929 in Philadelphia, into a wealthy and unusually competitive Irish Catholic household. Her father, John B. Kelly Sr., the son of Irish immigrants, won three Olympic gold medals for sculling and built a large brickwork contracting business; he ran for mayor of Philadelphia in 1935 and lost by the closest margin in the city's history. Her mother, Margaret Majer, taught physical education at the University of Pennsylvania and was the first woman to coach women's athletics there.

The theatrical instinct came from the paternal side. Her uncle Walter C. Kelly was a vaudeville star; her uncle George Kelly was a Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist who mentored her throughout her career. She was educated at Ravenhill Academy and the Stevens School in Chestnut Hill, graduating in May 1947, and was turned down by Bennington College on the strength of her mathematics scores.

The Academy and the Barbizon

She was admitted instead to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, graduating in 1949, and lived at the Barbizon Hotel for Women at her father's insistence. She modelled — Walter Thornton, then John Robert Powers, with commercials for bug spray and cigarettes — and worked constantly in live television, appearing in nearly sixty programmes. She made her Broadway debut in Strindberg's *The Father*, opposite Raymond Massey.

Henry Hathaway, impressed by her stage work, gave her a small part in *Fourteen Hours* (1951). Then came *High Noon* (1952) as Gary Cooper's young Quaker bride — a performance Alfred Hitchcock, watching later, judged "rather mousey" and short on animation — and *Mogambo* (1953), taken over from Gene Tierney, which brought a Golden Globe and her first Academy Award nomination.

Hitchcock's Blonde

Between 1954 and 1955 Hitchcock made three films with her and in the process defined a type that outlived them both. *Dial M for Murder* came first; he spent the shoot talking to her about the next one. "All through the making of *Dial M for Murder*," she recalled, "he sat and talked to me about *Rear Window* all the time." As Lisa Fremont in *Rear Window* (1954) — a Manhattan socialite and fashion model who turns out to be the most competent person in the story — she gave the performance that fixed her image. *To Catch a Thief* (1955) put her opposite Cary Grant on the Riviera. Grant, comparing her to his other leading women, was unequivocal: "I much preferred Grace. She had serenity."

The Country Girl

The Oscar came for something else entirely. In *The Country Girl* (1954) she played the worn, unglamorous wife of an alcoholic singer, opposite Bing Crosby, and won Best Actress. "The thrill of this moment keeps me from saying what I really feel," she said from the podium. She made *The Bridges at Toko-Ri* (1954), *The Swan* (1956) and, last, *High Society* (1956), which *Variety* thought possibly her most relaxed work. Then she stopped.

A Working Princess

She had met Prince Rainier III on 6 May 1955, having led the American delegation to the Cannes Film Festival and been invited to a photographic session at his palace. They married after a year's courtship: a sixteen-minute civil ceremony in the palace throne room on 18 April 1956, required by the Napoleonic Code, and a religious ceremony at Saint Nicholas Cathedral the following day. Her dress, designed by MGM's Helen Rose, took three dozen dressmakers six weeks. Three children followed — Caroline in 1957, Albert in 1958, Stéphanie in 1965.

The princess job was not decorative. She was president of the Red Cross of Monaco. In 1963, after seeing conditions among Vietnamese children, she founded AMADE Mondiale, which went on to hold consultative status with UNICEF and UNESCO. She established the Princess Grace Foundation in 1964 to support local artisans and the Princess Grace Academy in 1975, now the resident school of the Monte Carlo Ballet. She was a patron of Josephine Baker's orphanage, an honorary member of La Leche League who addressed three thousand parents at its 1971 Chicago conference, and the author, with Gwen Robyns, of *My Book of Flowers* (1980). She kept dual citizenship and bought back the family homestead in County Mayo in 1976.

The Road from Roc Agel

On 13 September 1982, driving down from the family's country house at Roc Agel with Stéphanie beside her, she suffered a mild cerebral haemorrhage, lost control of her Rover, and went a hundred feet down the mountainside. A second, more severe haemorrhage followed in hospital. She was declared brain dead, and life support was withdrawn on 14 September; she was fifty-two. The palace's initial claim of brake failure was retracted a week later, after police investigators and Rover engineers found no evidence for it. Four hundred people attended the funeral, among them Cary Grant, Nancy Reagan, and Diana, Princess of Wales. Stéphanie, injured in the crash, could not.

Why Grace Is Called a Genius

The case for Kelly is a case about a specific technical faculty, not about intellect, and it is complicated by how little film there is to examine. What she could do — better than almost anyone of her generation — was play the gap between surface and interior. Her characters hold still; the audience is made to read appetite, amusement, judgement and nerve behind a composed face that gives almost nothing away deliberately. That is economy of expression, one of the harder disciplines on camera, and it is why Hitchcock built three films around her. It was also learned rather than innate: he found her "rather mousey" in *High Noon*, two years before *Rear Window*. Grant's word for the effect was "serenity," which undersells the control it took.

The counter-case is substantial. Eleven films is a sliver of a career, and Kelly's cultural persistence plainly owes as much to other things — to Hitchcock's lighting and framing, to Edith Head and Helen Rose, to the white gloves that got her on the cover of *Time*, to the Hermès bag that took her name, to a royal wedding watched by thirty million people. Some of what reads today as her presence is couture and camera position. If the word genius belongs anywhere in her life it may belong to the second career rather than the first: a former actress who arrived in a foreign principality at twenty-six and, within a decade, had founded an international children's charity that earned consultative status at UNICEF and UNESCO, a national arts foundation, and eventually a ballet academy. That is institutional imagination, and unlike the films it kept producing after she stopped.

Legacy

Kelly received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 and entered the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame the same year; the American Film Institute ranked her thirteenth among the greatest female stars of classic American cinema in 1999. The Victoria and Albert Museum mounted a retrospective of her wardrobe in 2010, the Philadelphia Museum of Art displayed her wedding dress in 2006. Prince Albert established the Princess Grace Awards for emerging film, theatre and dance artists in 1984. There is a rose garden in Fontvieille, a hybrid tea rose bearing her title, an Irish library of nine thousand volumes founded by her husband, and, since 2003, a Princess Grace Challenge Cup at Henley Royal Regatta — the one memorial her father, three times an Olympic sculling champion, would have understood immediately.

Achievements

• Educated at American Academy of Dramatic Arts and Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre
• Worked as film actor, model and television actor