Grace Kelly

The Kellys of East Falls were rich, Catholic and relentlessly athletic. Grace's father, John B. Kelly Sr., came out of an Irish immigrant family, won three Olympic gold medals in sculling and built a Philadelphia brickwork fortune, and he thought acting a slim cut above streetwalking. Her uncle George had a Pulitzer for drama, and it was his influence that got her into the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York after low mathematics scores kept her out of Bennington. Her parents disapproved and her father most of all. She modeled to pay her way, doing commercials for bug spray and cigarettes, and worked constantly in live television, close to 60 programs before Hollywood took her seriously.

Eleven films in five years. High Noon put her opposite Gary Cooper in 1952. On March 30, 1955 she took the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Country Girl over Judy Garland in A Star Is Born — Groucho Marx wired Garland that it was the biggest robbery since Brink's, and people argue about it still. Then three for Hitchcock: Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief. He cast blondes because he thought audiences suspected them least, and what he wanted from her was the distance between the composure and whatever cracked it.

She led the U.S. delegation to Cannes in April 1955, was steered into a photo session at the palace, and met Rainier III there on May 6. They married 11 months later, on April 18 and 19, 1956, a civil ceremony then a cathedral Mass watched by some 30 million people on television. She was 26, and she never made another film. It was not for want of trying. In March 1962 Hitchcock announced she would come out of retirement for Marnie, and she had accepted. Monégasque opinion turned against their princess playing a kleptomaniac, the palace would not fight it, and by June she had withdrawn. The trade was real: a career at its peak for a constitutional job with 142 titles and no way out. What she said about how content she was shifted with the decade.

In Monaco she took on work, not decoration: president of the Red Cross of Monaco, the Princess Grace Foundation in 1964 for local artisans, AMADE Mondiale for children's welfare prompted by the plight of Vietnamese children in 1963, and in 1975 the academy that became the Monte Carlo ballet school. On September 13, 1982, driving down from the family's farm at Roc Agel with her 17-year-old daughter Stéphanie beside her, she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, lost the road and went 100 feet down the mountainside. She died the next night. Stéphanie survived with a fractured vertebra. The rumor that she had been at the wheel spread anyway, she denied it in 1989, and the record has never supported it.

Grace Kelly's life against the full span of the corpus.

• High Noon film
  The Quaker bride opposite Gary Cooper — the part that made her 1952
• Dial M for Murder film
  First of the three for Hitchcock, shot in 3D 1954
• Rear Window film
  Lisa Fremont, opposite James Stewart 1954
• The Country Girl film
  The Academy Award for Best Actress 1954
• To Catch a Thief film
  With Cary Grant on the Riviera she would soon live on 1955
• High Society film
  Her last film, released two months after the wedding 1956

• 1949 aged ~20 Graduates from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts Admitted on her uncle George Kelly's influence after the semester quota was full.
• 1951 aged ~22 Film debut in Fourteen Hours A small part. Critics did not notice, and she went back to live television.
• 1952 aged ~23 High Noon opens Hitchcock called the performance rather mousey. He hired her anyway.
• March 30, 1955 aged 25 Wins the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Country Girl Judy Garland, waiting with television cameras in her hospital room, lost.
• May 6, 1955 aged 25 Meets Rainier III at the palace in Monaco She had led the U.S. delegation to Cannes the month before.
• April 19, 1956 aged 26 Marries Rainier at Saint Nicholas Cathedral in Monaco The civil ceremony was the day before. Roughly 30 million watched on television.
• March 20, 1962 aged 32 Announces she will return to film for Hitchcock's Marnie She withdrew in June after opposition in Monaco to a princess playing a kleptomaniac.
• 1964 aged ~35 Founds the Princess Grace Foundation AMADE Mondiale, her children's organization, had come the year before.
• September 14, 1982 aged 52 Dies in Monaco a day after the crash on the Roc Agel road A second hemorrhage at the hospital left no chance of recovery.

• Alfred Hitchcock 1899–1980
  Director whose Hollywood films and television presence defined modern suspense and influenced generations of American filmmakers. directed by
• James Stewart 1908–1997
  The everyman of American movies, and a combat bomber pilot who rarely mentioned it. co-star
• Cary Grant 1904–1986
  The definitive Hollywood leading man, and one of the first stars to break the studio contract system. co-star
• Judy Garland 1922–1969
  Actress and singer best known for The Wizard of Oz, whose life and talent became emblematic of Hollywood. defeated
• Elizabeth Taylor 1932–2011
  Two-time Academy Award winner who turned the largest fame in the world into the first mass-audience campaign against AIDS. rival