Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier marry

American actress Grace Kelly marries Prince Rainier of Monaco in a spectacular ceremony on this day in 1956.

Kelly, the daughter of a former model and a wealthy industrialist, began acting as a child. After high school, she attended the American Academy for Dramatic Arts in New York. While she auditioned for Broadway plays, she supported herself by modeling and appearing in TV commercials. In 1949, Kelly debuted on Broadway in The Father by August Strindberg. Two years later, she landed her first Hollywood bit part, in Fourteen Hours. Her big break came in 1952, when she starred as Gary Cooper’s wife in High Noon. Her performance in The Country Girl,as the long-suffering wife of an alcoholic songwriter played by Bing Crosby, won her an Oscar in 1954. The same year, she played opposite Jimmy Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

While filming another Hitchcock movie, To Catch a Thief (1955), in the French Riviera, Kelly met Prince Rainier of Monaco. It wasn’t love at first sight for Kelly, but the prince initiated a long correspondence, which led to their marriage in 1956. Afterward, she became Princess Grace of Monaco and retired from acting. She had three children and occasionally narrated documentaries. Kelly died tragically at the age of 52 when her car plunged off a mountain road by the Cote D’Azur in September 1982.

Lonely and desperate, how Grace Kelly tried to escape her cruel sham of a fairytale marriage

Late on a January evening in 1962, Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco is drinking heavily in her 235-room pink  palace overlooking the Mediterranean.

When she gave up her Hollywood career to marry Prince Rainier – the ruler of the tiny tax haven –   Grace Kelly, as she then was, believed that she had found the perfect husband.

Six years later, however – after bearing him an heir, Albert, and  an elder daughter, Caroline – she  is so disillusioned she has decided she will flee back home to America, where she has been offered $1 million to star in Marnie, a new Alfred Hitchcock thriller.

The fee – $7.6 million in today’s terms – is staggering.

But it’s not the money that has attracted her, she confides to her husband’s chaplain and closest adviser, Father Francis Tucker, who has joined her in the pink  palace for a glass of whisky. Rainier’s tyrannical rules and explosive temper have worn her out, the beautiful  32-year-old tells the elderly priest.

What will happen, she asks him, if she accepts the Hitchcock role and seeks a divorce?

‘Your children will suffer most,’ replies Tucker. ‘They are heirs to a European throne. You’ll be lucky to see them again. I suppose the world will also hang its head in disappointment.’

The shock scene is taken from the script of Grace Of Monaco, a new film in which Nicole Kidman portrays Grace as the lonely and desperate  victim of an abusive husband.

The project, which also stars Tim Roth as Rainier and Frank Langella  as Father Tucker, was recently denounced by Grace’s son, Prince Albert, and his sisters Caroline and Stephanie, as ‘needlessly glamourised’ and riddled with ‘major historical inaccuracies and a series of purely fictional scenes’.

But the 106-page script, which has been seen exclusively by The Mail on Sunday and is registered with the Hollywood Writers’ Guild, is based on hundreds of interviews biographers have conducted over many years with  palace insiders and other first-hand sources.

The family’s real fear, it seems, may be that the film has broken a long-standing Hollywood taboo about bringing the truth about  the marriage to the big screen – and it may set the stage for more embarrassing projects.

While Rainier sleeps in a separate room from Grace in the script, and is said  to be constantly ‘busy’ during the daytime, the production glosses over accusations that he was unfaithful.

‘This film really is a very slim slice of Grace’s life and it is nowhere near as negative as it could be,’ Wendy Leigh, a biographer of the princess, said last night.

ACCORDING  to her 2007 book, True Grace, the suave, cigar-smoking prince began cheating on Grace soon after she became pregnant during their honeymoon. Within months, he had taken at least three mistresses.

‘I think the family were hoping  to stop the film and that this is  their warning shot to producers who might want to do the full story about Rainier’s promiscuity and cruelty,’ Ms Leigh said.

‘Grace was humiliated and she was extremely unhappy. She was surrounded by decadence and Rainier’s disreputable friends.’

Blonde, blue-eyed and with a sultry sex appeal that casting directors compared to Marlene Dietrich, Grace herself was hardly an innocent.

Grace Kelly, pictured left in 1955, is being played Nicole Kidman in a new film about her, Grace of Monaco

Princess Grace of Monaco, actress Grace Kelly, with her family Prince Rainier, Princess Caroline and Prince Albert

The daughter of a socially ambitious Philadelphia brickworks owner, she became infatuated with several of her leading men.

While shooting the Hitchcock thriller Dial M For Murder in 1954, she scandalised Hollywood by conducting an affair with her married co-star, Ray Milland. She met Rainier during a photoshoot in 1955 at his palace. Six years her senior, he was seeking a wife with the help of a crony, the Greek shipping baron Aristotle Onassis, played in the film by Robert Lindsay.

His quest was a matter of urgency. If he failed to conceive a legitimate heir, Monaco would become a French protectorate under the terms of a 1918 treaty.

After she submitted to an examination to prove she was capable of bearing children, he presented her with a 12-carat diamond engagement ring.  ‘I fell in love with Prince Rainier,’ she confides in the film’s opening scene. ‘What followed was more difficult than I had thought.’

A silver Rolls-Royce delivers Alfred Hitchcock – played by Roger Ashton-Griffiths – to the palace, where he is greeted by Grace’s scheming lady-in-waiting, Madge Tivey-Faucon (Parker Posey).

Madge has been chosen for her job by Rainier – her chief qualification for the role being her willingness to spy on Grace’s every move.

Hitchcock is puzzled that there is no sign of the prince. A palace retainer quietly tells him: ‘He never comes. Far too busy.’

Actress Grace Kelly (later Princess Grace of Monaco) and His Serene Highness Prince Rainier III of Monaco on 19th April 1956.

Speaking little French, Grace is bored and homesick, occupying  herself by preparing pumpkin soup and other American dishes for  Ray, as she calls Rainier in rare moments of tenderness.

The Monaco climate does not agree with her. Her eyes are reddened from conjunctivitis and she suffers from hayfever and insomnia. Hitchcock turns up just as she is composing a secret letter to her mother to confide she is miserable and wants to end the marriage.

Now Hitchcock is giving her the perfect excuse to leave in a matter of weeks. 

‘Universal will pay you one million dollars,’ he says. ‘It’s going to be the role of a lifetime.’

‘Do I look that unhappy, Hitch?’ she asks wearily.   

‘You look tired, Gracie,’ he says.

It isn’t only Rainier’s tantrums and constant absences that have brought her marriage to the point of breakdown. As ‘his’ princess, she must submit totally to his rules which, according to the script, include smiling sweetly at his side and never voicing an opinion.

At a New Year’s Eve party on the  Onassis yacht, he grows red-faced with rage when she engages French President Charles de Gaulle in a debate about the UK-US special relationship. Rainier furiously confronts her when they return home. ‘This is not America, Grace! People don’t just speak their minds.’

‘What did you expect me to say?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know. You used to be an actor. Act,’ he snarls.

Madge, he adds, has informed him of Hitchcock’s visit. ‘She is very loyal,’ he reminds his wife. Pecking a kiss on her forehead, he retires for the night, closing the door to his bedroom behind him.

Some biographers claim Rainier was violent as well as a control freak. During a tennis doubles match, he allegedly aimed a ball straight at Grace’s face. When it hit her, the friend who was his doubles partner defended him, saying he was just ‘desperate to win’. 

The film treads carefully on the issue. He is verbally abusive to Grace, flying into a rage when she shears her long hair into a fashionable bob. He shouts that she did not seek his permission: ‘It looks dreadful. It yells of disrespect.’

When Grace finally plucks up the courage to tell Rainier that she would like to accept Hitchcock’s  million-dollar offer of the leading role in Marnie, he assures her:  ‘I won’t stand in your way.’

But his words ‘don’t ring true’, and when her plans for the movie are leaked to the press – she suspects by palace plotters – the prince’s 30,000 subjects are horrified.

Smashing a glass he is holding to the floor, Rainier tells Grace he has changed his mind in the face of  the  outcry. ‘You’ll have to call Mr  Hitchcock and turn him down,’ he orders. ‘We’ll make a show of how happy you are here.’ ‘That’s not your decision to make,’ she says. ‘I am the prince, and your husband,’ he storms. ‘You will and you must!’

In the end, the role of Marnie went to another Hitchcock protegee, Tippi Hedren.

The film’s most contentious claim  is that Grace eventually sought a divorce from Rainier.

The director, Olivier Dahan, has not identified the script’s precise sources for the claim, but they would appear to include a mysterious book, Grace: A Disenchanted Princess, published under a pseudonym in France in 2004.

It quoted one Rainier relative, Christian de Massy – whose mother, Princess Antoinette, was the prince’s  sister – as recalling that Grace was heartbroken when she was forbidden to do Marnie.

Controversial: British actor Tim Rother plays Grace Kelly's husband, Prince Rainer, in the film

Despondent about life in a ‘golden cage’, she allegedly consulted an American divorce lawyer but, after being advised that she would lose her children, resigned herself to her fate in Monaco.

The royals – who were shown the screenplay when Dahan applied  for permission to shoot in Monaco – claim that to their ‘astonishment’,  their ‘numerous requests for changes’ were ignored.

DAHAN has promised, however, that the film,  which he started to shoot last August in Monaco and Paris, will be released on schedule early next year. ‘I think we have a misunderstanding,’ he said, insisting that he neither needs the royal family’s permission, nor has sought it. ‘We never asked them to endorse anything,’ he stresses.

The new film draws to a close when Grace stumbles on evidence that Antoinette, portrayed by Geraldine Somerville, is conspiring with France to seize control of the  principality in a coup.

As part of this treacherous deal,  de Gaulle has agreed that Christian, who at the time was just 13, will assume the throne.

The Mail on Sunday is withholding the exact details of the suspense-filled denouement to the purported plot – which critics claim involves considerable licence on the film- makers’ part as Antoinette clashed with her brother in the Fifties.

One clue, however: it leads to a reconciliation between Grace and Rainier, and she bears their third and final child, Stephanie.

The screenplay ends with one simple line: ‘Grace Kelly never acted again.’

Worn down by disappointment, she died in a 1982 car crash, apparently after suffering a stroke.

Grace Kelly American actress and princess of Monaco

Grace Kelly, also called (from 1956) Princess Grace of Monaco, French Princesse Grace de Monaco   (born November 12, 1929, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died September 14, 1982, Monte Carlo, Monaco), American actress of films and television, known for her stately beauty and reserve. She starred in 11 motion pictures before abandoning a Hollywood career to marry Rainier III, prince de Monaco, in 1956.

Kelly was born into a wealthy Irish Catholic family in Philadelphia (her uncle was the playwright George Kelly) and was educated in convent and private schools. She then attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City in 1947, working as a photographer’s model to pay her tuition. After several seasons of acting in summer stock, she made her Broadway debut in November 1949 in August Strindberg’s The Father. She appeared in a number of television dramas in the early 1950s. Her first film role, a small one, was in Fourteen Hours (1951), but the next year she appeared as Gary Cooper’s Quaker wife in High Noon and her career began to blossom.

During the height of her Hollywood career, Kelly appeared in such films as Mogambo (1953), opposite Clark Gable, and The Country Girl(1954), a screen version of Clifford Odets’s play, for which she won an Academy Award for best actress as Bing Crosby’s dowdy wife. But perhaps her most memorable roles were in such Alfred Hitchcock films as Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), and To Catch a Thief(1955). Kelly was the perfect Hitchcock heroine, epitomizing what he called “sexual elegance.” After making The Swan (1956) and High Society (1956), she retired from the screen to marry Prince Rainier, becoming princess of Monaco. The couple had three children—Caroline, Albert, and Stéphanie—and Princess Grace was active in charitable and cultural work. She resisted attempts to lure her back into performing, although she lent her narration to one or two documentary films and gave occasional poetry readings, and in 1976 she joined the Board of Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation.

In 1982 Princess Grace died of injuries sustained in an automobile accident. She and her daughter Stéphanie were driving on a winding road at Cap-d’Ail in the Côte d’Azur region of France when Princess Grace suffered a stroke and lost control of the car, which plunged down a 45-foot (14-metre) embankment.

Monaco's Prince Albert II criticises 'inaccurate' Grace Kelly film

Prince Albert II of Monaco has criticised a new Hollywood film about the life of his mother Grace Kelly, describing it as "needlessly glamorised and historically inaccurate."

In the film Kidman, left, plays the young Princess Grace Photo: REX/AFP

The prince, his sisters Princess Caroline and Princess Stephanie, said that "numerous requests for changes" had been ignored and that the latest screenplay "had caused much astonishment".

In a statement, the royal House of Grimaldi described a "series of scenes" in the forthcoming film Grace of Monaco, starring Nicole Kidman and directed Olivier Dahan, as "purely fictional".

"Therefore, the royal family wishes to stress that this film in no way constitutes a biopic," said the palace's statement.

"It recounts one rewritten and needlessly glamorised page in the history of Monaco and its family with both major historical inaccuracies and a series of purely fictional scenes."

The American-born actress was one of the world's most famous film stars when she married Rainier III Prince of Monaco, Albert's father in 1956, becoming Princess Grace of Monaco.

Princess Grace died in a car crash in 1982, at the age of 52, following a stroke while driving her Rover P6 on a winding road above the Mediterranean principality, which is bordered by southern France.

In the film, due for release next year, Kidman, an Oscar-winning actress plays the young Princess Grace in the 1962 crisis when Charles de Gaulle blockaded Monaco, angered by its status as a tax haven for wealthy French people.

The film is said to portray how she supported Prince Rainier during tense diplomatic negotiations that led to a new constitution in Monaco.

In a recent interview with Le Figaro, Kidman insisted that the film was dramatic and creative work that charted Kelly's "path from cinema to royalty".

"This is not a biopic or a fictionalised documentary of Grace Kelly but only a small part of her life where she reveals her great humanity as well as her fears and weaknesses," she said.

Grace Kelly Biography

A highly popular film actress in the 1950s, Grace Kelly starred in movies such as Dial M for Murder and To Catch a Thief. She married Prince Rainier III of Monaco.

Synopsis

Born in Philadelphia in 1929, Grace Kelly became a popular actress in the 1950s starring in movies such as Dial M for Murder (1954), To Catch a Thief(1955) and The Swan (1956). She gained even greater fame after having starred in the film The Country Girl (1954), for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress. She married Prince Rainier III of Monaco, with whom she had three children, in 1956. She died after having been in a car accident on September 14, 1982. Nicole Kidman won the role of Kelly in the 2014 biopic Grace of Monaco.

Early Life

Actress and Princess Consort of Monaco Grace Patricia Kelly was born on November 12, 1929, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her father, John Brendan "Jack" Kelly, was a champion sculler who won three Olympic gold medals as part of the U.S. rowing team. A self-made millionaire, he owned one of the most successful brick businesses on the East Coast. Her mother, Margaret Katherine Majer, was the first coach of women's athletic teams at the University of Pennsylvania. Kelly was the third of four children and was named after her father's sister, who died at a very young age.

Kelly expressed a deep love of performance at a young age. In addition to participating in school plays and community productions, she occasionally modeled with her mother and sister. While attending Stevens School, a small private high school in Philadelphia, she continued to dream about acting. The arts held a prominent place in the Kelly family. Her uncles Walter C. Kelly, a vaudevillian performer, and George Kelly, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, both had a huge affect on her. It was George who later encouraged his niece to pursue a full-time acting career, mentoring her through her rise in Hollywood.

After high school, Kelly decided to pursue an acting career in New York City despite her parents' objections. According to Kellys close friend Judith Balaban Quine, Jack Kelly thought that acting was "a slim cut above streetwalker." Despite this, Kelly enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. As a student, she modeled part-time and appeared in ads for Old Gold cigarettes and on the covers of magazines like Cosmopolitan andRedbook. Her final performance at the Academy was in A Philadelphia Story. Years later she would reprise her role in High Society (1956), a musical adaptation on the big screen.

After graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York at age 19, Kelly sought a career on Broadway, but she found it tough going. Don Richardson, one of her directors and teachers later said, "She would never have had a career in the theater," because she had "great looks and style, yes, but no vocal horsepower."

Whether or not that assessment was correct, Kelly soon found that film was more amenable to her talents. In the years just following World War II, the film and television industries were both booming, and Kelly soon moved to Hollywood. She would eventually feature in 11 films and star in over 60 television productions.

First Hollywood Film

Gary Cooper discovered Grace Kelly on the set of her first film, Fourteen Hours (1951), when she was 22 years old. He arranged for her to play his very young wife in High Noon (1952), an acclaimed Western that put her on the path to stardom. A year later, Kelly was offered a role in Mogambo(1953), a film set in Kenya, starring Clark Gable and Ava Gardner. While filming Mogambo, Kelly had an affair with Gable. Later she said, "What else is there to do if you're alone in a tent in Africa with Clark Gable?" Mogambomarked a turning point in Kelly's career: She was nominated for her first Academy Award and won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress. MGM offered her a seven-year contract, which she accepted on the condition that she live in Manhattan every other year so that she could pursue stage work.

Kelly turned down the role of Edie Doyle in On the Waterfront (opposite Marlon Brando) so that she could work with her soon-to-be friend and mentor Alfred Hitchcock. In the 1950s, Kelly made three films with the legendary master of suspense: Rear Window (1954), Dial M for Murder (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955). Hitchcock considered Kelly the epitome of the femme fatale: She had beauty, style and "sexual elegance." Jimmy Stewart, her co-star in Rear Window, said, "She's too perfect… She's too talented. She's too beautiful. She's too sophisticated. She's too everything but what I want."

In 1954, Kelly won the role of Georgie Elgin in The Country Girl opposite Bing Crosby and William Holden. It was not a glamorous role for Kelly, who portrayed the dowdy and neglected wife of an alcoholic. She gave a raw and uncharacteristically stripped-down performance, which garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. This time she won, beating Judy Garland in A Star Is Born (1954) to claim the Academy Award.

A Royal Wedding

At this point in her career, Kelly was one of the highest paid and most respected actresses in the world. In 1955, she was asked to join the United States Delegation Committee at the Cannes Film Festival in France. During a photo shoot, she met Prince Rainier III of Monaco, who happened to be seeking a bride. If he didn't produce an heir, Monaco would become part of France. The prince once described his ideal bride: "I see her with long hair floating in the wind, the color of autumn leaves. Her eyes are blue or violet, with flecks of gold." The press glamorized their courtship, depicting it as a fairytale romance. A year later, their wedding date was set.

After marrying Prince Rainier on April 19, 1956, in a very public and ornate ceremony, Kelly abandoned her acting career in order to become Princess Consort of Monaco. She was also required to give up her American citizenship, and Prince Rainier banned her films in Monaco.

The royal couple had three children: Princess Caroline, Prince Albert, and Princess Stéphanie. Despite many attempts by filmmakers to lure Princess Grace back into the film industry, she resisted, embracing her role as a ceremonial leader of Monaco. She became very involved in many cultural and charitable organizations over the course of her life. Though some believe she deeply missed her acting career, she often spoke of the rampant problems afflicting the film industry: "Hollywood amuses me. Holier-than-thou for the public and unholier-than-the-devil in reality."

Tragic Death

Tragedy struck on September 14, 1982, when Princess Grace and her younger daughter was driving along the steep cliffs of the Côte d'Azur region of southern France. She suffered a stroke and lost control of the vehicle, which spun off the cliff's edge and plunged down a 45-foot embankment. Mother and daughter were rushed to a hospital where Princess Grace spent 24 hours in a coma before passing away at the age of 52. Princess Stéphanie survived with minor injuries.

Grace Kelly remained in the public eye for most of her life. Her on-screen beauty, self-confidence and mystery enchanted the world, and her serenity and poise as Princess Consort piqued the media's attention. Of this attention, she remarked with typical humor and grace, "The freedom of the press works in such a way that there is not much freedom from it." Kelly's very public life is set to be portrayed by Nicole Kidman in the film Grace of Monaco (2014).

Grace of Monaco - historically accurate? You've got some de Gaulle

The adherence to fact is as weak as the rest of Olivier Dahan's tale of Grace Kelly's princess years starring Nicole Kidman

Grace of Monaco (2014)
Director: Olivier Dahan
Entertainment grade: E
History grade: E+

In 1956, Oscar-winning actress Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier III, sovereign of the tiny Mediterranean principality of Monaco.

Characters

It's 1961, and Alfred Hitchcock is trying to persuade his former leading lady Grace Kelly, now Princess Grace of Monaco (Nicole Kidman), to star in his next project, Marnie. Both Hitch and Grace are bossed around by Madge (Parker Posey), a lady-in-waiting with pointy specs, pointy elbows and pursed lips who always wears head-to-toe black, even in the blazing Mediterranean sunshine. She appears to bea parody of the great Mrs Danvers in one of the real Hitchcock's own masterpieces, Rebecca.

Accents

Meanwhile, Grace and her limp husband Rainier (Tim Roth) are at a bleak party on a yacht with billionaire vulgarian Aristotle Onassis (Robert Lindsay). There is a grumpy French politician moaning about the war in Algeria. "Oh, but colonialism is so last century," trills Grace. Kidman aims for the real Kelly's creamy ingénue tone throughout, yet somehow ends up sounding like Derek Zoolander.

Politics

Rainier faces a challenge to his rather diminutive power: Charles de Gaulle. The French president intends to blockade Monaco to force it to pay French taxes.There was such a crisis in 1962, but, in order to create sympathy for Grace and Rainier, the film needs you to see it as a proud Monegasque struggle for freedom and democracy. The problem is, what it was really about was the presumed right of the super-rich to sequester their obscene wealth in a ridiculous Ruritanian principality. At a guess, it may be tricky to drum up much sympathy for this from Guardian readers. Or indeed from anyone in the 99%, some of whom the producers are presumably hoping will shell out to see their silly movie. "The future is business for the sake of business," simpers Rainier. What a slogan! To the barricades!

Chronology

Several daft subplots rub up disconsolately against each other, mostly having been fictionalised or transplanted from another point in history. For example, it is true that Rainier's sister Antoinette tried to take the throne from him – but that was in 1950, not 1962. In a last-ditch attempt to knit some of its fraying strands together, the film suggests that General de Gaulle is attempting to conquer Monaco because Grace wants to be in a Hitchcock film. Nope. Finally, Grace figures out how to end the war (there wasn't a war) – throw a party!

Balls

Grace arrives at the Monaco Red Cross Ball shimmering in diamonds and the sparkliest of princess dresses – the filmmakers evidently having decided that the restrained gown she really wore n'a pas coupé la moutarde. She has persuaded General de Gaulle himself to come, which in real life he did not. President Kennedy has sent his defence secretary, Robert McNamara, who is warmly cheered by the crowd. This scene is set in mid-October 1962, when McNamara and Kennedy cannot be said to have been glued to events in Monaco: they were slightly more concerned with the impending global apocalypse threatened by the Cuban missile crisis.

More balls

Rising to her feet, Grace makes the kind of horror speech you might make if you were incredibly nervous and drank all your champagne, then all everyone else's champagne, then staggered up on stage and insisted on talking despite all your friends trying to drag you off. "I believe in fairytales," she burbles. "I believe they can come true. I believe the world will not always be full of hatred and conflict if we are prepared to sacrifice enough." Anything short of paying taxes, obviously. "That's what Monaco means to me." She is crying now, from self-pity. It is awful. "I don't think anyone should have the right to crush happiness or beauty," she bleats on. "It's not how I was raised." There is rapturous, inexplicable applause. McNamara leans over to President de Gaulle. "You're not really gonna drop a bomb on Princess Grace, are you, Charles?" he says. No, of course he's not. Given the chance, though, the audience might.

Romance

 AP

"I love you," whispers Rainier to Grace as she sits down. Presumably, this is supposed to signify a happy ending. In fact, the marriage was not a success. Grace and Rainier continued to spend a great deal of time apart, and she eventually moved alone into an apartment in Paris. In later life, she told friends she no longer dreamed of being a princess: instead, she fantasised about becoming a bag lady. Now, that might be a fairytale worth telling.