We continue our guest articles which visit the stories of ‘commoners’ who have married royalty. This week we bring you the story of American movie star Grace Kelly.
Her Serene Highness, Princess Grace of Monaco
Grace Kelly
Grace Patricia Kelly was born in Philadelphia USA in 1929. Her Father John Brendan Kelly was a triple Olympic medallist in Sculler (rowing) and his wife, Margaret Katherine Majer was the first woman to head the Physical Education Department at the University of Pennsylvania.
Grace said of them: “My parents, despite their serious attitude toward life in general, and that of their children in particular, were very broad-minded people. There was no such thing as a bad profession for them. As I was their daughter, they knew that, whatever profession I chose, I would do it well. That was enough for them. There was always trust among the Kellys.”
After graduating from High School, Grace worked as a model for a short time and made her debut on Broadway in 1949. Not content with the work she was receiving in New York, Grace moved to California quickly finding work in motion pictures. In 1951, she appeared in her first film entitled ‘Fourteen Hours’
She climbed the Hollywood ladder quickly and it was her work with the director Alfred Hitchcock, initially in his film Dial M for Murder, then in his following movies; Rear Window and High Society, which helped make her a star. Indeed it is often said that it was her performance in Rear Window in 1954 that brought her to prominence.
It was while filming another Hitchcock movie: ‘To Catch a Thief’ in the summer of 1954, on the French Riviera with Cary Grant, probably after the scene where she speeds along the Moyen Corniche to quickly get to the “picnic grounds” and away from a tailing police car, that she had time to look at the Mediterranean and the countryside along the coast. “Whose gardens are those?” she asked screenwriter John Michael Hayes. “Prince Grimaldi’s” was his reply.
In the film Grace gushed: ‘Have you ever seen any place in the world more wonderful?’ Guillaume Rose, Monaco’s head of tourism, told the AFP news agency that the classic movie is ‘the best advertisement we ever had.’
Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in a scene from: To Catch a Thief
In April 1955 Grace Kelly headed the U.S. delegation at the Cannes Film Festival and while there was invited to participate in a photo session for the magazine Paris Match at the Palace of Monaco with Prince Ranier III. After a series of delays and complications Grace who was 26 years old finally met the prince who was a few days shy of his 32nd birthday and following the photo shoot, the Prince and Grace visited his gardens and small zoo, which she had admired from a far the year before.
Their second meeting was a dinner date and a meeting with Grace’s family.
A year later in April 1956 after a whirlwind romance they married in what was described as ‘The wedding of the century’ after which she assumed the title of Princess Consort of Monaco, styled as Her Serene Highness the Princess of Monaco and commonly referred to as Princess Grace.
The couple had been exchanging letters in a hushed romance since their first meeting and the Prince had asked her to marry him a few days after Christmas that year. The engagement wasn’t announced to the press until January 5 1956, because Grace’s parents had to be persuaded to grant their permission.
Her father, John, is said to have told Prince Rainier before giving his consent: ‘Royalty doesn’t mean anything to us. I hope you won’t run around the way some princes do, because if you do, you’ll lose a mighty fine girl.’
Prince Rainier first gave Grace a friendship ring of diamonds and rubies. Her engagement ring was a twelve-carat emerald-cut diamond ring.
Prince Rainier and Princess Grace on their Wedding day
The Prince and Princess had both a civil and religious wedding ceremony. The civil ceremony took place in the Palace Throne Room of Monaco on April 18, 1956, and was broadcast across Europe and was watched by an estimated 30 million people on television. The following day the church ceremony took place at Monaco’s St Nicholas’s Cathedral. Grace herself said: “When I married Prince Rainier, I married the man and not what he represented or what he was. I fell in love with him without giving a thought to anything else.”
Over the next few years the new Princess of Monaco found that the demands of her new life were very different from that of an actress. She struggled initially but her unique vitality shone through and she eventually turned her attention towards the antiquated palace customs, changing the law that required women calling upon her to wear a hat, or for any representative calling on the princess to be female.
She said at this time that she had found it difficult separating Grace Kelly the actress and Princess Grace, the wife of a head of state: “Before my marriage, I didn’t think about all the obligations that were awaiting me. My experience has proved useful and I think that I have a natural propensity to feel compassion for people and their problems.”
But throughout it all she remained deeply in love with her Prince saying of him: ‘He’s enormously sweet and kind…he wants a close and loving family, just as I do. He’s very bright, has a wonderful sense of humour, makes me giggle, and is very, very handsome…he’s a good person. And I love him.’
Princess Grace with Prince Albert
The royal couple had three children; Caroline, Princess of Hanover, the current ruling prince; Albert II, Prince of Monaco and Princess Stéphanie of Monaco
The princess died tragically in 1982 after suffering a stroke while driving Princess Stephanie home along the winding roads from their country retreat, Roc Agel, on the French side of the border, causing her to crash her car. Her daughter survived the accident.
Prince Ranier III and Princess Grace’s tomb, the Grimaldi Vaults, St Nicholas Cathedral, Monaco.
A heart broken Prince Rainier laid his princess to rest in the in the Grimaldi family vault on September 18th, 1982, after a requiem mass in St Nicholas Cathedral, Monaco.
On the 20th anniversary of Grace’s death, in 2002 Prince Rainier said: “Twenty years after her disappearance, Princess Grace is always present in our hearts and in our thoughts.” He praised her for “carrying out to perfection her role as spouse and mother.”
Prince Rainier lived another 23 years and was Europe’s longest-reigning monarch at the time of his death. The Prince’s funeral was be held on April 15 at the 19th-century Monaco Cathedral where he and Princess Grace married over 60 years before. The music played as his coffin was moved to the cathedral was Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” which was the same music played at the funeral of Princess Grace, he was laid to rest next to his much loved wife.
Anna Featherstone.
British Monarchist Society Blog 