Grace Kelly’s Real Price For Becoming A Princess

Grace Kelly was born in Philadelphia in 1929, into a wealthy and influential Irish-American Catholic family. Her father was John B. “Jack” Kelly Sr., a self-made brickwork contractor who was also a three-time Olympic gold medalist in rowing. The Kellys were a fiercely competitive family, and Grace developed a desire to earn her own fame instead of merely existing as another Philadelphia socialite. That desire led her to acting.

In 1947, after failing the mathematics requirement of the college where Grace Kelly wished to study, she relocated to New York City. She began classes at a dramatic arts school in the fall of that year, but instead of using her family’s funds, she paid her own tuition and rent by modeling for fashion magazines and television commercials.

In November 1949, Kelly made her first appearance on the New York stage as Bertha in a production of August Strindberg’s The Father, opposite Raymond Massey. Her performance received critical acclaim. Casting directors from television and motion pictures took notice, and several movie offers arrived.

Kelly got her first film role in a 1951 drama called “Fourteen Hours,” where she played a woman going through a divorce. It was a minor role, but Kelly’s cool and composed demeanor impressed Hollywood bigwigs, including star Gary Cooper, who kept her in mind for his next picture.

In 1951, a producer and director cast 21-year-old Kelly in the western “High Noon” as Amy Fowler Kane, a pacifist Quaker bride of Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper), who had recalled her from her first film. When the movie came out the next year, it won four Oscars, and Kelly became famous across America overnight.

Director John Ford cast Kelly in MGM’s Mogambo, filmed in Kenya. She played a reserved English wife alongside Clark Gable and Ava Gardner. MGM had contracted her for seven years, and the role earned her a Golden Globe award and her first Oscar nomination, tying her to the studio in a way that would prove important several years later.

Alfred Hitchcock, the “Master of Suspense,” loaned Kelly from MGM for his 1954 thriller “Dial M for Murder” with Ray Milland. He called her “a snow-covered volcano,” with a cool exterior covering up underlying passion. Hitchcock was so pleased with the result that he used her in that fashion two more times.

In 1954, Kelly returned to the fold for Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” in which she played a fashionable Manhattanite across from James Stewart’s wheelchair-bound photographer. Working in tandem with costume designer Edith Head, Kelly crafted looks and a persona that made her the epitome of elegance for audiences worldwide. It proved to be one of the most successful films of the year.

After years of being cast purely on her good looks, Kelly fought her studio for the right to play Georgie Elgin, the down-and-out wife of an alcoholic singer, in “The Country Girl,” a film opposite Bing Crosby that opened in late 1954. She scrubbed off the makeup and discarded the dresses for simple clothes. It was a risk aimed at undermining her image as a beauty queen.

On March 30, 1955, William Holden presented the award at the Academy Awards ceremony and announced 25-year-old Kelly as Best Actress for “The Country Girl.” The win came as a shock because everyone had expected Judy Garland to take it for “A Star Is Born.” Network crews had actually set up TV cameras in Garland’s hospital room, where she was recuperating after giving birth, to televise her speech. They had to take the equipment down when they heard Kelly’s name.

In the summer of 1954, Kelly was filming Hitchcock’s “To Catch a Thief” on the Côte d’Azur, playing an heiress opposite Cary Grant’s retired jewel thief. The car chases took place along the coast roads above Monaco. She emerged from filming with a newfound affection for the French Riviera, and before long she would meet the man who ruled Monaco, the small principality on its coast.

In May of 1955, at the Cannes Film Festival, a magazine editor and his wife, the actress Olivia de Havilland, organized a press photo-op between Kelly and Monaco’s 31-year-old prince, Rainier III. Through transport strikes and wardrobe trouble, Kelly arrived at the Prince’s Palace on May 6 for what she had expected to be a brief photo session. In actuality, the encounter stretched into a two-hour private tour of the grounds led by the prince himself.

In the seven months after they met at Cannes, Kelly and Prince Rainier wrote each other letters across the Atlantic. It was a quiet process, with an American priest, Rainier’s court chaplain in Monaco, carefully arranging the mailing of the correspondence.

In December 1955, Prince Rainier visited the Kelly family in Philadelphia and asked Grace to marry him over Christmas, presenting her with a ruby-and-diamond eternity ring in the colors of his own principality of Monaco. Her engagement to the prince was announced on January 5, 1956, at a press conference at the Philadelphia Country Club.

A 1918 treaty between France and Monaco provided that should the reigning prince die without a male heir, then Monaco’s independence would cease, and the microstate would come under French protection. Prince Rainier, who was 32 and single at the time, had no time to waste. His romance with Grace Kelly was not just about two people in love. It was also about Monaco’s right to remain a sovereign nation.

In keeping with long-standing European royal tradition, the Prince’s family would not agree to the marriage unless $2 million was paid in a prenuptial contract by the time of the ceremony, split between Kelly’s own film earnings and her father’s money. “My daughter doesn’t have to pay any man to marry her,” said Jack Kelly at first. Finally, however, the payment went through in full.

Kelly was still under her seven-year contract with MGM, so the studio did not simply release her. They required that she give them exclusive rights to film and sell footage from the religious ceremony. Her walk down the aisle became another kind of release for the studio.

Grace Kelly took to the ocean on the SS Constitution from New York with family and friends, her bridesmaids, and 80 trunks for her new life. Over a week later, she was met at sea by Prince Rainier aboard his yacht off the coast of Monaco as people gathered along the cliffs to witness her landing.

A government minister conducted a short civil ceremony inside the palace, reading out all the new nobility titles Grace had acquired through marriage. The following day, a bishop married her in a religious ceremony at St. Nicholas Cathedral, in front of hundreds of guests and tens of millions more who watched on television around the world. Kelly’s dress had taken a team of seamstresses several weeks to make, and she retired from acting afterward at age 26.

Grace’s first child was a daughter, Caroline, whose birth was celebrated with a national holiday. A little more than a year later, she gave birth to a son, later known as Prince Albert II, who fulfilled the condition in the 1918 treaty that there be a male heir. This secured Monaco’s independence from France for good, and the crisis that had made the wedding so important was at last over.

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