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how Grace Kelly overcame shyness to become hollywood royalty

apr-news-Grâce Kelly / how Grace Kelly overcame shyness to become hollywood royalty
Tuesday, 9 January 2018

how Grace Kelly overcame shyness to become hollywood royalty

BBC - Her father, Jack, was a three-time Olympic gold medallist who turned a $7,000 loan into an $18 million construction company. Her mother, Margaret, was a champion swimmer and cover model. One uncle had been a vaudeville-era star; the other a Pulitzer-winning playwright. In home movies, the four Kelly children – one boy and three girls – prove their mettle by racing and leaping off rooftops.

But Grace, the middle daughter, was different. She was the only Kelly who couldn’t command a room, a shy, glasses-wearing girl who avoided competitive sports. The only thing Grace liked was the stage.

Up there, she had a defined role besides being the clan’s least likely to succeed, a label that stuck even after her singular 18-month Hollywood triumph during which she made nine films, won an Oscar, married a prince, and retired.

When a reporter asked Jack Kelly if he was proud, he suggested they write about her older sister Peggy instead, shrugging, “Anything that Grace could do, Peggy could always do better.” Grace Kelly was the family failure.

With nurturing like that, what Kelly lacked in aggression, she made up for in resilience. In her first stage bow in the play Don't Feed the Animals, the lead forgot her lines. Kelly calmly dropped her bag, turned around, and whispered a cue. She was 12 years old.

(Crédit: Getty Images)

After graduating from Philadelphia's best schools, Kelly attempted to attend Bennington University, but flunked the maths exam. Kellys weren’t supposed to fail.

At least, she failed with dignity – and she’d need it as she skipped college to study acting while auditioning for Broadway. She stomached five years of rejection. “I was in the ‘Too’ category,” she sighed. “Too tall, too leggy, too chinny.”

Grace hated her wide jaw, and learned to tilt it to look narrower. Her strong features could make her look stubborn – which she was.

(Crédit: Alamy)

Shunning her parents’ money, Kelly supported herself with modelling gigs and commercials. She scored the cover of Cosmopolitan, her chin half-hidden behind a green-polka dotted glove.

Most of her jobs were unglamorous ads for shampoo, cigarettes and beer. Kelly claimed she was lousy at them, too. “Anyone watching me give the pitch for Old Gold would have switched to Camel,” she joked.

Kelly could be spooky. When she was too busy to furnish her New York flat, she’d greet dates in a bare, candlelit room dressed like an Addams Family comic. Another boy found her under a sheet made-up like a corpse. She had a quiet addiction to fortune tellers, who assured her that her hard work would pay off.

(Crédit: Alamy)

So she perfected an Irish accent to screen test for the movie Taxi, but lost that role, too. That stung. When Kelly finally got a cameo as a conflicted divorcée in the film Fourteen Hours, the assistant director paid less attention to her performance than protecting their rented fur coat.

Then she nabbed a small part as Gary Cooper’s young bride in High Noon, but the only follow-up offer she got was a $250-a-week studio contract. She said no. Maybe Hollywood wasn't for her.

‘A snow-covered volcano

Kellys weren’t supposed to fail. But one loss turned into a win when John Ford, on the hunt for an actress to play a married sophisticate who cheats with a safari guide in Mogambo, saw Grace’s rejected screen test for Taxi and exclaimed, “This girl can act.

Get her!” Kiss Clark Gable in Kenya? Grace rushed to the airport, signing her six-year MGM contract minutes before her flight took off (a decision she'd regret).

(Crédit: Alamy)

Gable adored her. She’d join him hunting while their co-star Ava Gardner slept in. “Some day I’m going to get married and I’ll want to tell my children I was in Africa on a safari,” she explained.

When Gable shot a 12-ft snake, she posed with his trophy. After Mogambo opened, the rest of Hollywood adored her, too.

In a dramatic betrayal scene, Kelly angrily shoots her secret sweetheart with a pistol. For just a second, this cool beauty lost control – and won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination and the Golden Globe.

(Crédit: Alamy)

It was 1953. Kelly was 24 years old and famous overnight. Unlike the other bombshells in town, she’d never fiddled with beauty contests or cheesecake pin-ups. As Time Magazine wrote, “She is a star who was never a starlet.”

Kelly was positioned as the anti-Marilyn Monroe, a good girl from a good family who kept her clothes on, unlike that orphan anyone could see nude in that tacky new Playboy Magazine.

Kelly was barely seen as flesh at all. Her aura was described as 'stainless steel' and 'granite'. Alfred Hitchcock, who also became obsessed with her after stumbling across that Taxi screen test, called her “a snow-covered volcano”.

(To prove it, in Rear Window he made her kiss Jimmy Stewart 30 times in one scene.) Entertainment reporters failed to drill beneath her exterior. When they asked intrusive questions about her measurements, or whether she wore falsies, Kelly shut down interviews.

(Crédit: Alamy)

Rumour was that her Dial M for Murder co-star Ray Milland tried to leave his wife of 21 years for a shot at Kelly’s hand, but she wouldn't speak about it. All the press learned was she liked giraffes, the colour yellow, and knitting. “I don't want to be a personality,” she insisted.

After one journalist spent three weeks desperately trailing her for a scoop, he finally threw down his notebook and groaned, “There’s nothing here worth printing.” Kelly replied evenly, “I don't think I’m very interesting either.”

Forced to attend industry parties, Kelly would hide behind spectacles and stay silent. The mystery only made men love her more – and producers, too. “I’ve never seen any actress more in demand,” wrote Louella Parsons.

Six days a week, Kelly would wake up at 5am, shoot until dark, eat a hamburger, and go straight to bed for 10 hours of sleep. One morning in 1954, she wrapped Green Fireand that afternoon, hopped a flight to France to shoot To Catch a Thief.

Yet, while she gave all of her time and energy to Hollywood, she kept her private life separate. She insisted on sharing a modest rented apartment instead of buying a home – proof that she could go back to New York any time.

Hollywood had nothing to offer her besides the pleasure of acting. She didn’t need money and she didn’t like fame and she wasn’t hungry for anyone’s approval, except her father's.

From film goddess to princess

Instead of Jack Kelly’s affection, she had Hitchcock’s, who claimed that Kelly could practically read his mind. When Kelly insisted that her character in Dial M For Murder wouldn’t slip a bathrobe on to answer the phone, the infamously hard-headed director agreed.

Something in her presence, her dark blue eyes, her broad forehead, her soft and precise way of speaking, made her feel like a voice worth trusting. Or maybe her quarter-century of failures had earned her this streak of luck.

One night in Cannes, she and costume designer Edith Head vowed to gamble $10, no more, on the roulette wheel. Head lost everything instantly. Kelly waited and then finally put all ten dollars on the number 6. She won $350. “The luck of the Irish? My eye!” laughed Head. “She’s always right.

(Crédit: Alamy)

Kelly threatened to quit acting if MGM didn't loan her to Paramount for The Country Girl, the film that won her an Oscar. In it, Kelly plays the overprotective wife of Bing Crosby, a neurotic actor who forces her to fix his drunken mistakes.

She’s practical, sad and strong, a proud woman misunderstood by people who think she’s jealous of her husband’s talents. The few audience members who knew about Kelly’s childhood might have shivered when William Holden’s misogynistic director growls, “With all your fine background and breeding you were a failure.” But Kelly doesn’t flinch. She slaps him in the face. 

Her Oscar speech was typically concise at 32 words, half of which were, “The thrill of this moment keeps me from saying what I really feel.”

But her awards fanfare was smothered by headlines about Kelly’s impending marriage to Rainier III of Monaco, which would make her the most-titled woman in the world: two-times a princess, four-times a duchess, eight-times a countess, nine-times a baroness, 111-times a lady, and the most apt title of them all, Her Serene Highness. “I’m not impressed with royalty,” her father told the press.

(Crédit: Alamy)

Kelly and Prince Rainier’s engagement was so sudden that her mother first thought she was wedding the Prince of Morocco. Earlier that year, Rainier had been paying people to introduce him to Marilyn Monroe.

He wanted a top-shelf US actress – who would then quit acting to bear him children, thus securing Monaco’s crown and tax-free independence from France.

I regret I didn’t stick to it for another five years because I believe I might have made a real name as Grace Kelly,” said the princess a few years before her death in a car accident at the age of 52.

But she busied herself with charity balls and flower art and being the first woman on 20th Century Fox’s board.

And she directed the home movies she wanted to star in, happy footage of her three kids surrounded by love.

Her final Hollywood film, High Society, gave her a warm farewell. Kelly wore her own engagement ring to play a well-bred Philadelphia heiress – a part that reflected reality, especially when, while wrapped in Frank Sinatra’s arms, she sighs: “I don’t seem to be made of bronze then?” Smiles Sinatra: “You’re made of flesh and blood.

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