New documentary shows how Grace Kelly never forgot her Irish links
Grace Kelly – Banphríonsa Mhaigh Eo airs on TG4 on CHristmas Day.
In May 1961, Princess Grace Kelly and her husband, Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, were invited to the White House for a luncheon with President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie. All eyes were on the princess. She wore a lush green wool ensemble, lined in matching silk, designed by the French couturier Hubert de Givenchy. The princess wore the Givenchy ensemble again the following month when she visited Ireland, being greeted on the tarmac at Dublin airport by Taoiseach Seán Lemass and his lieutenant, Frank Aiken.
“The more I looked into her life, the more I realised how Irish she was, and how deep her connections with Ireland were and so celebrated by her and her family,” says Brian Reddin, director of Grace Kelly – Banphríonsa Mhaigh Eo, broadcast on TG4 on Christmas Day.
“What fascinated me even more is that this year is the sixtieth anniversary of JFK’s visit to Ireland in 1963. A lot of people have been talking about it – ‘60 years since the big state visit of JFK, which put Ireland on the map. It showed Ireland as a progressive country – that we came out from the shadow of Dev into Lemass territory. We were young and hip and showing it to the world.’
“That was true, but Grace Kelly did that two years before JFK. She officially made the first visit of a head of state to Ireland since [Irish Free State] independence in 1921. She beat JFK by two years, but not many people talk about it. That 1961 visit was so significant in terms of Ireland’s international image.”
Irish people were enthralled with the princess. Her wedding in 1956 was a landmark event. It was broadcast live and watched by 30 million people, including an avid audience in Ireland. Her white wedding dress took 35 tailors six weeks to complete. Previously Irish brides mostly wore formal dress for a wedding. After watching Grace Kelly, an Irish-American Hollywood star, marry her prince, it became fashionable for Irish brides to copy her, and wear a white wedding dress when walking up the aisle.
Irish people loved that she was so proud of her Irish roots. Her paternal grandfather came from Drumilra, a village outside Newport, Co Mayo. (In 1976, she bought the Kelly homestead ruins and surrounding 35 acres in Co Mayo, with the intention of restoring it as a holiday home.) Her grandfather left for the United States around 1867, settling in Philadelphia. His son, Jack Kelly, won three Olympic gold medals in the 1920s for rowing. He also became a self-made millionaire from construction.
Grace Kelly, the third of four children, was born in November 1929, during the depths of the Wall Street Crash, but her father escaped with his finances intact. She enjoyed a gilded childhood, playing in tennis courts, waited on by servants and drivers, vacationing at a holiday home in Ocean City. Perhaps it was no surprise she slipped so easily from the silver screen into the opulence of court life in Monaco when she married Prince Rainier III. She did, however, always maintain a grounded personality.
“Everyone will tell you that she was perfectly named – Grace,” says Reddin. “She was graceful with everybody she met. I interviewed about 50 people. No one had a bad experience with Grace Kelly. No one had a bad word to say about her. She seemed to be ‘on’ a lot. She didn’t seem to have a bad day.”
Hollywood was mystified by her decision to stop acting when she married. Alfred Hitchcock desperately tried to coax her out of retirement for the lead in his 1962 film, Marnie, but she declined. She remained in self-imposed exile until her three children were reared. In 1979, she came out of retirement for a stage production – a night of poetry – which toured, including performances at the Dublin Theatre Festival.
Three years later, she crashed her car after suffering a brain haemorrhage while driving in the hills outside Monaco. She was taken to hospital, but died the following night.
Reddin scored a coup in securing an interview with her son, Albert II, Prince of Monaco, for the documentary. “I’ve done lots of documentaries about actors,” says Reddin. “It’s hard enough to get actors to speak about other actors, but getting a reigning monarch to do an interview. How do I go about that?”
Reddin liaised with the press office of the Prince’s Palace of Monaco. “You’re in luck,” the press officer told him – “99 percent of all requests are turned down because obviously he has a country to run, but he loves talking about Ireland.” Reddin sat down with Prince Albert II in the palace at Monaco for the interview.
“Obviously it’s his mother and he’s going to speak fondly about her,” says Reddin, “but when he talks about her passing, he still gets choked up all these years later. She seems to have been an essential part of his life, and incredibly close to her. What I got from him was a great sense of loss to lose his mother at 52 years of age.”
- Grace Kelly – Banphríonsa Mhaigh Eo will broadcast on TG4, 9.30pm, Christmas Day. See: www.tg4.ie
Grace Kelly had a short, but prolific career in Hollywood, featuring in 11 movies in five years, several among the most revered films of the twentieth century. She began acting in a local theatre in West Falls, Philadelphia as a teenager. Theatre was in the blood. One uncle was a Vaudeville actor, another a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. After moving to New York to work as a model, she studied at the prestigious American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
The Hollywood film director Henry Hathaway spotted her in a Broadway play and cast her in his film Fourteen Hours, which came out in 1951. Life moved quickly from there. John Ford cast her in Mogambo, which earned her an Oscar nomination. As a 22-year-old, she starred as the 51-year-old Gary Cooper’s wife in the classic western, High Noon. Annoyed with being typecast as the “pretty blonde” – roles she described as “NAR (no acting required)” – she sought out meatier roles.
“When Alfred Hitchcock gets her, he’s the one who changes her,” says Brian Reddin, director of Grace Kelly – Banphríonsa Mhaigh Eo. “Hitchcock sees her ability. She’s still a very pretty woman, and is there as a love interest for leading actors, but she has this icy determination that he gets out of her, first in Dial M for Murder and then in Rear Window, which has incredible tension in its scenes. He found an inner steeliness in her, an iciness that he tapped into. People remember her as this icy, cool blonde from Philadelphia, who is aloof, well-spoken and posh. That became her screen persona.”
In 1954, the year Dial M for Murder and Rear Window were released, she won an Oscar for The Country Girl, playing the wife of an alcoholic character played by Bing Crosby. Perhaps her defining role came a couple of years later in High Society.
“It’s arguably one of the greatest musicals ever,” says Reddin. “She acts alongside two screen legends in Crosby and Frank Sinatra. She’s fantastic in that. Then she goes, ‘That’s it. I’m done. I’m off.’ And walks away from it in 1956.”
