Saturdays with the Stars: Grace Kelly

Each month of 2021 we will be taking a look at the leading ladies of some of Alfred Hitchcock's many celebrated classics; we'll be doing this series chronologically to when they first entered Hitchcock's filmography.  Last month we talked about one of the biggest stars of Hollywood's Golden Age who made three films with Hitch, Ingrid Bergman.  This month, we're going to profile a woman who had a lot in common with Bergman.  She also would be appropriately name-checked as one of the biggest stars of the era.  She also made three films with Alfred Hitchcock (two of which I've seen, one of which I haven't, just like Bergman up until last month), and she was also a ravishing blonde beauty whose fame continues to this day.  However, this month's star didn't have decades of movies for us to pick from in her filmography-it is, in fact, quite short, thanks to a royal detour her career took that would define her in the public consciousness in ways even Hitchcock couldn't dream.  This month, our star is Grace Kelly.

Unlike a lot of the women we're profiling this year, Grace Kelly's childhood was not haunted by much personal tragedy or poverty.  She grew up in a wealthy Philadelphia family, her father a former Olympian who eventually worked in the Roosevelt administration during the 1930's. Her family disapproved of her move to New York City to pursue acting, but success came pretty quickly for Grace; she made her Broadway debut in 1949 when she was barely twenty, and two years later she was making her film debut opposite Paul Douglas & Barbara bel Geddes in Fourteen Hours.

Kelly's career is very different than Ingrid Bergman's.  By 1952, Kelly was getting a major role in the film classic High Noon, and would enjoy a steady string of films from 1952 to 1956, including five in 1954 alone, before her career would end.  Kelly, for those who are not familiar with the actress somehow, would be best remembered today for marrying Prince Rainer of Monaco, becoming a princess consort, the matriarch of the modern royal family of the principality, and while she flirted with the idea of making other movies (including Hitchcock's Marnie and Herbert Ross's The Turning Point) it never panned out.  Kelly died in a car accident at the age of 52.

Kelly is arguably the most important actress in Hitchcock's collective filmography, and certainly he is the most important director in her acting career.  While she'd be nominated for Oscars for working with John Ford & George Seaton, her three films with Hitchcock are considered her best, and most lasting legacy in pictures.  She got along well with Hitchcock, even though he was pretty obsessed with her (we'll talk about that as the month progresses), and would spend the next decade basically trying to replace her, never to his satisfaction (and much to the chagrin of the women who "fell short").  I have seen Rear Window and To Catch a Thief, so for Kelly this month in addition to some of her less-known work (she only made 11 movies & I've seen five of them so we're going to need to go deep into the catalog), we'll be talking about her first outing with Hitchcock: Dial M for Murder.