Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Grace Under Pressure


As the years passed, she increasingly looked as if not every aspect of the bargain she'd made had worked out quite as expected...

Other film stars had become tinpot marquises or married dubious princes; Grace Kelly grabbed a real one, or at least as real a version as could have at the time been imagined marrying a film star (it was, after all, an era that could simply not have conceived that the Queen of Spain might someday be a divorced former newsreader, granddaughter of a taxi driver).  It's startling to realize that she gave up the life she had made for herself at only 26, her films - just shy of a dozen - made over just five years.

She certainly kept up her part of the deal, flawlessly enacting the part of a devoted, gracious, beloved Princess Consort for some 26 years.  And if at all ended messily, and suddenly, and sadly, here in 1966 - just ten years into her life in the South of France - she has no idea.

Today she would have been 85.

2 comments:

  1. I often wondered whether she was at all prepared for the institutionalized infidelities that left her alone in that pile in the square mile principality - alone with the children, the servants, and her thoughts. From fairytale to reality can be a very long road indeed. But she held up her end of the bargain, it seemed, beautiful and gracious to the end.

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    1. Well, the Kellys were hardly the Cleavers, if anything I ever heard in my Philadelphia days is true, but still there's no question the Grimaldis - Europe's louchest princely family at the time and since - outpaced them in their little bizarreries.

      One wonders what kind of work she'd have been doing by the mid-sixties or later - they weren't really making her kinds of picture much, and maybe it was better to be staring out to sea in Monte Carlo than trying to nab a second lead in an Avco-Embassy "all star" production...

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