Grace Kelly Married a Prince, Signed Away Her Career, and Never Made Another Film

How it began

Grace Kelly won the Academy Award for Best Actress in March 1955. Thirteen months later she was married to the sovereign prince of a state smaller than Central Park, her MGM contract had been settled, and her film career was over. She was 26 years old and had made eleven features in five years.

The wedding was covered as a fairy tale and has been recycled as one ever since. The documented version is more interesting, because it involves a contract negotiation, a constitutional problem, and a return to acting that was arranged and then cancelled under political pressure.

How it unfolded

1. May 1955

   Kelly, in Cannes for the film festival, meets Prince Rainier III during a magazine photo assignment at the Prince's Palace in Monaco.

2. 30 March 1955

   She wins the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Country Girl, having also appeared in Rear Window and Dial M for Murder in the previous eighteen months.

3. 5 January 1956

   The engagement is announced in the United States.

4. 4 April 1956

   She sails from New York to Monaco aboard the SS Constitution with her family, her bridal party and a large press contingent.

5. 18 April 1956

   The civil ceremony takes place in the throne room of the Prince's Palace. This is the legally binding wedding.

6. 19 April 1956

   The religious ceremony is held at the Cathedral of Our Lady Immaculate in Monaco and broadcast across Europe and beyond, watched by an audience estimated at around 30 million.

7. 23 January 1957

   Princess Caroline is born.

8. 14 March 1958

   Prince Albert is born, securing the succession under Monaco's rules at the time.

9. 1962

   Alfred Hitchcock offers her the title role in Marnie. The palace announces her return to film; after public opposition in Monaco the plan is abandoned and the role goes to Tippi Hedren.

10. 1 February 1965

    Princess Stéphanie is born.

11. 13 September 1982

    She suffers a stroke while driving on a mountain road above Monaco; the car leaves the road. Princess Stéphanie, a passenger, survives.

12. 14 September 1982

    Grace, Princess of Monaco, dies in hospital, aged 52.

What we can stand behind

• PUBLIC RECORD: there were two ceremonies — a civil wedding on 18 April 1956 and a religious one the following day. Only the first was legally constitutive.
• PUBLIC RECORD: the cathedral ceremony was broadcast live and is among the most-watched television events of the 1950s.
• PUBLIC RECORD: she made no films after becoming Princess of Monaco. Her final release, High Society, had been completed before the wedding.
• PUBLIC RECORD: the 1962 plan for her to appear in Hitchcock's Marnie was announced and then withdrawn, and the role was played by Tippi Hedren.
• PUBLIC RECORD: she died on 14 September 1982 following a road accident the previous day.

The contract, and what she actually gave up

Kelly was under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and a working film star could not simply stop. The arrangements surrounding the marriage included the settlement of that contract, and MGM filmed the wedding — the studio produced the coverage that much of the world watched. A dowry paid to the principality, widely reported at the time at around $2 million, appears throughout the contemporaneous press but is not documented by any published palace record, and Forgotten Frame records the figure as REPORTED rather than confirmed.

The Marnie episode is the clearest evidence of what the role cost her. In 1962 the palace announced that she would take the part; the reaction in Monaco to their princess playing a compulsive thief in an American film was hostile enough that the announcement was reversed within weeks. She never acted in a feature again, though she narrated documentaries and gave poetry readings in the 1970s.

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Their own accounts

“I would like to be remembered as someone who accomplished useful deeds, and who was a kind and loving person.”

Neither she nor Prince Rainier publicly framed the end of her career as a sacrifice. Rainier, who ruled from 1949 until his death in 2005, spoke of her role in the principality's public life — the Princess Grace Foundation, the arts institutions, the transformation of Monaco's international profile — rather than in terms of what had been given up to get there.

What is only reported

Claims about the state of the marriage in later years, and about the circumstances of the 1982 crash, circulate widely and are not established. The official finding was that she suffered a stroke at the wheel. Alternative accounts — including the persistent claim that her daughter was driving — have been denied by the palace and are not supported by the investigation record. They are DISPUTED and are not repeated here as fact.

The years that followed

Monaco's transformation from a declining casino economy into a global financial and tourist centre took place during Rainier's reign, and the 1956 wedding is generally credited as its single most effective piece of publicity. Prince Albert II succeeded his father in 2005. The Princess Grace Foundation continues to fund emerging artists in theatre, dance and film.

The template she created — the film star who becomes a working royal, followed by a press corps that never disperses — has been repeated several times since, most recently and most publicly by the Duchess of Sussex. Nobody has yet repeated the ending.