American Princess: Grace Kelly
Fashionable Princess: Diane Von Furstenberg
Although she’s just as well known for her acting as she is for her royal role, Grace Kelly’s film career lasted only a few years.
The daughter of Olympic gold-medal winning rower and self-made millionaire John B. Kelly, and Margaret, a former covergirl model and competitive swimmer, Grace was considered the least talented among her siblings.
When she failed to get into university and instead decided to go to a New York drama school, her father was even more disapproving. Even so, Grace always had ambitions beyond that of her family, telling her sister Peggy when she was still a child: “One day I’m going to be a princess.”
After graduating at 19, the next five years were filled with rejections for the would-be star. “I was in the ‘too’ category,’ Grace would later explain. “Too tall, too leggy, too chinny.”
After building a successful modelling career, by 1950 she began to get small roles, mostly in televised drama productions, before getting a minor movie part in 1951’s Fourteen Hours at age 22. It was on the film’s set that she was spotted by Gary Cooper, who cast her as his wife in the famous western High Noon, setting her on the path to stardom.
Legendary director John Ford swiftly cast her in Mogambo alongside leads Ava Gardner and Clark Gable, deciding the stunning blonde had “breeding, quality and
class”. This led to Alfred Hitchcock choosing Grace to replace the recently married Ingrid Bergman in 1954’s Dial M for Murder.
Amazingly, Grace’s career would last just another two years and see her star in only seven more films after this – including her most famous roles in Rear Window, To Catch a Thief and High Society.
In 1955 Grace was at the top of her game. She was one of the highest paid actors in the business and had won her first – and only – Best Actress Oscar for her role in The Country Girl. Then just a few weeks later, she attended the Cannes Film Festival and met Prince Rainier III of Monaco.
At the time the prince was under pressure to find a wife and produce an heir or risk the tiny principality being returned to French ownership. According to legend, the prince wooed Grace by walking her around his lavish palace garden, which included a private zoo where he impressed her by petting a baby tiger.
They met again when Prince Rainier visited the US and met Grace’s family.
Her father famously remarked of his daughter’s union: “I’m not impressed by royalty” – but he paid a $1 million dowry to the prince nonetheless, although it’s been long rumoured that his daughter paid half.
The muchanticipated wedding took place on April 19, 1956, and was watched by an estimated 30 million people around the world.
Apart from being granted the title of Princess and Her Serene Highness on her marriage, Grace also became a duchess, countess, baroness and lady.
She had one son, Prince Albert, and two daughters, Princesses Caroline and Stephanie. Grace died in a car crash in 1982, aged just 52, having never returned to her Hollywood career.
The Belgian-born fashion designer met her first husband – Prince Egon von Furstenberg, a member of the German aristocracy and heir to the Fiat automobile fortune – when she was just 18 and at university in Geneva. Just two years later they married, but on becoming a member of her husband’s royal family, Diane decided she needed to do something else with her life apart from being Her Serene Highness Princess Diane of Furstenberg – and so began a career in fashion. “I was a little nervous about becoming a princess because I didn’t want anyone to think I was trying to land this great catch,” she explained in 2017. “Ironically, becoming a princess made me even more determined to have a career and identity of my own.”
The couple moved to New York in 1969 and had two children: Prince Alexander and Princess Tatiana. Diane’s aristocratic status helped her gain immediate access to the fashionable Manhattan set and by the early ’70s she had developed her iconic wrap dress.
Around the same time, however, her marriage began to crumble and by 1973 Diane and Egon had separated, although they didn’t divorce until 1983.
In 1976 Diane was featured on the cover of Newsweek, which proclaimed her “the most marketable woman since Coco Chanel” after selling five million dresses. Her portrait by Andy Warhol and presence at the iconic and celebrity-packed ’70s nightclub Studio 54, among other fashionable spots, also helped cement her pop culture status.
Now 72 and still working,
Diane married her long-term partner and media mogul Barry Diller in 2001.
‘Usually, the fairytale ends with the girl marrying the prince. But mine started as soon as the marriage was over,’ she says.