The biggest regret of Grace Kelly’s career: “I wish I had been given the chance”
Every actor has regrets, perhaps that’s taking on a role that they soon realised was a bad idea, or turning down the chance to star in a movie that ends up becoming a huge sensation. The issue with Hollywood is that chance, luck, and the actions and decisions of other people all play a part in an actor’s success, and sometimes things are just out of your control.
For Grace Kelly, retiring at 26 meant that she avoided many of the regrets most actors will acquire over a long career, which often includes a string of duds or perhaps a money-grabbing attempt at staying relevant. It happens to the best of actors. Kelly, on the other hand, left Hollywood to become the Princess of Monaco, as you do, meaning she only acted in 11 films. That’s pretty impressive considering her status as one of the most iconic Hollywood stars of all time.
The actor evidently picked her roles well, often working with incredibly acclaimed filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, who cast her in his films Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and finally To Catch a Thief. She proved to be an endlessly compelling figure with an innate elegance to her that radiated off the screen, making her the perfect screen star. She also appeared in classics like High Noon, Mogambo, and The Country Girl, for which she won an Academy Award for ‘Best Actress’.
How could Kelly have any regrets with such an impressive filmography? Maybe she wished to have starred in more movies or tried out some against-the-grain roles in an unexpected genre? No, Kelly’s biggest regret was something that, to many, might seem rather trivial. She wished she had appeared in more black-and-white movies.
While colour cinema is the dominant mode of filmmaking these days, when Kelly was rising to prominence, Technicolor was still relatively new, and many people were of the belief that black-and-white was far superior. She only appeared in three black-and-white films during her brief acting career, reportedly stating in High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly by Donald Soto, “I wish I had been given the chance to do fewer pictures in colour and more serious productions in black and white.”
It seems that Kelly, too, a product of her time, associated black-and-white cinema with being more respectable and impressive, although the colour movies that the actor appeared in were hardly a step down from the monochrome ones she did. Her black-and-white titles were Fourteen Hours, High Noon and The Country Girl, which ignore many of her successes in colour films, like Hitchcock’s excellent movies with her and High Society.
Perhaps if she had continued acting for longer, she would’ve had the chance to appear in more black-and-white films. However, the 1950s, Kelly’s golden era, was simply a moment in cinema history when the wonders of colour cinema were becoming increasingly more popular and widespread.
Instead, she settled into a life of high society and royalty, leaving behind a screen legacy predominantly illuminated in Technicolor.
