The Hollywood icon Elle Fanning would love to play: “There’s something there”
Elle Fanning belongs in the highly exclusive club of actors who slowly but surely became more acclaimed than their famous older siblings. Like Elizabeth Olsen and Joaquin Phoenix, she began acting in her youth and clawed her way into Hollywood’s highest realm of stardom, even as her sister, Dakota Fanning, transitioned from being a blockbuster star as a child to more of a supporting actor in adulthood.
The younger Fanning has so thoroughly left her child acting career behind her that she is now more associated with Sofia Coppola, Sally Potter, and Joachim Trier than she is with early movies like Daddy Daycare and The Nutcracker in 3D. She’s played a sex worker addicted to heroin in Ben Affleck’s Live By Night; an ill-fated model in Nicolas Winding Refn’s cannibalistic take on Los Angeles, The Neon Demon; and Bob Dylan’s partner in A Complete Unknown.
In other words, Fanning has range, even at the tender age of 20-something, and she is not afraid to stretch her proverbial muscles. In an interview with Parade in 2024, she further proved as much when she revealed that she has ambitions to play a particularly challenging role.
“I’ve always said Grace Kelly,” she said when asked if there were any parts she was interested in playing. “She’s someone who would be interesting, her film career leading into becoming a princess? I don’t know, there’s something there.”
There is definitely something there. Kelly was one of Hollywood’s most celebrated stars of the 1950s before she left it all behind to become the Princess of Monaco. Considered by many to be the most beautiful person to ever stand in front of a camera, she was Alfred Hitchcock’s favourite female star and, despite having a film career of less than ten years, won a ‘Best Actress’ Oscar. She led a charmed life in Hollywood and a fairytale life as a princess before her death in a car accident at the age of 52.
Kelly’s life seems tailor-made for the big screen, but as plenty of precedent shows, it is exceedingly difficult to make halfway-decent movies about Hollywood royalty. Whether it’s a straightforward melodramatic biopic like 2000’s The Audrey Hepburn Story or a misjudged attempt at emotional truth like 2022’s Blonde, it basically never works, and everyone involved ends up looking delusional and 50% worse at their jobs.
You don’t even have to look at biopics about other stars to see how treacherous Fanning’s proposition could be. There already was a movie about Grace Kelly, and it was, to put it mildly, profoundly idiotic. Olivier Dahan’s Grace of Monaco opened the Cannes Film Festival with a queasy thud in 2014 and somehow fared worse than the previous year’s biopic disaster, Diana.
Nicole Kidman does her level best not to look embarrassed, but ends up looking tranquilised instead. Even if you set aside the dubious fact that the film is supposed to be based on reality, it is a tedious display of vapidity and pseudo-arthouse lethargy, a film that is so obviously unworthy of its subject that it’s a mystery as to why anyone bothered.
You could argue that this leaves the door wide open for another attempt at capturing Kelly’s life for the silver screen. Alternatively, you could take it as a good excuse to never do it again. The latter seems pretty sensible.
