The performance that “horrified” Grace Kelly: “This poor girl may never make it”
Grace Kelly, later the Princess of Monaco, was an indelible star of the screen, even if she retired from the shiny world of show business when she was just 26.
Her success was brief, but within that she appeared in some of the most popular Hollywood movies of all time, like Rear Window and High Society, making an indelible mark on the industry, but it’s not something she could have anticipated, as when Kelly got her start, she was unsure if she even had what it took to actually become a star.
Having dabbled in theatre as a teenager, she spent the late 1940s modelling and appearing in small television roles before joining New York’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts (with the nepotistic help of her uncle George Kelly, no less), and it was here that she went from being a relative amateur to finding roles on Broadway, marking the beginning of her legendary career.
One of her earliest roles was in High Noon alongside Gary Cooper, a movie that would receive significant acclaim, even winning four Academy Awards, and while this certainly helped to boost her place in Hollywood and exposed her to a wider audience, many people, including herself, were slightly reproving of her performance, to the point where the success did not feel easy to handle.
Kelly deemed herself woefully inexperienced, struggling to keep up with everyone else involved in the movie, being all of 21 and new to the world of Hollywood cinema. When she landed up starring across from someone like Cooper, she found the prospect rather daunting, revealing in the book High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly by Donald Spoto her dissatisfaction with the part, which made her head straight for acting lessons as she didn’t want to be kicked out as quickly as she’d entered the folds of the showbiz train.
“I was very young when I made High Noon,” she explained, “[Fred] Zinnemann was wonderful with people who knew their job and their métier as screen actors. But I wasn’t one of those who did. Early during filming, he said to me, ‘Grace, I’m sorry, I can’t help you the way I should be able to’. It wasn’t that he didn’t take an interest; he just didn’t know how to instruct me, and of course, there was the problem of time. I couldn’t get the kind of direction from him that I needed as a neophyte, and I wasn’t equipped enough for moviemaking at that time to do it for myself.”
She was incredibly critical of herself, going as far as to say that “After I saw the finished picture, I was horrified!”
Thus, she thought on her feet, noting, “I remember thinking, ‘Well, this poor girl may never make it unless she does something very quickly’. I rushed back to New York and started taking classes again, with Sandy Meisner.”
By making an active decision to improve, Kelly ensured that she wasn’t going to be lost to history, and her efforts paid off, soon landing her next role in Mogambo, which was released the following year, and miraculously, she found herself nominated for an Academy Award. Now, that’s not too bad considering she had no faith in herself just a year prior.
