“Grace was a kind of American ideal: she had the manners, dress and diction of the social elite, but . . . she had a quick sense of fun and a healthy, passionate nature,” writes her latest biographer, Donald Spoto. “Despite her aristocratic bearing, she was one of the girls.”

The young convent school graduate defied her Mainline Philadelphia family — except for her gay uncle, playwright George Kelly — to pursue an acting career with single-minded determination. When her father, a wealthy brick manufacturer, suggested she come out in Philadelphia society, she indignantly replied: “I am out! Do you think that to get a date I have to use those women who sell mailing lists of boys’ names?”

“I rebelled against my family and went to New York to find out who I was — and who I wasn’t,” she tells Spoto. “There happened to be a place in New York that my parents thought would preserve, protect and defend me, as if I were the Constitution. It was a residential hotel for women only, and to have my father’s consent to audition for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, I had to agree to live at that hotel — not in an apartment of my own.”

That feistiness carried her throughout her career. She did her most important work on loan to Paramount, where Alfred Hitchcock transformed her into his ultimate cool blonde sex goddess in “Rear Window” and “To Catch a Thief,” and she won a Best Actress Oscar for “The Country Girl.”

After Kelly married into Monaco royalty, she had the chance to resume her movie career in Hitchcock’s “Marnie.” People said she gave up the role because of opposition from the Monaco press. But Spoto reveals the sadder truth — Kelly quit because she became pregnant and lost the baby before an announcement was made.

It turns out Kelly never entirely gave up the idea of a return to acting. She played herself in a short film that was abandoned when she died in 1982.

Which, in a way, was probably just as well. While the memory of her as the troubled, middle-aged Princess Grace has faded, Grace Kelly forever remains the epitome of youth, class and sex appeal in her frequently revived movies.

High Society

The Life of Grace Kelly

by Donald Spoto

Harmony