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Favouring an uncluttered line, she was emphatic in her embrace of Christian Dior’s full-skirted, pinched-waist New Look which provided the silhouette for both tailoring and gowns (though not all were created by Dior himself). It was a tasteful, restrained brand of femininity, accented by classic accessories and continues to set a precedent for other such women of status – the Duchess of Cambridge’s modest, lace-covered Alexander McQueen wedding gown likely found its forebear in Kelly’s own, a gift from her studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and its costume designer Helen Rose.

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(“I’m very happy that Grace has found herself such a good part,” Hitchcock would slyly remark on the occasion of her engagement.)Īs such her wardrobe, already a venerable force thanks to several well-outfitted film roles, became something of a definitive statement of how to dress as a woman of obligation.

Aged just 26 she retired from the film industry to undertake a role which was all her own – that of a former actress, and Monégasque princess. Of course, her lofty position in the narrative of 20th-century popular culture – one shared by perhaps the only two other women who so entirely transcended the moniker of “actress” as she, Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn – was affirmed by her marriage to Prince Rainier III of Monaco in 1960. “The Kelly effect is not unlike the James Dean effect (three great films, three bit parts), whereby a few brief hours of screen time continue unquenchably to burn,” The New Yorker critic Anthony Lane wrote of her legacy. It was in the films of auteur Alfred Hitchcock that her glacial demeanour was most potent, though it would be George Seaton’s The Country Girl which delivered her first, and only, Oscar. Grace Kelly’s film career might have been brief – it lasted a scant five years and numbered just 11 films – but there was something about the directness of her presence in front of a camera which stuck.