Grace de Monaco Opens 67th Cannes Film Festival

Cannes Film Festival 2014 opens with a fairy tale: an international cinema star marries a Prince and becomes Grace of Monaco, inventing the concept of Modern Princess.

Oliver Dahan’s Grace of Monaco, stages a drama on the love story between Grace Kelly, American favorite actress of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies, and Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, played by Tim Roth. In a climate of political tension with France, Grace is torn apart, as she is asked for a film by Hitchcock, she must choose between her still burning artistic flame or permanently become Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco. She later, will invent the concept of modern princess, but the film evokes the duty to please everyone at the price of forgetting about oneself.

Grace Kelly at Cannes Film Festival

Revealed by John Ford in 1953 in Mogambo, Grace Kelly was invited for the first time at Cannes in 1955 for her interpretation in The County Girl by George Seaton, which earned her an Oscar for best actress the very year. On the fringes of the Hestival, she met Prince Rainier of Monaco who has been reigning over the Principality since 1949.
The romance begins at the moment of their meeting, helpe shortly after by Father Tucker, an Irishman from Philadelphia, who, confessor of Prince Rainier, is invited into the Kelly family for the holiday season. He made the link between the two youths who eventually announce their engagement during a charity ball at the Waldorf-Astoria in January 1956.
But, for the beautiful and recently Oscar-winning Grace, who plays with Hitchcock, leaving her country to live in Monaco and marry a prince, means giving up her profession. This choice will change her life, but after the “wedding of the century”, her union with Prince Rainier III will create a legendary couple who literally made a star of Monaco worldwide.

Family boycotts film

Prince Albert II and his sisters, Princesses Stephanie and Caroline, have not walked up the stairs, accusing the film – despite Nicole Kidman – to be only a “rewritten and unnecessarily glamourised” page of their mother’s life. The Palais had also asked the production to make changes so that the film reflects reality. Olivier Dahan and his team didn’t complied, the French director claiming his “right to fiction”, saying to be “artist rather historian.”