The cover of the April 26, 1954 issue of Life Magazine, states: GRACE KELLY – HOLLYWOOD’S BRIGHTEST AND BUSIEST NEW STAR and reads as follows:
Hollywood’s Hottest Property
Movies will soon be full of Grace Kelly
In Hollywood, 1954 is likely to be known as this year of Grace. The reason is the serious looking girl potrayed by 24-year-old Grace Kelly, who has suddenly become the most valuable acting property in the movies.
With four recently completed top-budget films to be released this year and a fifth already begun, Miss Kelly’s cool beauty and her unquestionably fine acting ability will soon be movie land bywords. What will not be so publicly evident, however, is the determination — what one convinced producer called Miss Kelly’s “stainless steel inside” — that has brought all this about.
Grace, daughter of a famous and wealthy Philadelphia family, scarcely needed fame or wealth but through her drive to be an actress seems destined to attain both. Like all her performances her deliberately planned career has been a masterpiece of underplaying. Having established herself as a competent TV actress and taken smallish movie roles in Fourteen Hours and High Noon, she turned down a Hollywood contract with he amused tolerance of a high-born English post deb at teatime and returned to her first love, Broadway. She consented to come back for a role in Mogambo and then she was on her way.
Best gauge of Hollywood’s evaluation of Grace Kelly is the leading men she has had. After Mogambo she was starred in quick succession opposite the four big Hollywood names shown on this page [with William Holden in The Bridges at Toko-Ri, with Ray Milland in Dial M for Murder, with Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, and with Bing Crosby in Country Girl].
The basis for her success is her combination of freshness, ladylike virtue and underlying sex appeal that has led two of her directors to compare her with the early Ingrid Bergman. Added to that is her ability to lose herself in almost any dramatic role. For this Alfred Hitchcock invited her back for a second film when she had finished one for him, and Paramount liked her so much in her first for them that it reborrowed her from MGM to do two more right away. Still on her original contract, Miss Kelly is not getting much more than the $750 a week she started at, although other studios are reported to be paying MGM as much as $50,000 a picture for her services.
– Courtesy of Life Magazine –
The year culminated in the 1954 New York Film Critics Awards (that actually took place in January of the following year) and a rare interview captures the essence of Grace Kelly, the movie star.
A sampling of 1954 Grace Kelly images:
See 1954 Grace Kelly Movies
