Born today, Grace Kelly was twenty-six when she married Prince Ranier and became the princess of Monaco. Thus ended a brief but magnificent cinematic career. Astrologically, her charm, beauty, and royalty are all prefigured in her chart: Scorpio is not only her birth sign but also her rising sign! Born on Philadelphia on November 11, 1929 — on Veterans’ Day, just two weeks after the stock market crashed — Grace had the perfect first name, face, height (5’7), and acting chops. Her status as an Earth Snake (in Chinese astrology) with a magic number of 8 prefigured her fate. If only her moon had not been in OPisces, she might have lived a longer life; she died in a car crash in 1982, months shy of her fifty-third birthday. “I can’t see myself as an old woman,” she confided. “I will always be the model on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar.” Gracve Kelly shares her birthday with Demi Moore, Leonardo Di Caprio, and Dostoyevsky.
Whether playing a quaker lady dressed in virginal white in the Wild West (High Noon), or lounging amid the leading luminaries of Newport society while Louis Armstrong plays his trumpet (High Society), Grace Kelly was one of the most glamorous of all the screen queens of the 1950s, a Harper’s Bazaar cover girl who enjoys dinners at 21, vacations in St. Tropez, and knows how to plan a picnic or stand up to a killer. Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra sang to her. Did Cary Grant prefer her (in To Catch a Thief) to Ingrid Bergman (in Notorious)? Did Hitchcock? In Mogambo (1953), she competes with Ava Gardner for Clark Gable’s affections. Little-known fact: Bennington College rejected her application because her mathematics scores were not up to snuff. Given the choice of playing against James Stewart in Rear Window or Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, she chose the former. That may be all ye know of her, and all ye need to know. –-DL
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Author: The Best American Poetry
