Grace Kelly

American actress who was transformed by her marriage to Princess Rainier as Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1955 for her performance in "The Country Girl," Grace was a Hollywood sensation in films including ""High Noon," "Rear Window," "High Society" and "To Catch a Thief."

Kelly was one of four children born to high achieving parents. Her father, Jack Kelly, was a bricklayer turned contractor who, by 1929, built a mansion in fashionable East Falls, Pennsylvania. Though a champion oarsman, he was denied entry by the British in the Diamond Scull race on the grounds that he worked with his hands and was therefore not a gentleman sportsman. Channeling his anger at the class system, Kelly saw to it thirty years later that his namesake son was accepted into the race and came away holding first prize. Mom was the first female athletic coach at the University of Pennsylvania. Sports was the focus of the Kelly family and father Jack, a charming philanderer, could in no way relate to his frail, asthmatic and decidedly unathletic daughter Grace, who spent countless hours alone in her room in a fantasy world where she acted out roles with her dolls, using a different voice with each one. As a result Grace never gained attention or approval from her father, thus setting the pattern in her adult life to seek older, important men who were father substitutes. The biography be Robert Lacey related that she lost her virginity at 17 to a friend's husband.

Living in a fantasy world was an escape route to acceptance and by age 12, she was acting in productions with the East Falls Academy Players. After attending a strict convent school, Kelly moved to New York to pursue a career in acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.