KELLY, Grace

(1929–1982)

   Grace Kelly, twice nominated for Academy Awards and winner once, was the leading female actor in such Hollywood classics as High Society (1956) and The Country Girl (1954) and in such Alfred Hitchcock thrillers as To Catch a Thief (1955), Rear Window (1954), and Dial M for Murder (1954). But Kelly actually got her film start in Westerns with her role as Amy, the new Quaker wife of Sheriff Will Kane (Gary Cooper) in High Noon(1952). The newlyweds are on their way out of town when Sheriff Kane hears that Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald) is coming back after a long prison term, and he plans on revenge. Torn between his love for a woman and his duty as a man, Will Kane knows what he must do. Kelly’s role highlights perhaps the most classic male dilemma in the Western myth: the tension between devotion to the world of women and the world of men. Speaking to the sultry Helen Ramirez (Katy Jurado), a former lover of Kane’s, Amy makes one of the most famous statements in classic Westernson this theme: “I’ve heard guns. My father and my brother were killed by guns. They were on the right side but that did not help them any when the shooting started. My brother was 19. I watched him die. That is when I became a Quaker. I do not care who’s right or who’s wrong. There is got to be some better way for people to live.” Kelly’s ingenue blonde good looks and vacant-eyed lack of comprehension of the ways of the world serves as a contrast to the dark-haired seductress Helen. In the end, though, it is Amy who is forced to a decision and must take up a gun to save her husband’s life.

   In a continuation of her fairy tale Hollywood life, Grace Kelly went on to marry Prince Rainer of Monaco in 1956 and became Princess Grace.