Grace KELLY

She was the screen queen who became royalty, only to die far too soon. On the 40th anniversary of the death of the Princess of Monaco, Kylie Walters looks back on her story

It was a story worthy of any script floating around Hollywood when the blonde, blue-eyed, all-American girl next door went on to become the silver screen's biggest star before abandoning it all to be whisked away to a far-off land and live happily ever after. But that's where any resemblance between Grace Kelly's life and a romantic fairytale ends. In the years following her 1956 wedding to Prince Rainier III of Monaco, Kelly would suffer from loneliness and frustration as she struggled to be accepted by the people of her husband's principality. "The idea of my life as a fairytale is a fairytale itself," she once confessed.

There is, however, one tale from her life that reads as if straight out of a storybook, albeit more of a tale of horror from the Brothers Grimm than our modern adaptations of Cinderella. During its 700-year reign, the Grimaldi family has suffered from short-lived marriages and untimely deaths. Legend has it that in the 13th century the ancestor of Kelly's husband, Prince Rainier I, abducted a Flemish woman who cursed his descendants. "Never will a Grimaldi find happiness in marriage," she is said to have decreed. As Kelly lost control of the car she was driving and plunged from a cliff, suffering head injuries that would claim her life at age 52, that prophecy certainly seemed to have come true for another generation of Grimaldis.

Grace Patricia Kelly was born on November 12, 1929, to an affluent Irish Catholic family in Philadelphia. Her father, John B Kelly, was a self-made millionaire who started a bricklaying company after winning three Olympic gold medals for rowing. Her mother, Margaret Majer, worked as a model and PE instructor and became the first director of women's athletics at the University of Pennsylvania.