Dial M For Murder: When Alfred Hitchcock Came Calling For Grace
The cinema classic was a door to a new audience - and an illicit love affair
The world was stunned when Princess Grace of Monaco died in a car accident in 1982, aged only 52. Her picture-postcard wedding to Prince Rainer had been headline news around the world - a true case of Hollywood royalty becoming actual royalty. Plenty of rumours have circulated in the years since her death about the actual reality of her marriage to the Prince that’s difficult to establish the truth from the scurrilous. With her looks - coolly ice-blonde with a regal bearing - and her iridescent talent, the former Grace Kelly has left us a cinematic legacy that was altogether too short, but nonetheless glittering. Her departure from the acting world at the tender age of 26 deprived us of knowing which roles she could have conquered.
The former model had made her big screen debut in Fourteen Hours in 1951 but certain stardom came the following year with her role in High Noon (1952). Her role in Mogambo with Clarke Gable and Ava Gardner in 1953 led to her being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, eventually winning the Best Actress statuette for 1954’s The Country Girl. Her rise to the top was meteoric - no-one could resist the gorgeous blonde who represented, for many, the ideal woman - graceful, beautiful, elegant, poised and reserved.
It has been reported that Grace was interested in the title role in Alfred Hitchcock’s psycho-drama Marnie after her marriage and was keen to take this forward, only for it to be ruled out by courtiers, who considered the subject-matter undignified for a royal of her status. The film was eventually made with Tippi Hedren in the lead role in 1964, to baffled viewers, though it has been revisited and reappraised in years since. But Grace and Hitchcock were old friends - they made a total of three films together - To Catch a Thief, Rear Window, and their first collaboration Dial M for Murder.
With Grace Kelly, Hitchcock’s blonde ideal was beyond satisfied. He promptly cast her in the movie as Margot Wendice, the unfaithful wife whose husband seeks to murder in a plot that’s as brutal as any horror movie. Ray Milland was cast as the vengeful husband Tony, an elegant loafer whose lifestyle is enhanced by his wife’s money. Milland had been hot property following his Best Actor Oscar win for the harrowing The Lost Weekend in 1945, and had made a varied range of career choices in the years between then and Dial M for Murder. He was ideal to play the louche ex-tennis pro Tony whose competition is the rather less compelling Mark Halliday played by Roberts Cummings, and in a tale as old as time, Milland fell in love with his leading lady. Which was difficult for everyone concerned as Milland had been married to his wife Muriel (Mal) since 1932.
In a feature in British Vogue Hayley Maitland touches upon the fall out from this event, which had the misfortune of happening when the moral majority would frown upon an extra-marital affair in the showbiz world. Referring to Kelly, Maitland says
Her reputation simultaneously nosedived, with the press labelling her a husband thief. (Kelly’s previous on-set relationships with her High Noon co-star Gary Cooper as well as Gable were also covered salaciously in the papers.) Naturally, her male partners never experienced the same degree of vilification by the media.
With only four years behind her belt in Hollywood, Grace was already seeking a way out, away from the noise and glare of the cameras, and the name calling and tutting behind her back, and even worse, to her face. It was Grace’s intention that she and Milland should marry - she, like he, had fallen deeply in love - but this plan never materialised. Milland returned to his wife and children with his tail between his legs. Dial M for Murder, whilst never quite reaching the top-tier, became a Hitchcock staple. Kelly and Hitchcock made two more films together, one of which - Rear Window became a firm critical and fan favourite. Grace, feeling that the misogynistic, hypocritical world of Hollywood was not for her - a woman who loved sex and pursued her passions in a similar way to men - began to seek further afield to find her true happiness. Whether she ever truly found it is questionable.
Sources and further reading
http://jamesspadashollywood.blogspot.com/2013/02/grace-kelly-and-ray-millands-affair.html#:~:text=He%20was%20particularly%20susceptible%20to,effort%20to%20conceal%20their%20romance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Kelly
https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/Daily_Mirror_(14/Apr/2007)_-_Grace_Kelly_Exposed
https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/grace-kelly-documentary
Quote of the Week
“Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.”
― Orson Welles