Prince Albert II of Monaco paid tribute to his mother Grace Kelly on Tuesday night on the 40th anniversary of her disappearance by attending a screening of The hand on the necklacefilmed in 1954 by Alfred Hitchcock.
This film, starring Grace Kelly alongside Cary Grant, is being screened at the city’s cinematheque as part of a retrospective of the eleven films made by the late Princess of Monaco. A hundred spectators attended this session to which the current sovereign of the Principality had been invited by the city of Nice.
“My mother is beautiful in this film, to put it mildly, and then there are superb images that evoke Monaco and the Côte d’Azur, and it is also a beautiful story,” Prince Albert explained after the session, which he had chosen himself. to review this feature film, trusting that until now he had “seen The Train Will Whistle Three Times more times”.
“Perhaps the role she was most proud of was the one she played in a country girlwhere perhaps it was least expected”, Albert II also told the public. This role earned Grace Kelly an Oscar in Hollywood.
“Everyone knows the Princess of Monaco by heart, but not everyone necessarily knows the actress, so I wanted the Nice Cinematheque to pay tribute to the Princess of Hollywood,” said writer and journalist Henry-Jean Servat, also cinema assistant in the city of Nice.
Mainly produced on the Côte d’Azur
The eleven films starring Grace Kelly were shot in the space of five years, between 1951 and 1956, before the latter, who became Princess of Monaco after her marriage to Prince Rainier, stopped collaborating with the cinema.
After her marriage, other film proposals were made to her, in particular from Alfred Hitchcock for his thriller No spring for Marnie. “She wanted this adventure, but in the end reason prevailed,” Prince Albert said.
The hand on the neck it was mostly produced on the Côte d’Azur in 1954. The costume ball in the final scene was shot at the Victorine Studios in Nice, which lent the chairs used by Grace to the Cinémathèque for the occasion. Kelly, Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock during filming.
Prince Albert lent himself to the game of photographers by posing in front of these pieces presented in the cinema library for the occasion. They are carefully kept in the prop store of these film studios that the city of Nice, which took them over to him, is trying to revive.
Source: BFM TV
