Grace Kelly

Grace Kelly rose from a brief career as a New York model and stage actress to major Hollywood stardom in just a few years during the early 1950s, becoming closely associated with Alfred Hitchcock, who directed her in three films between 1954 and 1955. Her cool, poised screen persona made her one of the defining leading women of the decade despite a career that lasted barely five years. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for "The Country Girl" (1954), a dramatic role that stood apart from the glamorous parts for which she was better known, beating Judy Garland's widely favored performance in "A Star Is Born" that year. In 1955, while filming "To Catch a Thief" on location in the south of France with Cary Grant, Kelly met Prince Rainier III of Monaco; she married him in April 1956 in a globally televised ceremony and retired from acting to become Princess of Monaco, ending her film career at its peak. She died in a car accident in Monaco in 1982.