A fairytale turned sour?
Like moves in a well-rehearsed, if precarious, game of Dancing On Ice, Prince Albert of Monaco and the director of a new film about his mother, Grace Kelly, are squaring up to do battle over alleged inaccuracies in the script.
Albert made the opening gambit, complaining that this latest intrusion into Kelly’s life, starring Nicole Kidman and scheduled to be released in 2014, is a ‘pastiche of major historical untruths and a series of purely fictional scenes [recounting] one rewritten and needlessly glamorised page in the history of the Principality of Monaco and its family.’
Setting aside the issue of whether it’s even possible to over-glamorise the life of Grace Kelly, Olivier Dahan, director of this ‘pastiche’, essayed a clever feinting pass at the prince by putting his hand up to the historical inaccuracies, but insisting that they were irrelevant because his work is ‘not a biopic’.
‘I am not a journalist or historian. I am an artist,’ he lectured the French newspaper Le Journal de Dimanche. ‘I hate biopics. I have made a human portrait of a modern woman who wants to reconcile her family, her husband, her career, who gives up this career to invent another role.’
Grace Of Monaco, the title of Dahan’s movie, takes place during a six-month period in 1962; it portrays Grace Kelly as a mother with two children, who is already disenchanted with life in Monaco and the tyrannical rules and explosive temper of her husband, Prince Rainier. She has just been offered an escape route, however – the chance to star in Hitchcock’s new film Marnie. In the disputed script, Kelly is portrayed as the lonely and desperate victim of a loveless marriage who spends her days drinking heavily in her 235-room pink palace overlooking the Mediterranean.
She asks her trusted adviser, Father Francis Tucker, what will happen if she accepts the Hitchcock role and seeks a divorce? ‘Your children will suffer most,’ replies Tucker. ‘They are heirs to a European throne. You’ll be lucky to see them again. I suppose the world will also hang its head in disappointment’.
The film ends when Grace stumbles on evidence that Prince Rainier’s sister Antoinette is conspiring with Charles de Gaulle at Monaco’s annual society event, the Red Cross Ball, to seize control of Monaco in a coup and replace Rainier with her son Christian.
Grace Of Monaco hardly sounds like a sure-fire blockbuster, but back in the real world, the prince, with his two sisters, Caroline and Stephanie, have issued a joint statement saying that ‘we have had absolutely no association with this project, which claims to be about the lives of our parents… For us the film does not constitute a biographical work, but portrays only a part of her life and has been pointlessly glamorised and contains important historical inaccuracies as well as scenes of pure fiction.’
Nicole Kidman stars in the controversial new film, Grace Of Monaco
In addition, they say that their numerous requests for changes to be made to the script have been ignored.
Dahan insists that he neither needs the royal family’s permission, nor has he sought it. ‘We never asked them to endorse anything,’ he emphasises.
But he agrees about the pure fiction – that’s the filmmaking process, he explains. ‘Of course there are historical inaccuracies. General de Gaulle never set foot at the Red Cross Ball, but I need this stage to tell my story.’
Stuck in the middle of this unedifying row, Nicole Kidman who stars as Kelly, alongside a stellar cast, makes a timely intervention by revealing that what really interested her about the film was how it covered ‘Grace’s transition from film star to princess in 1962.
‘It shows her great humanity,’ Kidman notes, ‘but also her fears and frailties as she leaves her career behind.’
Kidman’s version of the film is the one that Princess Grace’s fans – and there are many of them – will find the most reassuring. Much like Princess Diana after her, the memory of the beautiful Philadelphia society blonde, her transformation into reallife princess and her early, tragic death in a car accident, is, not surprisingly, still revered worldwide.
Any intrusion into her life is thus bound to cause unease – not least because mystery still surrounds Kelly’s death. The official version of events states that the princess suffered a stroke while driving with her youngest daughter Stephanie in the passenger seat. But there have also been persistent, albeit entirely unfounded, rumours that it was 17-year-old Stephanie who may have been driving, which she has strenuously denied.
The royal family’s real fear about Dahan’s film may not be simply that it gives an historically inaccurate view of Kelly’s life, breaking a long-standing Hollywood taboo about portraying the realities of her marriage to the prince, but that it will open the floodgates for more potentially embarrassing projects in the future.
Albert made the opening gambit, complaining that this latest intrusion into Kelly’s life, starring Nicole Kidman and scheduled to be released in 2014, is a ‘pastiche of major historical untruths and a series of purely fictional scenes [recounting] one rewritten and needlessly glamorised page in the history of the Principality of Monaco and its family.’
Setting aside the issue of whether it’s even possible to over-glamorise the life of Grace Kelly, Olivier Dahan, director of this ‘pastiche’, essayed a clever feinting pass at the prince by putting his hand up to the historical inaccuracies, but insisting that they were irrelevant because his work is ‘not a biopic’.
‘I am not a journalist or historian. I am an artist,’ he lectured the French newspaper Le Journal de Dimanche. ‘I hate biopics. I have made a human portrait of a modern woman who wants to reconcile her family, her husband, her career, who gives up this career to invent another role.’
Grace Of Monaco, the title of Dahan’s movie, takes place during a six-month period in 1962; it portrays Grace Kelly as a mother with two children, who is already disenchanted with life in Monaco and the tyrannical rules and explosive temper of her husband, Prince Rainier. She has just been offered an escape route, however – the chance to star in Hitchcock’s new film Marnie. In the disputed script, Kelly is portrayed as the lonely and desperate victim of a loveless marriage who spends her days drinking heavily in her 235-room pink palace overlooking the Mediterranean.
She asks her trusted adviser, Father Francis Tucker, what will happen if she accepts the Hitchcock role and seeks a divorce? ‘Your children will suffer most,’ replies Tucker. ‘They are heirs to a European throne. You’ll be lucky to see them again. I suppose the world will also hang its head in disappointment’.
The film ends when Grace stumbles on evidence that Prince Rainier’s sister Antoinette is conspiring with Charles de Gaulle at Monaco’s annual society event, the Red Cross Ball, to seize control of Monaco in a coup and replace Rainier with her son Christian.
Grace Of Monaco hardly sounds like a sure-fire blockbuster, but back in the real world, the prince, with his two sisters, Caroline and Stephanie, have issued a joint statement saying that ‘we have had absolutely no association with this project, which claims to be about the lives of our parents… For us the film does not constitute a biographical work, but portrays only a part of her life and has been pointlessly glamorised and contains important historical inaccuracies as well as scenes of pure fiction.’
Nicole Kidman stars in the controversial new film, Grace Of MonacoIn addition, they say that their numerous requests for changes to be made to the script have been ignored.
Dahan insists that he neither needs the royal family’s permission, nor has he sought it. ‘We never asked them to endorse anything,’ he emphasises.
But he agrees about the pure fiction – that’s the filmmaking process, he explains. ‘Of course there are historical inaccuracies. General de Gaulle never set foot at the Red Cross Ball, but I need this stage to tell my story.’
Stuck in the middle of this unedifying row, Nicole Kidman who stars as Kelly, alongside a stellar cast, makes a timely intervention by revealing that what really interested her about the film was how it covered ‘Grace’s transition from film star to princess in 1962.
‘It shows her great humanity,’ Kidman notes, ‘but also her fears and frailties as she leaves her career behind.’
Kidman’s version of the film is the one that Princess Grace’s fans – and there are many of them – will find the most reassuring. Much like Princess Diana after her, the memory of the beautiful Philadelphia society blonde, her transformation into reallife princess and her early, tragic death in a car accident, is, not surprisingly, still revered worldwide.
Any intrusion into her life is thus bound to cause unease – not least because mystery still surrounds Kelly’s death. The official version of events states that the princess suffered a stroke while driving with her youngest daughter Stephanie in the passenger seat. But there have also been persistent, albeit entirely unfounded, rumours that it was 17-year-old Stephanie who may have been driving, which she has strenuously denied.
The royal family’s real fear about Dahan’s film may not be simply that it gives an historically inaccurate view of Kelly’s life, breaking a long-standing Hollywood taboo about portraying the realities of her marriage to the prince, but that it will open the floodgates for more potentially embarrassing projects in the future.