Inside Grace Kelly’s Glamorous Royal Wedding: Photos

To audiences today, Grace Kelly is often remembered as Princess Grace of Monaco. But before becoming royalty, Kelly was one of the biggest movie stars of the 1950s, epitomizing elegance and glamour in films like Shane, Rear Window and The Country Girl—for which she won an Academy Award.

While traveling to Cannes in 1955, Kelly was offered the chance to meet Prince Rainier III of Monaco by fellow film star Olivia de Havilland. A string of mishaps—including a minor car accident en route to the meeting—nearly derailed the encounter, but the pair ultimately met and hit it off. After eight months of correspondence and courtship, Rainier proposed.

When the two eventually got married on April 18, 1956, it was described as “the wedding of the century” and the “world’s most-anticipated” betrothal. On the surface, it was the culmination of what many people perceived as a fairy tale. “It would have been like if Beyoncé married Prince William,” says fashion historian Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell.

Kelly’s established star power merged seamlessly with Monaco’s mystique and glamour. “Monaco is one of those places that looms very large in people’s minds, because it is, for at least a century, a vacation place for wealthy people and has this amazing allure,” says Diana Kemppainen, president of the Grace Kelly Foundation.

The engagement sparked an immediate media frenzy surrounding the couple’s upcoming wedding. A formal press conference was held at the Philadelphia Country Club in Kelly’s hometown, followed by a celebratory ball at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. MGM, Kelly’s longtime film studio, even got in on stoking wedding fever.

Countless brands clamored to be associated with the upcoming royal wedding, eager to capitalize on the worldwide fascination surrounding Kelly and Rainier. Cosmetics giant Max Factor publicly claimed its brand would provide Kelly’s wedding-day makeup—which Kelly denied. Her bridal makeup was done by MGM’s trusted beauty team, including famed hairstylist Sydney Guilaroff, reinforcing the close connection between Kelly’s Hollywood image and her transformation into royalty.

Movie studios were also eager to capitalize on the wedding. In Kelly’s final film, the 1956 musical High Society, she wore one of her real engagement rings on screen. “The original engagement ring [Rainier] gave her was not that ring,” Kemppainen says. “It was a ruby and diamond ring to represent the colors of Monaco. But then she was doing this film, and she was going to wear an engagement ring. He was like, ‘I want you to wear mine.’ So he bought her that second Cartier piece. That became her second engagement ring, which is now iconic.”

Kelly was already regarded as a fashion icon before her wedding, but her Helen Rose-designed bridal dress became one of the most influential wedding gowns ever created. The dress—housed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art today—has become inseparable from Kelly’s image. “It was designed to be seen on television,” Chrisman-Campbell says. “It’s got a lot of detail around the neck. Her veil is off her face so you can see her face beautifully. It’s got this long train because it is in a cathedral, and it had to match the scale of the setting. [It is] this triumph of the costume designer’s art. They really did approach it like they were making a movie.”

The dress set a standard for other famous royal wedding dresses, explains Chrisman-Campbell. “If you look at Kate Middleton’s wedding dress it had a very similar style, very similar construction,” she says. “Grace Kelly was instrumental in forming that model.”

The wedding was broadcast live to more than 30 million viewers across dozens of countries, transforming Kelly and Rainier’s nuptials into one of the first truly global media spectacles. MGM filmed the ceremony in both black-and-white and color so it could later be shown in movie theaters, further blurring the line between royal event and Hollywood production.

Eighty guests attended the ceremony—24 of them representing different nations—including Aristotle Onassis, Cary Grant, Gloria Swanson, Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra. The mix of international power players and Hollywood’s A-list made it a highly exclusive social event.

The sheer amount of attention on the wedding coupled with the grandeur of the event left the couple feeling overwhelmed by the end. Kelly inherited a whopping 142 titles, all of which were read out during the ceremony. Becoming Princess of Monaco also meant the end of Kelly’s Hollywood career. “It’s well documented that the people of Monaco did not want her to continue in an acting career,” Kemppainen says. Despite offers from acclaimed directors including Alfred Hitchcock, Kelly never returned to the big screen.

“She was just such a style icon and such an international beauty and celebrity,” Chrisman-Campbell says. “She’s in the same category as Taylor [Swift and] Audrey Hepburn.” Kelly’s enduring mystique, she argues, also stems from the fact that she died at the age of 52 in a car accident. “We didn’t really see her age, and there’s still that kind of romantic association with her. She was the fairy princess, the commoner, the American who married a prince—just like in Cinderella.”

That combination of Hollywood celebrity and real-life royalty is what continues to make the wedding so compelling decades later. “It’s much more than just another celebrity wedding,” Chrisman-Campbell says. “It’s the royal wedding, and the celebrity wedding at once. It’s very hard to resist the allure of that.”