Grace Kelly

The top female box-office star of 1954, Grace Kelly's status as icon takes in an 11-film, three-year, screen career and a glamorous later life as Princess of Monaco. More than any other star, she was in three memorable films the quintessential Hitchcock blonde, delineating traits of cool beauty, depths of hidden passion, intelligence, playfulness, and style- in short, the qualities that led biographer James Spada to call her “the pious man's Marilyn.” Yet Grace Kelly also showed her versatility and won her acting honors for playing against type in the title role in the grimly realistic movie The Country Girl. Grace Kelly was a classic beauty, a public figure, and serious actress representative of an era.

The Movie Icon series: People talk about Hollywood glamour, about studios that had more stars than there are in heaven, about actors who weren't actors but were icons. Other people talk about these things, TASCHEN shows you. Movie Icons is a series of photo books that feature the most famous personalities in the history of cinema. These 192-page books are visual biographies of the stars. For each title, series editor Paul Duncan has painstaking selected approximately 150 high quality enigmatic and sumptuous portraits, colorful posters and lobby cards, rare film stills, and previously unpublished candid photos showing the stars as they really are. These images are accompanied by concise introductory essays by leading film writers; each book also includes a chronology, a filmography, and a bibliography, and is peppered with apposite quotes from the movies and from life.