Grace Kelly (12 November 1929 – 14 September 1982) was an American actress who became Princess of Monaco after her marriage to Prince Rainier III in 1956. Rainier proposed with a ruby and diamond eternity band in the colours of Monaco. Shortly after, he commissioned a second ring from Cartier London: a 10.47-carat rectangular emerald-cut diamond flanked by two baguettes. She wore this diamond in her final film, High Society, which was released in the same year as the wedding.
The Cartier Connection
The rings were made by Cartier London under Jean-Jacques Cartier, who ran the London branch from the 1950s through the early 1970s. The commission was one of the most publicised of the decade, partly because of Kelly's public profile as an actress and partly because her engagement to the Prince of Monaco carried the kind of transatlantic celebrity interest that was relatively new at the time.
The broader story of her Cartier pieces, including the ruby ring that came first, is explored in detail in Grace Kelly's Cartier Engagement Rings. What the Grace Kelly commission reflects is the position Cartier occupied in the postwar decades as the jeweller for significant life events across royal, aristocratic, and entertainment worlds that had come to overlap with one another. Earlier screen figures including Gloria Swanson had been Cartier clients since the 1920s, but Kelly's commission marked a new intensity of public attention.
Later Pieces
Grace Kelly continued to wear Cartier pieces as Princess of Monaco, and her association with the firm extended beyond the engagement rings. Her name appears in accounts of several pieces connected to official Monaco occasions in the years following the wedding. The pieces associated with her name have remained among the most studied examples of the firm's mid-century work, and they appear regularly in exhibition catalogues and auction records when other pieces of the period are being contextualised.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 10 ("Cousins in Austerity, 1945–1956")
- Wikipedia: Grace Kelly
