And now, a heartwarming story that harkens back to Old Hollywood days, about Grace Kelly and one of her last co-stars, Cary Grant. In a new interview with People, one of Kelly’s children, Prince Albert of Monaco, recalls his days growing up with his mother. He remembers the Oscar-winning actress as a “loving and caring hands-on mom.” He speaks of her famous transition from Hollywood marquees to Monaco royalty, after she famously forfeited acting to marry Monaco’s Prince Rainier III: “Coming to live here and having to behave in a certain way must have been hard for her at first,” Prince Albert tells the magazine. “But I never heard her complain.” He speaks of her classic style: “Some days if she was having a bad hair day, she would put on a turban or a scarf.” But most fascinatingly, he speaks of how, even after Kelly settled down thousands of miles away from Hollywood, Cary Grant—Kelly’s dashing co-star in To Catch a Thief—made a point of visiting her on several occasions.
Prince Albert tells People (via Daily Mail), that he remembers Grant visiting the entire family in Monaco, gifting them with both the Cary Grant charm and, as it turns out, dirty jokes—even to Kelly’s three children, who were quite young at the time. Grant would tell “dirtier ones with Dad,” Prince Albert remembers. And he is quick to endorse Grant as the kind of classy leading man you’d expect him to be. “But he was always a gentleman,” Prince Albert adds.
This is not the first documentation of Cary Grant’s predilection for R-rated punch lines. In the actor’s biography Evenings with Cary Grant: Recollections in His Own Words and by Those Who Knew Him Best, Grant’s friend Bea Shaw told author Nancy Nelson, “Cary and Prince Ranier would call one another and tell dirty jokes. Some of Cary’s jokes were really raunchy.” Gregory Peck further confirmed, “Cary told the funniest stories, with southern accents, ethnic accents—any kind of accent. Dirty ones, too. You’d never think those things would come out of him.” As for an example, here is a poem, that according to the memoir, was a Cary Grant favorite: “They bought me a box of tin soldiers. / I threw all the Generals away. / I smashed up the Sergents and Majors. / Now I play with my Privates all day.”
Even though the photogenic duo only co-starred together in one film, Grant later went on record stating that, after acting in more than 70 films, Grace Kelly was his favorite leading lady. Per The Los Angeles Times, Grant was put on the spot with the “favorite co-star” question during a 1985 Q&A. His answer: “Well, with all due respect to dear Ingrid Bergman,” he said of his Notorious co-star, “I much preferred Grace. She had serenity.”
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