Grace Kelly
If Hollywood can become the materialization of dreams of fortune and glory, the case of Grace Patricia Kelly went one step further: from making her debut in 'Alone in the Face of Danger (1952) at the hands of Fred Zinnemann and Gary Cooper to becoming Hitchcock's muse ('Perfect Crime', 1954; 'Rear Window', 1954; 'To Catch a Thief', 1955) there was only one step ('Mogambo', John Ford, 1953), and when we wanted to give account, Kelly renounced the fairy tale to become a true princess, marrying Raniero III of Monaco.
Her life was tragically cut short on September 14, 1982, in a terrible car accident on the same road near the Principality where three decades earlier she had challenged Cary Grant in the aforementioned 'Catch a Thief'.
Vivien Leigh
Was there life before Scarlett O'Hara? Yes: almost a dozen films covered Vivien Leigh's resume before she dropped by the set of 'Gone with the Wind' (Victor Fleming, 1939), but it was undoubtedly the megalomaniac and tremendous adaptation of the novel of Margaret Mitchell the one that raised him to the altars of Hollywood.
And that she was rejected from the first castings and it was difficult to convince her partner, Clark Gable. Leigh would pleasantly surprise locals and strangers thanks to 'Waterloo Bridge' (Mervyn LeRoy, 1940), 'César y Cleopatra' ( Gabriel Pascal, 1945), 'Anna Karenina' (Julien Duvivier, 1948), and, mainly, 'A Streetcar Named Desire' (Elia Kazan, 1951): his overwhelming Blanche Dubois would give him the second Oscar of his career. She would still make four more films, perhaps less remembered, before dying in 1967, at the age of 53, a victim of tuberculosis.
Kim Novak
At the beginning of the fifties, she began to forge a career based on small roles in minor films, until "Picnic" (Joshua Logan, 1955) and "The Man with the Golden Arm" (Otto Preminger, 1955) stood out. Hitchcock was so taken with her on the set of 'Vertigo.
From the Dead (1958) he wanted to make her the new Grace Kelly of her, but Kim Novak would not work with the filmmaker again. 'I fell in love with a witch' (Richard Quine, 1958), 'In the middle of the night' (Delbert Mann, 1959), 'The mysterious lady in black' (Quine, 1962), 'Kiss me, fool' (Billy Wilder, 1964) or 'Moll Flanders' (Terence Young, 1965) are some of his best-remembered roles, before almost disappearing in the universe of third-tier TV-movies. She still had a celebrated comeback on the television show 'Falcon Crest' during the second half of the 1980s. Retired from show business in 1991, she currently lives with her husband on a horse ranch in Oregon.
