Grace

Grace is a 157-page book of captioned photographs by Howell Conant, published by Random House in 1992 and about Grace Kelly. Open Library’s description says the pictures portray the film star and Princess of Monaco, starting at her wedding and ending with her death in 1982. Its subject headings are Princesses, Biography, Motion picture actors and actresses, and Princes. The book suits a reader who wants her years in Monaco shown in pictures by the man who took them, since Wikipedia’s article on Kelly says the photographs are Conant’s own, made during her 26 years as princess.

Open Library files the book as a biography, the label also carried by Robert Lacey’s Grace (1994, G.P. Putnam’s Sons) and Donald Spoto’s High society: the life of Grace Kelly (2009, Harmony Books), although its description names captioned photographs as the form. It appeared in the same year as Elizabeth Gillen Surcouf’s Grace Kelly, American princess (Lerner) and one year after Jane Ellen Wayne’s Grace Kelly’s men (1991, Random House Value Publishing). Earlier books on Kelly include Marjorie P. K. Weiser’s Grace Kelly (1970) and Gwen Robyns’s Princess Grace (1976, W.H. Allen). A reader searching by title will also find Lacey’s Grace and James Spada’s Grace: The Secret Lives of a Princess (1987, Dell), which are by different authors.

For fans

The photographer, as Wikipedia has it

Wikipedia’s article on Grace Kelly dates Conant’s work with her to 1955, when he photographed her in Jamaica without makeup and in a natural setting. The article calls this a break from the way actresses were usually shown. Collier’s published the results and put a shot of her coming up out of the water, hair wet, on its cover. After the marriage, the same article says, Conant became the Grimaldi family’s unofficial photographer and took many pictures of Grace, Prince Rainier and their three children. Neither Open Library’s description nor Wikipedia’s article says whether the Jamaica pictures appear in the 1992 book.

The library records

Google Books lists a 2007 German-language title under the same main title: Grace: ein Hollywood-Star wird Prinzessin ; die unveröffentlichten Photographien von Howell Conant. That record runs to 159 pages and names Kay Diehl and Ursula Wulfekamp alongside Conant as authors. Its subtitle announces a Hollywood star turned princess and Conant’s unpublished photographs, and the record does not say how its contents compare with the 1992 Random House book. Neither the Open Library record nor the Google Books record quotes a review or says what the captions contain, and little else is recorded about the book.