The year was 1955, and Grace Kelly’s name was a familiar fixture on marquees, with recent turns in Rear Window and Dial M for Murder. At the Academy Awards in March—less than two months before a chance meeting with Prince Rainier of Monaco during the Cannes Film Festival would change the trajectory of her life—Kelly took the podium to accept an Oscar for best actress in the film The Country Girl. Her speech was heartfelt, if reserved. “The thrill of this moment keeps me from saying what I really feel,” she said, wearing an ice-blue satin dress by the costume designer Edith Head. “I can only say thank you with all my heart to all who made this possible for me. Thank you.”
Seventy years later, in the gilded ballroom of the Plaza Hotel, another ceremony corralled a group of artists—this time with awards named after Princess Grace herself. The occasion on Wednesday evening was the annual gala for the Princess Grace Foundation-USA, an organization launched in 1982 in her memory. (President Reagan, who understood a career pivot, hosted the first gala at the White House in 1984.) Though Princess Grace retired from acting following her 1956 wedding—itself a cinematic spectacle broadcast by MGM in exchange for a release from her contract—she remained a quiet benefactor and mentor to a cohort of artists, knowing how hard the creative road could be.
“She told me once that she had just under 250—because she kept a record—interviews and auditions before she got her first paying job,” says John Lehman, the chairman of the foundation’s board, in a joint conversation with Princess Grace’s son, Prince Albert II. She grew up in Philadelphia with two uncles from the theater world: the vaudevillian Walter Kelly and the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright George Kelly. Decades later, she would invite musicians and dancers to Monaco, along with old friends like Cary Grant. “I remember seeing Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn perform right in the palace courtyard as an eight-year-old, so that tends to make an impression,” says Prince Albert II. (He’s taking his 10-year-old twins to see Cats at the national opera house next month.) His mother wanted to be remembered, above all, as “a decent and caring human being,” the monarch says. In that spirit, “we’ve been steadfast in that commitment to help promising young artists.”
The foundation’s focus on dance, theater, and film—three art forms that center the kaleidoscope of human experience—stands out in a tech-driven era increasingly marked by social isolation. At the same time, the performing arts are particularly vulnerable amid a deep slash in federal funding. In a way, as if mirroring Princess Grace’s footholds on either side of the Atlantic, the foundation lifts up American-style heterogeneous creativity using the supportive infrastructure we typically associate with Europe. (The grants for the various honorees range from $1,500 to an unrestricted $25,000.) The evening’s soundtrack also reflected the cultural split: a trumpeting “Hymne Monégasque” for the all-rise arrival of His Serene Highness, and Chappell Roan’s “Hot to Go!” for the wise-cracking auctioneer.
The evening itself played out across stage and screen. A video montage introduced the 2025 class of rising artists—18 Princess Grace Award winners and 12 honoraria recipients—with glimpses of work that spanned claymation, contemporary dance, and experimental theater. The Statue Award went to two previous Princess Grace winners now in the swing of their careers: the artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka and the American Ballet Theatre principal Isabella Boylston.
Hopinka, whose work has been shown at the Whitney Biennial, MoMA, and Sundance, told the audience how much it meant to him to be recognized in 2015, then an MFA student in Wisconsin. “I still have the microphone and the sound recorder that I bought with that money,” he said. “It was just so integral to me, feeling independent and having agency in the work that I make.”
Boylston, who grew up in Idaho without a ballet company in her hometown, described how her mother (proudly filming from her seat) would take her to the library to check out VHS tapes. “My favorite film was called The Children of Theater Street, and it was about the aspiring young dancers of the Vaganova Academy in St. Petersburg,” Boylston said. The narrator was Princess Grace herself: “She was kind of part of my psyche,” the dancer adds by phone. For her, even the application process for her 2009 Princess Grace Award was rewarding, as it prompted her to take on new solos: one from George Balanchine’s Divertimento No. 15, and another that she worked on with the late Georgina Parkinson, a British ballerina who her coach at the time. “[The award] came at a point in my career when I was just starting out,” Boylston says, “and I think that vote of confidence really helped to nurture me.”
Still, the gala’s unofficial theme, not apparent in the white roses and grilled branzino, was most definitely Wicked, in honor of the Prince Rainier III Award winner, Jon M. Chu. In a call ahead of the gala, the director—who rocketed to fame with Crazy Rich Asians before tackling the two-part Oz tale—explains how his 2001 Princess Grace Award funded an ambitious senior thesis, complete with a 20-piece orchestra, a choir, and dancers. The musical that resulted was the “thing that unlocked my whole career,” he says. Agents and managers saw it; Steven Spielberg did too. “When you are the recipient of generosity as a young artist, you don’t forget it because you need it so badly,” says Chu, who now sits on the foundation’s board of trustees.
Back in the ballroom, the musical theater veteran Jessica Vosk, who had a nearly yearlong run as Elphaba on Broadway, sang a medley from Wicked. The auctioneer peddled a pair of tickets to next month’s New York premiere of Wicked: For Good, with Chu sweetening the pot: “I will grab you by the hand on that carpet, and I will walk you to whoever we see and get you in there!” It sold for $55,000. Bowen Yang, who explained that Chu cast him in the Wicked films despite “bravely” forgoing an audition, was a presenter alongside the musical’s composer and lyricist, Stephen Schwartz. The costume designer Paul Tazewell, who earned a historic Oscar win for his work on Wicked, was there too.
The Prince Rainier III Award comes with a $25,000 grant to a philanthropic organization of choice, which Chu opted to give back to the Princess Grace Foundation. He also brought along another token for Prince Albert II: a yellow brick filched from the Wicked set. The director, ever one to tie a story in a bow, told the gala crowd about the construction company run by Princess Grace’s father. Its tagline: “Kelly for Brickwork.”
As dessert plates and coffee cups rattled, scenes from Princess Grace’s well-known films flitted across the screens. Even though she retreated from the industry, she still kept up company. Prince Albert II remembers traveling to California to visit Alfred Hitchcock in the summer of 1967, not yet a 10-year-old. Another time, he and his mother watched To Catch a Thief in the palace movie theater. “It was kind of strange to be sitting next to her and watching her onscreen,” he says of that double identity made manifest.
“She knew as a reigning princess she could not go back to Hollywood,” Lehman says—despite “being besieged by famous directors and producers to come back.” But really, like so many actors, “she missed her theater days,” says Prince Albert II. Princess Grace eventually found her own way back, giving poetry readings in the last years of her life. Lehman, who sometimes joined her on tour, remembers a nourishing exchange between audience and performer: “It just really opened her up.”
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