Paula Farquharson on Grace Kelly: 'She really had her heart set on being in the arts and acting'

On the 69th wedding anniversary of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco, Gemma Fullam meets Paula Farquharson, the Dublin-born director of the Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco

The Princely Couple's visit to the Kelly family's ancestral homestead in the townland of Drimula in Co Mayo. Picture: Princess Grace Irish Library Archives.

When John Kelly left a Famine-ravaged Ireland for America around 1867, he could never have envisaged that, almost 100 years later, his granddaughter would return to his home county of Mayo as a world-famous movie star and royal princess.

The state visit of Princess Grace and Prince Rainier III to Ireland in June of 1961 was highly significant. It mattered to Grace as it fulfilled her dream of connecting with her roots — “More than anything else in the world, I want to see Mayo, the county I think of as my own,” she’d said — and it was historically important as it marked the first ever visit by a head of state to these shores.