1956 Grace Kelly marries Prince Rainier

American actress Grace Kelly marries Prince Rainier of Monaco in a spectacular ceremony.

Kelly, the daughter of a former model and a wealthy industrialist, began acting as a child. After high school, she attended the American Academy for Dramatic Arts in New York. While she auditioned for Broadway plays, she supported herself by modeling and appearing in TV commercials.

In 1949, she debuted on Broadway in The Father by August Strindberg. Two years later, she landed her first Hollywood bit part, in Fourteen Hours . Her big break came in 1952, when she starred as Gary Cooper's wife in High Noon . Her performance in The Country Girl, as the long-suffering wife of an alcoholic songwriter played by Bing Crosby, won her an Oscar in 1954. The same year, she played opposite Jimmy Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window .

While filming another Hitchcock movie, To Catch a Thief (1955), in the French Riviera, she met Prince Rainier of Monaco. It wasn't love at first sight for Kelly, but the prince initiated a long correspondence, which led to their marriage in 1956. She became Princess Grace of Monaco and retired from acting. She had three children and occasionally narrated documentaries. Kelly died tragically at the age of 52 when her car plunged off a mountain road by the Cote D'Azur in September 1982.

1929 First "Our Gang" film with sound debuts

Small Talk, the first "Our Gang" picture with sound, debuts on this day in 1929. Producer Hal Roach had started producing the Our Gang short comedies in 1922. The series' mischievous band of kids, later known as the "Little Rascals," quickly caught on with the public, especially after characters Spanky, Alfalfa, and Darla were added in the early 1930s. In 1938, Roach sold the Our Gang rights to MGM, which produced the shorts until 1944. In total, more than 100 Our Gang films were made.

1932 MGM signs Faulkner

The Hollywood Reporter states that William Faulkner, "a writer from the South," has been hired to write scripts for MGM. Although the author had already started producing his master works, including The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932), his novels did not earn him enough money to support his family, so he supplemented his income by working as a Hollywood screenwriter. Between 1932 and 1955, he co-wrote several acclaimed screenplays, including To Have and Have Not, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 and his Collected Stories (1950) won the National Book Award.

1953 All Star Revue ends