Sixty-three years ago this month, Grace Kelly appeared on stage at the U-M’s Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre. Kelly was twenty-one, and her first movie, Fourteen Hours, had come out just two months earlier; she was more than a year away from her breakthrough role opposite Gary Cooper in High Noon.
In the meantime, she took on a role in the Ann Arbor Drama Season’s production of Ring Round the Moon. The Ann Arbor News gave the opening night a glowing review, but, after accounting for nearly everyone else in the show, included only a single comment about the future star’s performance: “Grace Kelly playing Isabelle, a beautiful ballet dancer, and Boris Marshalov, a melancholy millionaire … teamed for one of the play’s many comic highlights.”
A 1999 Observer article by Grace Shackman told the history of the Drama Series, which ran from 1929 to the late 1950s. The late Ted Heusel directed its later years. Along with Kelly’s appearance, he recalled productions that included Charlton Heston in Macbeth and E.G. Marshall in The Crucible.
