Co Down writer Brian Hollywood has taken on the pen name Jude Quillan for his thrilling Grace Kelly novel The Comeback.
He talks to Brian Campbell
IT'S fair to say that Grace of Monaco - the biopic of the late actress Grace Kelly, with Nicole Kidman in the lead role - got a critical mauling on its release in May.
The film followed the Hollywood star turned Princess of Monaco having a crisis of marriage and identity and hones in on a dispute between her husband Prince Rainier III and French premier Charles de Gaulle - as well as Grace mulling over a return to Hollywood in the Hitchcock film Marnie.
Grace of Monaco was roundly panned and scored 21 out of 100 on Metacritic.com, the website that compiles critics' reviews and calculates the average rating.
The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw summed up the chorus of critical disapproval when he described Grace of Monaco as being "so awe-inspiringly wooden that it is basically a fire-risk".
No doubt such damning reviews are the stuff of nightmares for anyone writing a part-fact but mostly-fiction novel about Grace Kelly - but thankfully London-based Co Down writer Brian Hollywood's effort The Comeback is a rip-roaring thriller.
Grace Kelly made her name in films including Rear Window, Dial M For Murder, High Noon, To Catch a Thief and High Society and she won an Oscar for her role in Country Girl (1954).
Yet after she married Prince Rainier in 1956, the Hollywood star became a full-time princess and left acting behind her.
She died in September 1982 aged 52 after suffering a minor stroke and losing control of her car as she was driving to Monaco.
Hollywood's novel, written under the nom de plume Jude Quillan, poses questions about why Grace left the movie business behind.
He invents a page-turning plot that takes in Hitchcock, the Vatican and the Kremlin as Grace sets out to solve a mystery that almost proves fatal.
It is set during her last year and the 'comeback' in the title comes from the fact that a host of directors had been desperate to get Grace to return to the silver screen.
Hollywood/Quillan had been in the middle of writing a thriller when his brother Peter, also a writer, gave him the idea for his book's protagonist. "I was in the south of France and I think it was the 25th anniversary of her death, so 2007, and all the magazines had her on the front covers," he says. "Peter said to me 'Why not write your thriller about Grace Kelly? She's a 20th century icon'. "She won an Oscar and she wasn't just a pretty face, but a clever and intuitive actress too. Yet all those magazines asked why she doesn't have the same shelf life as Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor. She's almost the forgotten star. "I was always interested in her because she was so successful and then gave up. the rest of her life. Was she bored and unhappy? And then I thought, 'What if she had this crazy escapade?'"
As well as Grace setting off on a deadly mission behind the Iron Curtain, the novel sees her retreating to her house in the west of Ireland.
Hollywood is fascinated by the star's love of Ireland, which even saw her founding the world's largest foreign library of Irish literature, The James Joyce Centre in Monte Carlo. "She really had read Ulysses and understood it," explains Hollywood.
"Anthony Burgess said that she was one of the few readers he would trust to send a first draft to. There weren't that many blonde Hollywood actresses who had such a big intellect. "One of the things I made up in the book was her house in the west of Ireland - but she did actually plan to build a house there in order to spend more time in Ireland. "Even though her father kind of shunned his Irish identity, she had a real affinity for the place. She did poetry readings in Dublin and spent a lot of time there but her spiritual heartland was Mayo. She bought an island off the coast and I think her son still owns it."
Funnily enough, Hollywood says he hoped to write a book that someone could get lost in on a rainy day while on holiday in a cottage in the west of Ireland. "I actually set out to write a literary novel but then got so excited with this idea of writing a thriller that I thought 'Why not go hell for leather with it and try and write a real page-turner?' so I decided to put in as many twists and turns as I thought were believable. "There's a point in the book where Grace comes out of the palace and jumps on to the back of a moped with Andy Warhol and I thought 'Maybe I've gone too far' but it made me laugh. It's so far-fetched anyway."
Grace of Monaco's family were not impressed with the Olivier Dahan-directed film, so what does the writer think they would make of his book? "I hope they would think I have treated her with great respect. I invented rows with her husband but I didn't invent any of the relationships, so she knew absolutely everybody that's mentioned. She was friendly with Sinatra, Ava Gardner, Cary Grant, Alfred Hitchcock and Alec Guinness."
He says the fact that Grace could speak foreign languages, had a diplomatic passport, had lots of money and was a good actress meant that she was "the ideal thriller heroine". "She uses her intelligence and her acting ability to get out of tight spots. There's a cinematic thriller quality to it. "It's almost completely a work of fiction. A lot of people ask me which bits are true and I tell them that 99 per cent of it is made up."
Hollywood says he was aware of Grace Kelly from a young age. "She was an icon in Ireland and I'm old enough to remember when she died. Her funeral was on TV and I think the BBC changed its schedule on the night she died and put one of her big movies on. "I always had a real interest in old movies and the first Grace Kelly film I saw was High Noon. My favourite Hitchcock movie is Rear Window."
He explains why he took on the pen name Jude Quillan for the book. "I basically did it as I thought my surname for a novel about a Hollywood star was a bit too far-fetched."
And having seen the film Grace of Monaco, he said it was "a wasted opportunity". "The real story of Grace Kelly is far more interesting than what the film depicts. Nicole Kidman does a much better job than most other actresses would have done with a script as clunky as that. "It was dull and the last thing a film about Grace Kelly should be is dull. I do think there is another film to be made about her."
Perhaps one based on The Comeback? "Well, I couldn't possibly comment on that," he laughs. "Although in three years' time Nicole Kidman would be the right age..."
* The Comeback is available from Amazon (paperback and Kindle).
MAIN PICTURE: Mal McCann
* AUTHOR: Brian Hollywood.
Inset, Grace Kelly.