{"id":444294,"date":"2026-05-12T03:00:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T03:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/444294\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T03:00:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T03:00:10","slug":"the-irish-photographer-who-put-grace-kelly-and-prince-rainier-at-ease-in-early-courtship-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/444294\/","title":{"rendered":"The Irish photographer who put Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier at ease in early courtship \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

She was a Hollywood actress meeting her prince for the first time, but how did an Irishman capture the photograph of their encounter? <\/p>\n

Photographer Edward Quinn, from Dollymount in Dublin<\/a>, had a habit of being in the right place at the right time. With that in mind, it was no surprise when Paris Match asked him to photograph the first meeting between Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1955. <\/p>\n

There was hardly a movie star, artist or famous person who had not been photographed by the Dubliner when they visited the C\u00f4te d\u2019Azur. <\/p>\n

Quinn enjoyed a succession of careers before he discovered his skill for photography. Born in 1920, he became a jazz musician in Belfast<\/a> during the second World War<\/a>. He survived a German air raid when a church roof collapsed next to him, which inspired him to join the Royal Air Force, where he worked as a radio navigator.<\/p>\n

After the war, he worked as a navigator on charter planes between Europe<\/a> and Africa. During this period he met his future wife, Swiss woman Gret Sulser who was working in Monaco. He followed her there and returned to performing, calling himself Eddie Quinero, because he believed musicians in dance bands needed Italian names. <\/p>\n

The C\u00f4te d\u2019Azur \u2013 or French Riviera \u2013 was the playground for the rich and famous and he saw an opening for a photographer to document it all. He bought a camera, studied photography books and magazines and quickly carved out a niche for himself. From John Wayne to Brigitte Bardot, from Winston Churchill to Edith Piaf, he captured them all. <\/p>\n

He may even have helped Audrey Hepburn to secure her breakout role, according to his nephew Wolfgang Frei. During a recent talk at the Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco, Frei told how Quinn met Hepburn in Monaco in 1951 and was captivated by her beauty.<\/p>\n

Still relatively unknown, she agreed to a photo shoot and they drove to the village of \u00c8ze in his 1930 Mathis car to take the photographs. On their way back to Monaco, the car battery died and the future Oscar winner helped him to push the car until they reached the top of a hill. <\/p>\n

Afterwards, her agent sent the photographs to Paramount. Whether it was the photographs or Hepburn\u2019s Broadway performance in Gigi later that year, Paramount<\/a> called her for a screen test for Roman Holiday and her career took off. <\/p>\n

But back to Grace Kelly, who the photographer first met in 1954 when she was filming Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s To Catch a Thief on the French Riviera. She was at the Cannes Film Festival the following May when she was invited to meet Prince Rainier. But another car driven by Quinn could easily have scuttled everything and the couple might never have met. <\/p>\n

In a 2006 documentary on Quinn, produced by his nephew, the photographer recalled how the Hollywood star was driven to the palace in MGM\u2019s limousine while he followed behind in his trusty Peugeot 203. However, as they were leaving Cannes, the limousine took a sharp corner quickly and braked. He was following closely behind and crashed into the car.<\/p>\n

\u201cLumps of my car fell off the front bumper . . . they all got out and had a look. Nothing was wrong with their car so we all went on from there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

When the famous couple met, he recalled how they seemed nervous at first. He suggested going out to the palace garden for photographs. They became more relaxed as they walked around and the conversation flowed. <\/p>\n

Kelly was quiet as they left the palace and he said her only remark was: \u201cHe is charming, charming.\u201d The prince was so charming that she accepted his marriage proposal that Christmas and they were married within a year of that first meeting.<\/p>\n

Quinn was known for his candid photographs but as movie stars became more guarded, the chances of capturing those spontaneous moments reduced. He switched his focus to artists and spent more than 20 years documenting Pablo Picasso. He took more than 10,000 photographs over that period and published several books about the artist. <\/p>\n

He also photographed artists such as Louis le Brocquy, Anne Madden, Se\u00e1n Keating and Francis Bacon. <\/p>\n

Quinn\u2019s book, James Joyce\u2019s Dublin, in which he matched his photos of Dublin with selected writings from Joyce, was a personal favourite, his nephew says. He initially self-published it and financed the venture until it was picked up by a publisher in 1974. <\/p>\n

His archive is being kept alive by Frei and his wife Ursula through the website edwardquinn.com, where about 17,000 images can be viewed.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s his spontaneous and unguarded images from the C\u00f4te d\u2019Azur that will take you back to those halcyon days when future Oscar winners happily pushed broken-down cars and movie stars fell in love with princes. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"She was a Hollywood actress meeting her prince for the first time, but how did an Irishman capture…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":444295,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,61,60,8933],"class_list":["post-444294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-irish-diary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=444294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/444295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=444294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=444294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=444294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}