‘NEW GRACE KELLY’ A quiet celebrity in Hollywood

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33064, 3 November 1972, Page 5

‘NEW GRACE KELLY’ A quiet celebrity in Hollywood

(By

MARY KAYE)

When I first met Baroness Nina Van Pallandt 10 years ago, I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I stared so hard at her that she asked me: “Is anything wrong?”

Nothing was wrong. It was sheer unashamed envy, that was all. Every man in the room was drooling over her. And I was trying to find a flaw—one tiny flaw would have been enough—in that exquisite and perfect face. I couldn’t. And except for one or two tiny lines that could easily be passed as laughter lines, the beautiful singing Baroness—once half of Nina and Frederik, and now going it alone—is just as beautiful today at 40 as she was then.

What is more, she is busy making a new career for herself as a film star, at an age when most actresses are worried about being finished.

She has been the co-star with Elliot Gould and Sterling Hayden in a film called “The Long Goodbye,” and already in Hollywood they are calling her “the new princess of the screen.” “SPECIAL SOMETHING”

“She is fantastic,” says Robert Altman, who was the director of the film. “She is the new Grace Kelly—incredibly beautiful, elegant and coot And like Grace Kelly, she has that underlying ‘voom!’—that special something that will make her a star.”

She laughs at the plaudits and says: “I must say I adore working in films. I never thought I would, because I have done so much television work and I have never particularly cared for that. “The thing which really amuses me is that when I was younger and going through the hero-worshipping stage all young cinema fans go through. Sterling Hayden was my hero. I still think he’s pretty marvellous.” Of the actor-turned-singer, Richard Harris, with whom her name was linked not long ago, she just laughs and says: “He’s adorable; a fabulous man.” STILL SEES HUSBAND

But on the subject of any deep involvement in her personal life she is deliberately non-committal. She sees quite a bit of her husband, Frederik, now—they are separated but not divorced. It was in 1957 that they first met and began going out together. He was Dutch and, like her, blond and blue-eyed. He was as handsome as she was beautiful, and they were a very popular young couple at parties in Copenhagen where he would play his guitar and Nina would sing—mostly calypsos he had learned in Trinidad where he had studied tropical agriculture. “Everyone told us we ought to turn professional,” Nina told me, “but we never took the idea seriously until someone heard us and offered us a job in the Tivoli Gardens (Copenhagen’s most famous entertainment centre) for SNZ4 a night. “It seemed a lot of money, but we found it didn’t even cover the drinks we had to buy for our friends who came to see us. Often,” she laughed, “we were left without our fares home.” All the same, it was not long before bigger and better contracts were waved under their noses. There were concert tours, and soon the names of Nina and Frederik were known the world over. When their separation came, Frederik went off on a boat trip round the world, and has since turned to composing and writing poetry. Nina, of course, has gone on singing. THREE CHILDREN They have three children — a boy of 11 and two girls of nine and six — and, in spite of the break up, both are determined the children will not suffer. They share an ancient farmhouse in Ibiza where they spend as many holidays together as possible. For the rest of the time, the children live in Nina’s elegant house in London’s Chelsea or with their father in Rome.

“They have a marvellous life,” says Nina, “because they are very happy children and love travelling. What of her own future now that she has broken into films? She is still determined, she says, to go on with her singing. She is more in demand than ever.

Indeed, since her involvement as a witness in the case of Clifford Irving, and the Howard Hughes affair, offers have poured in from round the world. The story—although it surprised the world at the time —clearly did not worry her very much. Soon after the

■ story appeared, she made her i opening performance at a ■ glittering New York night- ; club and dedicated a song 1 “To someone who couldn’t be here tonight—and without ’ whose help neither would I. iTo Howard Hughes—God : bless him.”