The Monaco royal family did not take kindly to Nicole Kidman immortalising their mother Grace Kelly in last year’s Grace of Monaco, labelling Olivier Dahan’s featherweight biopic “pointlessly glamorised” and “historically inaccurate”.
Now Prince Albert II is to bring his own story of heroic royal endeavour to the big screen, based on the story of Monaco’s first ever bobsled team, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Titled Royal Ice, the movie will chart the then heir to the throne’s determined efforts to convince his reluctant father of the benefits of bobsledding, which resulted in the prince competing in five straight Olympic games between 1988 and 2002. Albert and Mark Thomas, a member of the original Monaco bobsled team founded in 1986, have come up with the story, while the latter will write the screenplay.
“This is the first royal fairy tale which tells the true story of a sitting monarch, where the human drive for achievement becomes a battle with one’s own limits, amplified by the constraints of royal duties,” said Sergei Bespalov of production and sales company Aldamisa in a statement. The film will be touted to potential investors at the Berlin film festival’s European Film Market this week, with Albert hoping to begin production in November. The prince himself described the project as a “very unique and personal story”.
Albert, the current ruling monarch of the Mediterranean principality, issued a joint statement with Princess Caroline and Princess Stephanie denouncing Grace of Monaco in 2013. “We have had absolutely no association with this project, which claims to be about the lives of our parents,” the royal trio said.
“For us, this film does not constitute a biographical work but portrays only a part of her life and has been pointlessly glamorised and contains important historical inaccuracies as well as scenes of pure fiction.”
Royal Ice will presumably veer closer to reality, and there is a Hollywood precedent for tales of unlikely winter Olympics success. The 1993 film Cool Runnings documented the real life story of the Jamaica national bobsleigh team’s debut at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, where they would have come up against Prince Albert and his men.
