The Actress Who Gave Elvis Presley His First On-Screen Kiss Is Now A Nun

At the height of her career, Dolores Hart left all of her belongings behind and joined a monastery.

The 60s starlet co-starred with Elvis Presley in the 1957 film Loving You, which launched her career. It was his second film and first onscreen kiss. "I often wonder why the lord gave me such an opportunity to audition for Elvis. There were so many of us in line that day," she later said in a 2012 documentary about her life, God Is The Bigger Elvis.

She went on to star alongside Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and more in many other films — even appearing alongside Elvis a second time. Although she'd never dated Presley, according to 2018 profile on Hart in Vogue, rumors surfaced that she was pregnant with his baby, after she disappeared from the limelight. "Nothing could have been further from the truth," she told the magazine.

The real reason would be one that no one would be able to guess. Hart had renounced all of her belongings, cut her famous hair, and started the path of devotion to become a Roman Catholic nun. Mother Dolores Hart, now in her 80s, opened up about what it was like to change her life, which was on track to her becoming "the next Grace Kelly" — and why she did it.

In 1963, Hart was only 24 years old, when she decided to leave her Hollywood life behind. She'd had a studio contract with Paramount (a practice within the old studio system where studios would have actors under contract for a certain number of films). She told Vogue that she had to convince the Catholic powers that be that she was serious about leaving her old life behind, which required a lot of purging. "I couldn’t talk to the press, not even my mother, but they had to make sure I was for real," she said. "It was really sad, like what purgatory may be like."

Hart remembers that cutting her hair was one of the biggest sacrifices she made at the time. She told Vogue about when she'd refused to cut her hair for her role in the 1961 film Francis of Assisi. "My great-grandma used to say to me as she would brush her hair, ‘Don’t ever cut your hair, dear, until it’s really love.'"

“At the time, I just couldn’t do that for a movie — it had to be for something real.”

That something real would turn out to be Hart's devotion to God and monastery. In God Is The Bigger Elvis, Hart further opened up about why she made the choice. "I never felt that I was leaving Hollywood. I never felt that I was leaving anything I was given. The Abbey was like a grace of God that entered my life," Hart said, referring to the enclosed Benedictine monastery in Connecticut that she now calls home.

"Hollywood, in a sense, chose me because I had a serious of incredible strokes of luck," she said in the film's opening. Hart said that at the height of her fame, Warren Beatty wanted to open her contract with MGM and 20th Century Fox — which would have made her worth at least a million dollars — in the 60s.

"I was 19 and in the thresholds of the biggest career you could have," she continued. "I grew up fast."

Hart goes on to describe an "unstable" upbringing. Her parents were 17 and 18 years old, respectively. Her grandmother had wanted her to be aborted. But Hart grew up to be a relatively devout Catholic teen, even as her Hollywood career exploded. "Every day I was up at 6 a.m., whether I was working or not, to go to mass," she said in the film. "I prayed to be an actress, and I believed that God was on my side. Every role I got, I prayed for."

When a visit to the Abbey of Regina Laudis to clear her mind while performing a Broadway show brought her a feeling of peace, Hart couldn't get the experience out of her head.

Even as she returned to her career and her success continued to grow, "The thing that bothered me was that in the back of my mind, I was thinking about going to [the monastery]," she said. "What I loved about cloistered life was the capacity that it offered for true communion with God."

Ultimately Hart decided that the feeling she had there meant that the life of a nun was where she was meant to be, so she left everything else behind — including Elvis.

"The Abbey was like a grace of God that entered my life in a way that was totally unexpected. And God was the vehicle. He was the bigger Elvis."

In 2012, Hart released a book about her experiences called The Ear of the Heart.