Meet the Hollywood Starlet Who Cut Off Her Bombshell Hair to Become a Roman Catholic Nun

They said she was going to be the next Grace Kelly, with her long blonde curls and big blue eyes and ability to work the lens opposite stars like Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and Elvis Presley. In fact, in the 1957 film Loving You, the rising actress gave the King his very first on-screen kiss—she blushed and then he blushed and “the director kept yelling ‘cut!’ ” And even though she didn’t date the heartthrob, when she suddenly disappeared from the limelight a few years later, rumors were that she’d fled Hollywood after bearing the icon’s love child.

“Nothing could have been further from the truth,” says Mother Dolores Hart, 80, more than five decades later from her office in the Abbey of Regina Laudis, an enclosed Benedictine monastery and working farm in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Her story was the subject of an Oscar-nominated short film, God Is the Bigger Elvis, in 2012; now, as the 2018 Met Gala approaches, with its theme of “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” who better to recall the push and pull between transcendent impulses and beautiful pleasures?

These days, the actress turned Roman Catholic nun can be found in the monastery, tending to the community as well as her chickens and cows and llamas, not to mention her African gray parrot, Beau, who is currently whistling into the phone. Mother Dolores also meets her sisters seven times a day and once at night for prayer. “Stability is one of the significant factors of the rules of Saint Benedict,” she says, admitting it was also what attracted her to becoming a nun in the first place, given her difficult childhood, in which she was shuttled back and forth between Los Angeles and Illinois. “My parents divorced and married three times over,” she says, matter-of-factly.

But it wasn’t all a seamless transition for the prioress who, then 24 years old in 1963, had to quietly purge all her belongings—fur coats, jewels, dresses—in secret. “It was really sad, like what purgatory may be like,” she says with a laugh. “I couldn’t talk to the press, not even my mother, but they had to make sure I was for real.” After she entered the monastery and became a postulant, she wouldn’t take the habit of a nun for at least another year. Meaning that, in addition to her promise of commitment and obedience, an interior realization that is cemented through a series of vows, she had to cut her golden shoulder-length curls, the very trait that—bound high in a girlish ponytail—helped her secure a studio contract with Paramount.

“When I was very small, 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,’ ” says Mother Dolores, recalling the time she refused to chop her waist-grazing lengths for the role as a young aristocratic woman who leaves her family to become a nun in the 1961 historical drama Francis of Assisi. Much to the filmmakers’ dismay, Hart asked to grease her lengths down and put on a wig in order to fake the climactic ceremonial scene. “At the time, I just couldn’t do that for a movie—it had to be for something real.”

Of course, that was then, when good looks often equaled movie star potential before serious acting chops even came into play. (Fortunately, Mother Dolores had both, coming from a long line of amateur actors, film buffs, projectionists, all with deep-rooted Catholic values, according to her 2013 biography, The Ear of the Heart.) And while it’s been more than half a century since she sat in the hair-and-makeup chair—where she would spend hours each day while on set for hit films such as Where the Boys Are, Come Fly With Me, and King Creole (another bill she shared with Presley)—the prioress, who now wears only her habit and veil and wimple, admits the desire to look beautiful isn’t ever far from reach.

Case in point: Last year, while in New York City to celebrate her 50 years of vowed life, Mother Dolores found herself back in the spotlight. It was, on all accounts, a red carpet beauty disaster: “My skin was broken out and purple from a lotion I had applied in the car on the way over,” she says, adding that a doctor had to be called, and later instructed her that no makeup be used to cover up the blemishes, for fear it would worsen the reaction. “Whether it was from allergies or nerves,” says Mother Dolores, “what struck me afterward was that after all these years, the desire to look right doesn’t have anything to do with how much you pray or don’t pray. It’s an instinct you simply have to deal with.” So, what did she do? “I finally told myself to stop worrying and just do what I have to do. . . . I appreciate the elegance [of it all], but in the end, all you have is the moment you’re living.” Not that she looked anything but camera-perfect in photos from the celebratory day. Talk about divine intervention.