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Actually you can't attribute Kelly as a female given name to Grace Kelly. The name first enters the SSA top 1000 list in 1948, two years before Grace Kelly's first appearance on television and four years before the film High Noon which made her a movie star.
I'm not sure what caused Kelly's initial regular use as a female name, but its real sudden boom which made it decidedly more female than male in the USA definitely comes from the character Kelly Gregg, a teenage girl on the television situation comedy Bachelor Father, which started in 1957.

This message was edited 2/28/2007, 7:55 AM