BACK TO WORK
Pregnant Kate Middleton returns to royal duties after six weeks off.
Although she had been on sick leave since August, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, looked well and happy on Oct. 10 at her first royal engagement since announcing her third pregnancy. The royal had been lying low while dealing with the extreme morning sickness she has experienced in all her pregnancies. “The duchess’s condition is improving but she is still suffering from hyperemesis gravidarum,” a royal aide said. “She is delighted to be able to be here tonight.”
Glowing and with a teeny baby bump, Kate, 35, Prince William, 35, and brother-in-law Prince Harry, 33, hosted a function at Buckingham
Palace on World Mental Health Day. “She’s been having this problem more severely than many pregnant mothers and so we’re very grateful [she’s here],” said actor Stephen Fry, president of British mental-health charity Mind.
The event honoured mental-health workers while highlighting the work of William, Kate and Harry’s Heads Together campaign that aims to reduce the stigma around psychological issues.
Earlier that day at a reception at St James’s Palace, William praised Kate for inspiring the charity, saying she “first realised that all three of us were working on mental health in our individual areas of focus. She had seen that at the core of adult issues like addiction and family breakdown, unresolved childhood mental-health issues were often part of the problem.”
If Kate is less than three months pregnant as believed, then the due date of the fifth in line to the throne is in April. Her last public duty was on Aug. 30 to commemorate the 20-year anniversary of Princess Diana’s death on Aug. 31. “In speaking about their own mental-health issues, particularly relating to the loss of their mother at such a young age, they are making such a huge difference,” Dame Esther Rantzen, the founder of charity Childmind, said of William and Harry. “It is a remarkable and wonderful legacy.”
—Stephen Fry