MORE ON ENGAGEMENT,
Buckingham Palace announces Toronto actor to marry Prince William next spring
LONDON — Actress, humanitarian campaigner, lifestyle blogger — and, next spring, a royal.
Palace officials announced Monday that Prince Harry is engaged to Meghan Markle, confirming months of rumours that the couple was close to tying the knot.
Harry’s brother Prince William and his pregnant wife Kate welcomed Markle to the royal family.
“We are very excited for Harry and Meghan,” they said in a statement. “It has been wonderful getting to know Meghan and to see how happy she and Harry are together.”
The announcement means another grand royal wedding is in the offing — the first since William and Kate married in 2011.
In some ways, Markle — a mixedrace American raised in California, an outspoken full-time actress and a divorcee — makes a surprising addition to Britain’s monarchy.
But the institution has moved on with the times and the romance between Markle and Harry — who has repeatedly stressed his wish to lead as “normal” a life as possible — has a decidedly unstuffy, modern feel to it.
Markle, best known for her role in the legal drama Suits, surprised many when she shared her feelings for Harry in a September cover story for Vanity Fair. Asked about the media frenzy surrounding their courtship, the 36-year-old said: “At the end of the day I think it’s really simple ... we’re two people who are really happy and in love.”
Describing Harry as her “boyfriend,” Markle said that while she expected she and Harry would have to “come forward” about their relationship at some point, the two were just a couple enjoying time spent with each other.
“Personally, I love a great love story,” she said.
Harry — once known for his badboy antics, including being photographed playing strip billiards in Las Vegas — has largely won over the British public with his winning smile, military career and devotion to charities aimed at helping disabled veterans and other causes.
The 33-year-old prince recently won praise with his work campaigning for more openness about mental-health issues. Speaking candidly about his personal struggle to cope with the loss of his mother Princess Diana when he was only 12, he encouraged others to talk about their own problems rather than keeping them bottled up.
Markle’s Vanity Fair interview broke new ground. It is unusual for a royal love interest to speak so candidly before becoming engaged. Harry’s past reported girlfriends all shied away from the limelight and his sister-in-law Kate Middleton stayed silent until she and Prince William gave a formal televised interview at Buckingham Palace after their engagement became public.
But Markle is no stranger to media exposure.
The actress’s most successful role is the feisty Rachel Zane in Suits, now in its seventh season. Her career has included small parts on TV series including Fringe, CSI: Miami, Knight Rider and Castle, as well as movies such as Horrible Bosses. Outside of acting, Markle founded a lifestyle blog called TheTig.com (which closed down in April) and has lent her celebrity status to humanitarian causes.
She has campaigned with the United Nations on gender equality, written in Time magazine about girls’ education and the stigma surrounding menstruation and has travelled to Rwanda as global ambassador for the charity World Vision Canada. She has described how her mother took her to the slums of Jamaica to witness poverty first-hand, saying experiences like that shaped her social consciousness and charity work.
To some degree that mirrors the experience of Harry, who was also inspired by his mother’s humanitarian work. Harry and Markle held hands for their first official appearance together in September in Toronto at the Invictus Games, a sporting event for wounded service personnel that Harry spearheaded.
Markle said she met Harry through friends in London in July 2016 and they had been dating quietly for several months before the romance hit the headlines.
The media attention became so intense that Harry took the unusual step of officially confirming the romance in order to warn the media off. In a strongly worded statement issued through the palace, the prince pleaded for reporters to stop intruding on his girlfriend’s privacy. He condemned “outright sexism and racism” in some online comments and said some articles with “racial undertones” had crossed the line.
Markle was born to a clinical therapist mother and television lighting director father. She grew up in Los Angeles and now lives in Toronto. She studied at a girls’ Roman Catholic high school before attending Northwestern University in Illinois, where she studied theatre and international relations.
Markle married film producer Trevor Engelson in 2011, but the pair divorced two years later. It wouldn’t be first time that a British royal has married an American or a divorcee. In 1936, Edward VIII famously abdicated after he was forced to choose between the monarchy and his relationship with twice-divorced American socialite Wallis Simpson.