Poppetto princess MEGHAN’S ROYAL RISE
From a young age, this girl had a date with destiny!
As she dreamed of becoming a famous actress, a young Meghan Markle couldn’t have imagined her greatest-ever role would be to join a family whose dramas are played out on the world stage. But looking back at the Californian beauty’s rise to fame, it’s impossible to conjure up a more perfect fit for the equally charismatic and adventurous Prince Harry.
While she grew up in Los Angeles, Meghan’s Caucasian dad Thomas was an awardwinning TV lighting director, while her African-American mum Doria Ragland was a yoga instructor and social worker.
The actress remembers being exposed to racism because she couldn’t answer questions about her ethnicity by “checking a box”. However, she says hers was a happy childhood as her parents “crafted the world around me to feel like I wasn’t different, but special”.
Like Harry’s folks, Thomas, 73, and Doria, 61, split when Meghan was six. She lived with her mother, but regularly visited her father at work on the set of Married
atFirstSight, which she recalls
as “a really funny and perverse place for a little girl in a Catholic school uniform to grow up”.
After graduating from Immaculate Heart High School, the budding talent completed a double major in theatre and international studies at Chicago’s Northwestern University, before pursuing her dreams of stardom.
In 2006, Meghan scored a role as a “briefcase girl” on game show DealorNoDeal, but she struggled to find any acting gigs. She tells, “I wasn’t black enough for the black roles and I wasn’t white enough for the white ones.”
Finally, in 2011, she landed her breakout part as ambitious paralegal Rachel Zane on the TV drama series Suits, which propelled her to global fame, but she never forgot her roots, using her platform as an advocate for gender equality, women’s health and ending world poverty.
Her philanthropy was just one of the things that attracted Harry to Meghan – and it’s something she’ll focus on in her new role as a royal. As the prince says, “She’s capable of anything and together there’s a hell of a lot of work that needs doing.”