Unseen photos of the girl who’s captured Harry’s heart
The Mail’s spoken to friends and family of the woman who could soon be a royal. They talked about her broken home, shock divorce and steely ambition — and provided previously unseen photos for this tantalising series
FOR Trevor Engelson, a hotshot Hollywood producer and agent, his wife’s sudden announcement came as a shattering blow. Meghan Markle, the beautiful actress whom he’d mentored to stardom and married 18 months earlier in an exuberant ceremony at the Jamaican beach hotel once favoured by Marilyn Monroe and Errol Flynn, was asking for a divorce.
It was 2013 and they’d been juggling a long-distance relationship. She was shooting the TV drama Suits in Toronto, while he was living at their home in Los Angeles — for three years.
Their frantic work schedules and frequent flights between the two cities had become too taxing, she told him. She was sorry, but she just couldn’t do it any more.
According to the pair’s friends, Engelson, who had met Meghan eight years previously when she was starting out in showbusiness, was utterly ‘devastated’. He tried to persuade her that they could overcome the difficulties. To this day, he still can’t fathom why Meghan bolted so quickly for the exit.
Inevitably, it led Engleson, now 40, and his friends to question whether his wife, who is four years his junior, had found someone else while living for months on end in Toronto.
Indeed, there were posts on Meghan’s social media sites — which she hastily closed down after her relationship with Prince Harry began — which at least hinted at the possibility, despite her protestations to the contrary.
They concerned a handsome Canadian ice- hockey star called Michael Del Zotto, now 27, and suggested she might have grown close to him.
She tweeted pictures of herself with the sportsman — whom she called ‘the best’ — after watching him play for the New York Rangers, and revealed she had seen him on April 8 and 22, 2013. (Her spokesman denies they had a relationship, saying she was never alone with him and he had absolutely nothing to do with the split.)
Some four months later, her no-fault divorce from Engelson, on the grounds of ‘ irreconcilable differences’, was finalised.
SINCEthen, friends of the couple — who had been together for six years before they married — have maintained a strict code of silence, but one of them, Adam Goldworm, who has known Engelson for 25 years and was a guest at the Jamaica wedding, broke it to tell me: ‘[The divorce] was her decision, totally out of the blue.
‘Nobody, including Trevor, knows whether there actually was [anything going on]. Yes, there was that hockey star [Michael Del Zotto] …’
Mr Goldworm says he has not seen Meghan since the split — an observation repeated by other friends, who say she has drifted away from her old circle as she has climbed the social ladder in Toronto, where she now consorts with elite members of the Canadian establishment.
‘She’s like a ghost,’ he said — before adding enigmatically: ‘I will just say that I think it’s strange, for anyone who’s ever met her, that she’s moving into the Royal Family.’
Presumably, he was referring to Meghan’s capricious, fun-loving nature. Before Harry came along, she described herself variously as a ‘ brash American’ and a freespirited Californian ‘hippy’.
Or perhaps Mr Goldworm was alluding to Meghan’s penchant for partying, as exemplified by the boozy games at her wedding, where she took part in wheelbarrow races, wearing a skimpy yellow polka-dot bikini and baseball cap.
If that’s so, then some might think she will make the perfect match for Prince Harry, hardly a shrinking violet himself — though the fact she rushed to the divorce court so swiftly when her marriage hit the rocks will doubtless be causing jitters at the Palace. For the royals use an old-fashioned, and rather perjorative, term for women who walk out on a marriage. They call them ‘Bolters’.
Pictures last weekend of Meghan and Harry embarking on a romantic holiday to Botswana — the African country that Harry described earlier this year as his ‘second home’ — have prompted speculation that an engagement is on the cards later this year.
Harry, 32, has made no secret of his desire to start a family, and with Meghan having celebrated her 36th birthday on August 4, time is of the essence.
Countless words have already been written about Meghan, but, as I have learned while investigating the background of this most unlikely royal girlfriend — and possible princess-to-be — there is so much more to her story.
For this series, I have spoken to family, friends and colleagues to learn about her fascinating ancestral roots, her strict but troubled childhood, her bizarre family — from which her relatively unscathed escape is little short of a miracle — as well as her intriguingly discreet love life before and after that divorce.
Meghan’s childhood and teenage years were surprisingly sheltered. She was doted upon by her parents, particularly her fiercely protective father, Thomas Markle, an award- winning Hollywood cinematographer who worked, almost obsessively, to help his daughter become an actress. As a result, Meghan was something of a late developer in the romantic stakes.
According to Sonia Ardakani, mother of Suzy, her best friend at high school, despite her stunning looks Meghan didn’t start dating until well into teens. ‘[Meghan and Suzy] were very good girls and they would find other ways of having fun,’ she told me. ‘They were in all sorts of different clubs, and they liked to do things like horse-riding in the park, skating and bowling.’
Meghan’s half-brother (from her
from David Jones IN LOS ANGELES