THEIR FATHERS WALKED OUT WHEN THEY WERE SIX

MeGHAn’S parents, doria ragland and Thomas Markle, divorced in 1988 after nine years of marriage, when she was just six years old.

‘It was the late Seventies when my parents met,’ she wrote in a 2015 article for elle magazine. ‘My dad was a lighting director for a soap opera and my mum was a temp at the studio.’

Though she has never spoken about her parents’ divorce, it was thought to be amicable, with Thomas leaving a bouquet of flowers outside doria’s Los Angeles home ahead of their daughter’s wedding last month.

Audrey, too, came from a broken home, with parents from very different walks of life. Her father, Joseph ruston (above), was born in Austria-Hungary and worked for a trading company, while her mother, ella van Heemstra, was a dutch noblewoman.

Audrey was six — the same age as Meghan — when her father left the family and moved to London, a sudden departure she described as ‘the most traumatic event of my life.’