I know where It all went so wrong, Meghan

MANY years ago I lived in Los Angeles with a film director in Sunset Strip’s go-to hotel, the Sunset Marquis. Our evenings were spent at parties in the Hollywood Hills with a quantum of decorative would-be film stars, each hoping to catch the eye of the director who would make them a household name — just as Meghan Markle is today.

Meghan didn’t make it to the top of the marquee or gain any award nominations for her acting, but she did well enough. Her run in the TV series Suits lasted seven years and after she quit for marriage to Prince Harry (some of her co- stars also left), the show faltered along for a season or so, then ended.

Her exit was characterised by that curious mix of pomposity and sentimentality in the strange world of American TV that confuses an actor with the character they play.

The press release announcing her departure in 2018 summed it up: ‘Fans have long admired Markle’s character Rachel Zane for her tenacby ity and integrity . . . through the toughest of times whether professional or personal — that it’s always worth it to fight for what you believe in and never lose faith in yourself.’

If, in character terms, Meghan began slightly to confuse her real self with Rachel Zane, the determined, can- move - mountains paralegal she’d played, it’s not surprising after so many years in the job.

But trouble was bound to ensue when Meghan/ Rachel found herself without a scriptwriter to save her as a troubling plotline began to emerge in her next role, as the Duchess of Sussex in the long-running drama that is the House of Windsor.

In the aftermath of that interview, one can’t help musing a little on the bumpy journey Ms Markle is now on, her incredible rise and what seems to be a nearspectacular fall from favour with a majority of Britons.

Such a sleigh ride is not unfamiliar to me. My husband — the newspaper tycoon Conrad Black — and I suffered a precipitous fall from grace in certain circles in the UK more than a decade ago.

Nor am I surprised by the conflicting responses on either side of the Atlantic in places where I’ve worked and lived, including Toronto, where she resided while shooting Suits.

In America, to criticise Meghan — or even to appear to — after that interview may cost you your job, as Sharon Osbourne found. The British TV personality was forced to quit The Talk, an American chat show, after defending her friend Piers Morgan’s criticism of the Duchess.

In Britain, by and large there seems to be more hostility to her — although you can only go so far, as former Good Morning Britain presenter Piers found out.

The time I’ve spent in and out of high society, showbusiness and even passing moments with royalty gives me some insight into these intense responses.

The world of a TV star is a bubble of personal appearances and fleeting applause. The world of the Queen is every bit as much a bubble. But there the similarities end.

Hollywood’s Technicolor lifestyles and attitudes are as familiar to the royals as life on the planet Neptune.

When the Prince and the Showgirl met, dated and married, conflict quickly emerged. Independent Meghan didn’t understand the world of royalty. She bridled at the restrictions and remembered she must ‘fight for what you believe’, just as her alter ego Rachel Zane had done.

This wasn’t how life was supposed to be for a ‘Princess’. All hell broke loose, culminating in Megxit and then the Oprah Winfrey encounter with its bombshell revelations, allegations and accusations.

As TV trailers teased viewers with a hint of what was to come during the run-up to the interview on March 7, rumours emerged in London alleging that Meghan had bullied members of her Palace staff.

The Sussexes hit back. ‘My family literally cut us off financially,’ said Harry.

‘I just didn’t want to be alive any more,’ said Meghan. ‘I left my career, I left my life.’

What followed was the modern version of a medieval royal joust: lances out and poison-tipped as the American Court of Meghan took on the British Court of Windsor, a battle made more deadly by the fact that each side spoke a language completely incomprehensible to the other.

The British have never understood America. They think it’s a downmarket version of the UK. In fact, it is a jungle where individualism rules.

Millions are ground down by its Darwinian cruelty, while a great many more work extremely hard and rise to comfortable or even immense wealth as epic stories play out.

The British way is more orderly: queue, follow the rules, for heaven’s sake don’t show off or overstate. It’s an approach to life that produces some great achievements but also approved, British-style repression.

Repression! That is a trait unknown in the U.S., except as a bad word to use on talk shows or your psychotherapist’s couch.

The great American flair for showmanship runs in Meghan’s veins. She can’t help it. From the Declaration of Independence to the Superbowl to multibilliondollar elections with 50,000 people at campaign rallies and, of course, Tinseltown itself, the U. S. does spectacle like nowhere else.

Everything has mythological proportions and everything is driven by the American Dream: that anyone can make it if only they work hard enough.

And in Meghan you have the American Dream on a Sunset Boulevard billboard.

The facts speak for themselves: a mixed-race woman in her late 30s from a fractured family background, a B-list TV actress living in a rented house in downtown Toronto, nabbed the Queen of England’s grandson (sixth in line to the throne), removed him from his country and family to settle in the Californian paradise of Montecito in an £11 million home with the prospect of many millions more to come, and is even being spoken of as a future presidential candidate.

On top of all this, Meghan has now managed to turn herself into America’s most popular figure: a victim.

This is no small achievement. In fact, it’s breathtaking. And in America it is admirable. In Britain, not so much.

Meghan Markle is not without an education. She graduated from Northwestern University’s School of Communications with a degree in International Studies and Theatre. Given this, many in Britain have questioned her bashful statement to Oprah Winfrey that when she married Prince Harry she ‘didn’t know much about the Royal Family’.

Though she may have watched Diana’s wedding to Charles over and over again on video, as one friend has confided, that statement rings true enough to me. To many Americans, the Royal Family are simply another species of celebrity.

‘ I grew up in LA. You see celebrities all the time,’ Meghan told Oprah. ‘As Americans especially, what you do know about the royals is what you read in fairy tales.’

Most Americans are not really interested in or knowledgeable about any country but their own. Meghan’s take on the life of royalty evokes a perfectly plausible picture of her learning about royal life through watching not only that wedding video but Hollywood’s fairytale versions — perhaps the film The Princess Diaries, in which a shy American teenager discovers she is heir to a European throne and must take on wicked courtiers who try to undo her new status.

Then we must consider ‘celebrity feminism’ in the mix. It is big business, especially in Hollywood

She has turned herself into that U.S. favourite . . . a victim