Meghan’s rise to royal bride
Tomboy, student, actress and now royal bride – we track Meghan Markle’s incredible journey
IN THE space of 18 months she’s gone from a relatively wellknown TV actress to one of the most famous women in the world – a sparkling American beauty who won the heart of a prince, captivated the British public and breathed fresh air into the royal family.
Yet for Ava Burrows, the second wife of Meghan Markle’s granddad, the idea of the wild-haired little girl she knew wedding a blue-blood is nothing short of bizarre.
“Meggie marrying a prince? Who’d have thunk!” she said, slapping her knee and laughing when a journalist came knocking.
And you can’t really blame her. To the outside world Meghan (36) may be impossibly glossy and enviably confident but once upon a time she was a cute tomboy fooling around in the backyard.
She’s come a long way, transforming from a happy-go-lucky Los Angeles lass to a glossy Hollywood actress – and now a dazzling duchess.
Here’s an in-depth look at Meghan’s life.
WHEN THOMAS MET DORIA Thomas Markle (now 73) was a lighting director with a promising career when he moved to Los Angeles in his mid-thirties, newly divorced from Roslyn Loveless whom he’d married fresh out of high school. They had two children, Samantha and Tom Jnr, who lived with their mom in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Footloose and fancy- free, Thomas met Doria Ragland (now 61), a beautiful African-American twentysomething working as a temp on the set of the TV show General Hospital.
“I like to think he was drawn to her sweet eyes and her Afro,” Meghan said. “Plus their shared love of antiques. Whatever it was, they were married and had me.”
Meghan was born in LA on 4 August 1981 – the Queen Mother’s 81st birthday.
Tom Jnr and Samantha, then 14 and 16, came to live with their dad around then. According to Tom Jnr, their dad became a changed man after Meghan was born.
“She was his whole world,” he said. “The look on his face was priceless. Dad would take so many pictures of Meggie – she must have been the most photographed baby in the San Fernando Valley.
“She was a really cute kid too. There was a lot of my father in her – the eyes and that turned-up Markle nose. Doria has a really nice complexion and she gave Meg that million-dollar skin. She resembled them both and it made a greatlooking combination.”
The first years of Meghan’s life were spent in San Fernando, with Thomas working on shows such as General Hospital and Married . . . with Children. The Markles lived a comfortable life. Daily Mail journalist David Jones described the family home as “an elegant, detached, Shaker-style chalet, with four bedrooms and a garden in the serene Los Angeles commuter town of Woodland Hills”. CHILD OF DIVORCE Like Harry, Meghan also suffered through her parents’ divorce – although her mom and dad’s split seems to have been far (Turn over)
more amicable than Charles and Diana’s.
Meghan was six when Doria and Thomas called time on their marriage and agreed to share custody of their little girl.
“What’s so incredible is I never saw my parents fight,” Meghan said. “We’d still take vacations together. My dad would drop me off on Sundays and we’d watch TV, eating dinner on trays, the three of us. We were still so close-knit.”
But she lived very different lives in her parents’ separate homes. With dad, it was all bohemian Hollywood parties in a reportedly rather seedy LA neighbourhood. With mom, it was educational trips to poor areas of Jamaica and Mexico. “My mom raised me to be a global citizen, with eyes open to sometimes harsh realities,” Meghan wrote in an essay for Elle in 2016.
Thomas was an indulgent dad so it was left to Doria to be the disciplinarian.
“I want you home by that time, Flower [her nickname for Meghan] – not because I’m worried about what you’ll do, but because I’m worried about what everyone else out there is up to,” Meghan recalls her mother telling her.
MOMMY’S GIRL “Dreadlocks. Nose ring. Yoga instructor. Social worker. Free spirit. Lover of potato chips and lemon tarts,” Meghan once wrote about her mom on her nowdefunct lifestyle blog, The Tig. “You’ll look at her and you’ll feel joy.” These days free-spirited Doria is a therapist at a nonprofit mental health clinic in LA where she has a full caseload and often works 14-hour days, a source told American magazine Us Weekly.
Doria qualified as a therapist in 2015 after going back to varsity – and Meghan’s acting money helped pay her tuition.
A STAR IN THE MAKING Every day after school for 10 years Meghan visited her dad on the set of Married . . . with Children. “It was a really funny and perverse place for a little girl in a Catholic-school uniform to grow up,” she told Vanity Fair.
Meghan always wanted to be famous, her childhood friend Ninaki Priddy says.
“She just loved to be the centre of attention. We used to imagine her receiving an Oscar. She used to practise announcing herself. In a way, she was nurtured on a stage. She knew no other life. Her dad was a great coach in that respect. He’d take photos of her on stage right from a young age.”
He organised small walk-on parts for her whenever he could and enrolled her in the pricey Little Red School House, a school famous for nurturing child performers that counts the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney among its alumni.
Meghan’s teenage years were spent at Immaculate Heart high school, an allgirls’ Catholic school where Thomas often helped out backstage at productions – which more often than not starred his talented daughter.
Meghan excelled academically too – she turned down spots at several top universities to study at Northwestern University in Chicago, an institution known for its performing arts faculty.
She graduated in 2003 with a double major in theatre and international relations, flying off for an internship at the American embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, soon after. But her heart was in Hollywood and it wasn’t long before the acting bug brought her back home.
A TOMBOY WHO LOVES ANIMALS Sonia Ardakani, whose daughter Suzy was one of Meghan’s best friends during her teenage years, says young Meggie wasn’t a girlie girl who chased boys and got up to mischief.
The pretty, freckle-faced teen was more into skating, bowling, roller-blading and horse riding in the nearby park, Sonia recalls.
“She had a boundless zest for life,” she adds. “She was always so determined and ambitious and if she wanted something she got it.”
Meghan didn’t have pets of her own and adored the Ardakanis’ cat – interestingly named Princess.
BEFORE HER BIG BREAK Like most aspiring actors, Meghan struggled before donning her signature pencil skirt to play sassy paralegal-turned-lawyer Rachel Zane in the hit US drama Suits.
Roles were few and far between – one was a brief scene in teen soap 90210, in which she played a temptress getting up to mischief with a boy in a car.
In an episode of 2008’s Knight Rider (a remake of the ’80s series) she played a tough army sergeant going undercover at a fight club to investigate the death of a colleague.
To make ends meet, Meghan worked as a freelance calligrapher, a hostess and even as the “briefcase girl” on game show Deal or No Deal. She was paid $600 (then R4 200) a day for the gig, which required her to parade around in a skimpy dress and sky-high heels.
It paid the bills but it was the ultimate indignity for Meghan, says Tameka Jacobs, another briefcase girl.
“Meghan’s aspirations were to win an Oscar or be on Broadway, so if you’re in a minidress and high heels with your boobs taped together when what you want to do is serious acting, then it’s tough.”
More bit parts followed – including a role as the delivery girl in Horrible Bosses – but as she neared 30, Meghan was finding it tough to make it in Tinseltown.
“I wasn’t black enough for the black roles and I wasn’t white enough for the white ones, leaving me somewhere in the middle as the ethnic chameleon who couldn’t book a job,” she said.
In 2010 that all changed. Meghan was invited to read for a starring part in a new legal drama. She told her agent she’d “blown it” at her audition, having forgotten her lines several times. But the casting team disagreed.
They invited her back for the second round of auditions, advising her to dress more conservatively. She scraped her hair back, bought a sensible black dress
– and Rachel from Suits had arrived. THE HALF-SIBLINGS Ava Burrows, described by the journalist who interviewed her as one of Meghan’s most “level-headed” relatives, sums up the Markles perfectly.
“I guess it’s like your Downton Abbey, and we’re the folks downstairs,” the retired teacher said. “I’m kind of expecting a visit from the men in black suits to check us out.”
Meghan’s half-siblings aren’t quite so good-natured though. In fact, since Meghan and Harry hooked up they haven’t missed an opportunity to air their dirty laundry.
Samantha (53), Thomas’ eldest child from his first marriage, has made no secret of the fact she and Meghan no longer see eye to eye. She called Meghan a “social climber” with “a soft spot for gingers” when she started dating her prince, and is said to be penning a “memoir” called The Diary of Princess Pushy’s Sister.
Not surprisingly she didn’t receive an invitation to the wedding. And Samantha – a writer and mental health counsellor who’s now in a wheelchair because of multiple sclerosis – didn’t take it well.
“Out of respect and humanitarianism, the Markles should be invited if 2 000 complete strangers are,” she tweeted. “Our uncle, brother, me, best friend of 30 years, nephews. Our issue isn’t a matter of closeness. Family is family.”
Samantha’s brother, Tom Jnr, has been singing a similar tune. He wrote a bizarre 1 Meghan’s half-sister, Samantha, has multiple sclerosis. 2 Thomas Jnr, Meghan’s half-brother, wrote a letter to Prince Harry, telling him not to marry her. open letter to Prince Harry, warning him against marrying his half-sister.
“It’s very apparent that her tiny bit of Hollywood fame has gone to her head, changing her into a jaded, shallow, conceited woman that will make a joke of you and the royal family heritage,” he wrote. He later penned a second letter apologising to “Meg”, asking for an invitation to the wedding. HUSBAND #1 Back in 2004, Meghan met producer Trevor Engelson (now 41) on a night out in LA and they tied the knot in a “barefoot wedding” in Jamaica six years later. Two years later, “irreconcilable differences” had driven them apart for good. According to royal biographer Andrew Morton, it was Meghan’s Suits success that caused the rift. “While she saw her star rising, her husband’s career was treading water,” he writes in his new book, Meghan: A Hollywood Princess. Morton claims Trevor was blindsided by the break-up – Meghan apparently posted her rings to him as a sign she wanted out. “Whether she wanted to admit it to herself or not, Meghan, who once said she couldn’t imagine life without Trevor by her side, was now building a new world for herself. She was her own woman now, earning a steady income, making new friends on set and off, no longer dependent on her husband’s connections.” Unlike other characters from Meghan’s past, Trevor has yet to come forward with his story – although he recently sold the rights to a comedy series about a man whose wife leaves him for a British prince. THE EX-BESTIE They went to the same primary and high schools, travelled to the UK together as teens, road-tripped across the USA and were once so close Meghan asked her to be her maid of honour in 2011.
But Meghan and Ninaki Priddy haven’t spoken in years – and it’s likely they won’t be any time soon after Ninaki dished the dirt to the media.
In a tell-all interview with the Daily Mail, she says they fell out after 30 years of friendship following Meghan and Trevor’s divorce. “The person I knew isn’t there anymore,” said Ninaki, also known as Niki.
“There’s Meghan Before Fame and Meghan After Fame. After three seasons of Suits, she called me to say the marriage was over.
“Maybe she’d started to change before then, but I was refusing to see it. The tone of her voice, her mannerisms, the way she laughed didn’t seem real to me anymore.”
Ninaki, now a designer in Los Angeles, says Meghan had always fancied the idea of living in the UK and was fascinated by
1 Meghan (then 15) and Ninaki pictured outside Buckingham Palace on a trip to the UK in 1996. 2 At Hotel Bellagio in Las Vegas on a road trip after university. 3 Ninaki and Meghan aged 10 in 1991. 4 Meghan, Ninaki and a friend try on engagement rings at Diamond House Jewellery in London in 1996. BESTIES NO MORE the royal family. “I wasn’t shocked or even surprised to hear about Prince Harry. I know she used to love The Princess Diaries – films about a commoner who becomes part of a royal family. She was very taken with that idea.”
Ninaki says these days thoughts of Meghan leave her feeling enraged and heartbroken. “It was always Niki and Meg. We came as a [pair],” she said. “We were both honorary daughters in each other’s homes.
“We had the kind of love you have for a sister. The end of our friendship was like a death.” SOURCES: DAILY MAIL, HELLO!, US WEEKLY, THE SUN, VANITY FAIR, CNN, ELLE, THE TELEGRAPH