Ambitious star who’s battled prejudice over her mixed race heritage
ACTRESS, self- styled humanitarian, writer, world traveller and most recently, fashion designer. Should Prince Harry’s new love interest, Meghan Markle, be invited to sit down for tea at Buckingham Palace, she certainly won’t be short of conversation. Stunningly beautiful — and not in the society blonde style of previous girlfriends — it’s not difficult to see why Harry might have been drawn to the 35-year- old Los Angeles-born actress, who stars in hit US TV drama Suits. Unlike many of his other conquests, Meghan is remarkably open with her private life — she’s posted more than 2,000 times on social media site Instagram, where she has a million followers and has her own blogging website The Tig, named after her favourite Italian wine, Tignanello. On Instagram, she’s fond of posting shots of herself beaming in glamorous locations — holidays in the past year include Italy’s Amalfi coast, Ibiza and Tulum in Mexico — and rather twee lifestyle mantras, such as ‘she was afraid of heights, but she was more afraid of never flying’. There are endless pictures, too, of her giggling with big groups of female friends over coffee or wine — she has an enormous network of friends all over the world. Celebrity contacts include tennis star Serena Williams and Made In Chelsea heiress Millie Mackintosh. On her blog, subjects range from how to balance acting and humanitarian work to tips on New York boutiques and recipes for spelt biscuits. She’s also not afraid of expressing political opinions: she is clearly anti- Brexit, posting pictures of Remain placards during her last visit to London.
LIKE her Suits character, Rachel Zane, Meghan is of mixed race. Her mother is an African-American former travel agent turned-yoga instructor (complete with dreadlocks and a nose stud), while her father is a white retired director of photography who worked on hit U.S. sitcom Married With Children.
Her great-great-great grandfather was a slave, who took the name Wisdom when slavery was abolished in America.
Meghan writes movingly of her childhood and her mum and dad’s mixed-race marriage on her website: ‘I like to think he was drawn to her sweet eyes and her Afro, plus their shared love of antiques,’ she writes. ‘Whatever it was, they married and had me.
‘They moved into a house in The Valley in LA to a neighbourhood that was leafy and affordable. What it was not, however, was diverse. And there was my mom, caramel in complexion with her light- skinned baby in tow, being asked where my mother was since they assumed she was the nanny.’
From her writing, it’s clear that her heritage is a subject with which Meghan is deeply preoccupied. She writes that she once deliberately left a mandatory ethnicity box on a school census form blank. Her teacher told her to tick Caucasian, ‘because that’s how you look’. But Meghan said she put her pen down because she couldn’t bear to picture ‘the pit-in-her belly sadness my mother would feel if she were to find out’.
She also describes hankering after a boxed set of Barbie dolls, a family that either came in black or white versions, and her delight on Christmas morning when she discovered her giftwrapped family, customised by her father to include a black mum, a white dad and a child in each colour.
She undoubtedly enjoyed a privileged upbringing — she went to a private Roman Catholic school in LA.
Interviews with the star are also littered with references to her global travels with her mother — though never ‘conventional’ family trips to Disney World. It was Hawaii and Mexico where she was encouraged to get an ‘authentic cultural experience’.
Even as a little girl she was highly political.
Aged 11, she saw a TV advert for a washing liquid, with the tagline ‘women all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans’. Incensed by the perceived sexism, she wrote to the manufacturer and then First Lady Hillary Clinton in protest.
Within a few months, the advert was duly changed to ‘people all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans’. Ten years of accompanying her father on the set of Married With Children fuelled a passion for acting.
On leaving school, she went to Northwestern University, Illinois, where she started out taking theatre studies, before deciding she didn’t want to be a ‘cliche’, so ended up completing a double major in theatre and international relations.
DURING her second year she applied for an internship at a U.S. embassy, ended up working in Buenos Aires and decided on a career in politics. However, she returned to college to pursue acting when a friend introduced her to an agent, who saw a student film she starred in and told her she would ‘make money’ acting.
Meghan says the fact she was mixed race presented some difficulties. ‘I wasn’t black enough for the black roles and I wasn’t white enough for the white roles,’ she wrote.
There was a short-lived stint as a model — holding one of the prize money briefcases on the U.S. version of Deal Or No Deal — and parts in a string of shows from general Hospital and 90210 to CSI and the 2011 film Horrible Bosses. But it was her role in Suits as a feisty paralegal (an American legal assistant) — with mixed-race parentage much like her own — that catapulted her to stardom.
To date, Meghan’s romantic life has been low profile, but not without drama.
She is understood to have begun dating her first husband, Trevor Engelson, now 40, who has a production company and bears more than a passing resemblance to Prince Harry, in 2004.
In 2011, the pair married, exchanging vows in a barefoot ceremony in front of 102 guests in Jamaica. But they went their separate ways in 2013, for reasons unknown.
Since then, she has been linked with Northern Irish golfer Rory McIlroy and Canadian chef Cory Vitiello, who this March was boasting on Twitter that he was ‘so proud of my lady’ after she was named a global ambassador for the children’s charity World Vision.
Speaking of which, Meghan appears to have chosen the Angelina Jolie/Emma Watson approach to fame and is a vocal advocate on behalf of the United Nations.
She was so keen to get on board that she volunteered to be an intern at the UN buildings in New York for a week before becoming a ‘women’s advocate for political participation’.
Certainly it’s easy to see what happy-go-lucky Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have in common. What’s less clear is how they
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