She is not some Hollywood vixen, she is a sweet but ambitious woman
Most women might feel a little peeved to be told – on a glorious summer night – that their husband was “nipping over the road for a quick pint” with a young female fan. The woman in question was both seriously attractive and a good actress. This I knew because she was the star of the American legal drama, Suits, which we’d been binge watching in the summer of 2016. What I couldn’t know (and might have helped me relax) is that Meghan Markle would spend that 90-minute “pint” (actually she’s a dirty Martini girl) telling my husband about the “persistent” young man bombarding her with text messages. A man she went on to have a date with that night at the swanky Mayfair member’s club, 5 Hertford Street. And didn’t Prince Harry’s persistence pay off? “Everyone in Britain keeps talking about Meghan like she’s the one who has ‘won the prize’,” laughs a mutual friend of the actress in Los Angeles, where the 36-year-old was born and raised. “But over here we’re thinking it’s Prince Harry who’s the winner.” According to the actress’s friends, Ms Markle is no “waity Katie”. In fact, as a woman who has endured abuse, harassment, racism and sexism from social media trolls well before she and Prince Harry even met, Ms Markle has been “a lot more wary than many would have been in her position about what she’s getting into,” I’m told. She may project an image of herself as a wholesome California girl who, in her own words, “lives by the ethos that most things can be cured with either yoga, the beach, or a few avocados”, and the word “sweet” does crop up a lot when I ask LA acquaintances what she is like, but so do the words “steely” and “smart”.
One television personality who has met the actress on several occasions claims she has “an ambitious streak, which is no bad thing. It has got her where she is” – and that’s a world away from the crime-ridden Crenshaw neighbourhood in LA where she was brought up.
Meanwhile my husband went so far as to describe her as “one of the smartest LA actresses I’ve ever met – funny with it and not at all phoney”.
That “realness” comes from Ms Markle’s childhood experiences: not
‘She’s probably a lot cleverer than Prince Harry. In fact, I think she may have to dumb down for the crown’
knowing which box to tick (“black” or “white”) as a bi-racial schoolgirl, witnessing racist abuse directed at her mother in the street – to say nothing of the guts needed in order to push through as a jobbing actress in LA.
The polar opposite of the cosseted Chelsea blondes Prince Harry might once have been attracted to, Ms Markle has also always risen up against injustice (at 11 she wrote a letter to then First Lady Hillary Clinton telling her how misogynistic a soap advert on television was) and for that reason “she won’t have to be shoehorned into a humanitarian role she took on voluntarily decades ago”.
When people began touting the hilariously pompous notion that our Royal family was in danger of being “vulgarised” by this Hollywood vixen earlier this year, my LA source laughingly informed me that we Britons had got it all wrong.
“She’s a well-brought-up middleclass girl who is probably a lot cleverer than Prince Harry. In fact I think she may have to dumb down for the crown. But she’s exactly what he needs.”