How Australia’s Mary Donaldson went from commoner
to Danish Queen
An unconventional journey from Australia’s middle
class to European royalty began in an unremarkable bar in Sydney in 2000
Virginia
Harrison
Virginia
Harrison in Sydney
Mon 1 Jan
2024 06.10 GMT
It started
with a discussion about chest hair. Twenty-three years later, in what has been
called a “real-life fairytale”, Mary Donaldson, a former real estate manager
from Tasmania, is poised to become the queen of Denmark.
Her
unconventional journey from Australia’s middle class to European royalty began
in an unremarkable bar in Sydney in 2000. At the Slip Inn that night, amid
Olympic fever, two young women met a group of young men.
A report
from the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper described the group as Prince Frederik
of Denmark, his cousin, Prince Nikolaos of Greece, his brother, Prince Joachim,
and Princess Martha of Norway.
It quoted a
friend of Mary’s, Beatrice Tarnawski, who said: “All the girls around the table
were discussing what is best – the man with a hairy chest or a man without hair
and the princes were wearing open shirts.
“We were
allowed to touch Prince Frederik and Prince Nikolaos. I liked Prince Frederik
best because he was so smooth. Prince Nikolaos had a lot of hair and that
really wasn’t my type.”
Mary, then
28, apparently had no idea who she was talking to.
“The first
time we met, we shook hands and I didn’t know he was the crown prince of
Denmark. An hour or so later someone came up to me and said, ‘Do you know who
these people are?’” she said in 2003.
Crown
Princess Mary of Denmark plays pool with a patient during a visit to the
Willem-Alexander Children’s hospital in Leiden, the Netherlands
Crown
Princess Mary of Denmark plays pool with a patient during a visit to the
Willem-Alexander Children’s hospital in Leiden, the Netherlands. Photograph:
Patrick van Katwijk/Getty Images
“From the very first moment that we started talking,
we never really stopped talking,” she told Australia’s 60 Minutes. “[Due to]
our geographical distance, everything was through words, so we really
established a strong relationship to begin with.”
Born in
Hobart in 1972 to Scottish parents, Mary’s father was a mathematics professor
and her mother an executive assistant at the University of Tasmania. The
youngest of four, she went to local schools and later studied commerce and law
in Tasmania. She moved to Melbourne and Sydney to work in advertising and then
worked in real estate, not long before the unlikely meeting in a pub changed
everything.
After
meeting at the Slip Inn, the pair began a secret, long-distance romance.
Frederik travelled to Australia several times over the next year. Then in 2001,
a Danish royal magazine Billed Bladet followed the prince to Sydney to find out
about his “secret Australian girlfriend”. According to the ABC, the magazine
broke the news that it was Mary, a “pretty, outgoing, gifted and perhaps future
crown princess”.
Frederik
soon invited her to move to Copenhagen. Ahead of the move, she hired a style
consultant, to begin her transformation from commoner to future queen. The
couple became officially engaged on 8 October 2003.
Denmark’s
Queen Margrethe, whose surprise abdication has opened the way for Frederik to
take the throne this month, had advised Mary to learn Danish ahead of their
marriage in 2004. At the time, Australia media was awash with the story of a
real-life fairytale princess. The Slip Inn screened the wedding, offering free
Carlsberg to anyone with a Danish passport.
The prince
and princess have four children. Alongside motherhood, the 51-year-old has
taken on humanitarian work on a number of causes including women’s and LGBTQ+
rights.
“I’ve
always had a strong sense of justice: that everyone should have the same
opportunities, no matter where you come from,” she told the Financial Times in
2022.
The crown
princess’s own mother, Henrietta, died in 1997, before she met her future
husband.
“I’m sure
she would be very happy to see me where I am, not only happy in my family life
and as a mother, but also to see that I’ve used my new situation and the
resources and skills I have to form a platform to make a difference where I
can,” the crown princess told the Australian Women’s Weekly in 2013.
“And I
think she’s probably smiling.”
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