Sometimes a woman’s deepest thoughts are best left unsaid, but the Princess Royal has never regretted once describing herself as ‘not everyone’s idea of a fairytale princess’.
It was a deliberate message and the moment she laid the ground rules for her life as a professional royal.
But everyone knew what she was getting at all those years ago.
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Enigmatic: Princess Anne strikes a regal pose on her 21st birthday
In a celebrity-besotted world inhabited by pretty people endlessly proclaiming the message that physical beauty brings instant happiness, Anne was having to deal with being a real princess who is not blessed with chocolate-box prettiness.
On Sunday, she will be 60.
She’s had two marriages, international sporting success, there has been talk of affairs and now, thanks to her son Peter and his Canadian-born wife Autumn, she’s about to become a grandmother - a considerable challenge for a woman who once admitted to Terry Wogan on TV: ‘I don’t like children.’ (though it has to be said that this same woman has been the spectacularly successful and hardworking president of Save the Children for 40 years).
As a princess, Anne has always been an enigma who, in public, maintains an old world sense of regality, while being the Royal Family’s most willing moderniser.
Where other royal women gush, she is always restrained; where Princess Diana would scoop up a sickly child lovingly in her bare arms, Anne, even now, usually follows the traditional royal manner of standing unbending and apparently aloof , seldom revealing the hands beneath her gloves - though she has started to shake children’s hands.
Indeed, behind palace walls the Princess Royal poured scorn on Diana’s hands-on style, which was totally opposite to the uneasy distance she always kept with the public.
It’s hardly surprising she never warmed to Diana.
Her attitude to the Princess was described by one former aide as ‘cool to the point of deep freeze’.
She customarily referred to her as ‘that woman’.
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Laid back: A rare relaxed portrait taken in 1973
And yet while the rest of the Royal Family indulge themselves and their offspring in self-aggrandisement and privilege, Princess Anne, the monarch’s second child and only daughter, refused to allow her children to be weighed down with royal titles - preferring them to have more freedom.
How different from Princess Margaret, for example, who, when she married photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones in 1960, insisted on him being given an earldom.
Equally, Prince Andrew and Fergie’s daughters Beatrice and Eugenie are not only royal princesses, but cost taxpayers
Vanessa Williams? who knows Vanessa Williams? (Former Miss America as for the year 1984) you really porn? that's why they took away his crown?
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