There’s never been a royal quite like Meghan Markle – but she won’t be daunted
THERE has never been a royal quite like Meghan Markle – a divorced career woman from a mixed-race background.
But she will be undaunted by the prospect of breaking the mould because, for as long as she can remember, Meghan has been carving her own path.
Writing in Elle magazine in 2015, she described how she defines herself now, having battled prejudice for years.
Meghan said: “While my mixed heritage may have created a grey area surrounding my self-identification, keeping me with a foot on both sides of the fence, I have come to embrace that.
“To say who I am, to share where I’m from, to voice my pride in being a strong, confident mixed-race woman.”
Raised in an affluent LA suburb surrounded by white neighbours, Meghan — whose birth name is Rachel — was aware that she was different from a young age.
She said: “It was not . . . 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.”
Megan’s mum is Doria Ragland, a yoga instructor who fell for her dad, the Emmy-winning lighting director Thomas W Markle, when they were working in the same studio.
They wed in 1979 and had Meghan two years later. She said of them: “I like to think he was drawn to her sweet eyes and her Afro, plus their shared love of antiques.”
Although they divorced when Meghan was six, she remembers fondly how her parents worked hard to ensure they were still a close family unit.
She said: “I never saw them fight. We would still take vacations together. Dad would come on Sundays to drop me off, and we’d watch Jeopardy! eating dinner on TV trays, the three of us . . . We were still so close-knit.”
Most importantly, her parents instilled in Meghan the sense that she “wasn’t different, but special”.
One Christmas she wanted a set of Barbie dolls called The Heart Family, which only came as either a set of black dolls or a set of white.
She woke up on Christmas morning to find that her dad had bought a set of each and mixed them up, so his daughter could have a black mum doll, a white dad doll, and a child of each colour.
On another occasion she was upset by a school census that required pupils to tick a box to say whether they were white, black, Hispanic or Asian.
Meghan didn’t know what to choose. Her teacher told her to tick “Caucasian” because she looked white, but Meghan felt it would look like a rejection of her mother.
So she left it blank — “a question mark, an absolute incomplete . . . much like how I felt.”
She said: “When I went home I told my dad what had happened. He said the words that have always stayed with me, ‘If that happens again, you draw your own box’.”
It was also through her father that Meghan was introduced to the world of TV drama. He would take her to the set of American sitcom Married With Children as a child.
She attended private primary Hollywood Little Red School House, which boasts Elizabeth Taylor and Judy Garland as past pupils, then the respected Catholic girls’ school Immaculate Heart High, where she appeared in multiple school plays.
At 17 she was crowned the Homecoming Queen.
Acting wasn’t the only passion Meghan developed in her youth, she also took her first steps as a feminist campaigner.
When she was 11, she wrote to First Lady Hillary Clinton complaining about a soap advert which implied that women belonged in the kitchen. The ad’s language was subsequently changed.
Meghan went on to study theatre and international relations at Northwestern University School of Communication in Illinois, graduating in 2003.
She took a job at the US Embassy in Buenos Aires before beginning her acting career with minor roles in General Hospital, CSI and 90210.
In the early days of her acting career she had to do “odds-and-ends jobs to pay the bills”, including calligraphy.
She said: “I didn’t wait tables. I did calligraphy for the invitations for, like, Robin Thicke and Paula Patton’s wedding.” But as an actress, she once again found herself battling racial prejudices.
She said: “Being ‘ethnically ambiguous’, as I was pegged in the industry, meant I could audition for virtually any role.
“Morphing from Latina when I was dressed in red, to African American when in mustard yellow, my closet filled with fashionable frocks to make me look as racially varied as an Eighties Benetton poster. Sadly, it didn’t matter. 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.”
Finally, in 2011, US TV legal drama Suits came along — a moment Meghan describes as “the Goldilocks of my acting career”.
She believes that in casting her as the beautiful, confident, paralegal Rachel Zane, the producers of Suits “helped shift the way pop culture defines beauty”.
She added: “Some households may never have had a black person in their house as a guest, or someone bi-racial.
“Well, now there are a lot of us on your TV and in your home with you. And with Suits, specifically, you have Rachel Zane. I couldn’t be prouder of that.”
Just as her career was taking off with Suits, Meghan’s first marriage was breaking down.
She had met film producer Trevor Engelson, 41, in 2004, and they wed in September 2011, after she landed the Suits part.
Their relaxed wedding took place on a beach in Jamaica, where 100 of their nearest and dearest partied for four days on rum punch and local beer.
Sadly, her long stints away from the marital home in LA while she filmed Suits in Toronto, Canada, took its toll on the marriage. The couple divorced in 2013, citing irreconcilable differences, and Meghan moved permanently to Toronto.
Meanwhile, her career went from strength to strength.
She landed roles in major Hollywood movies including Get Him To The Greek, Remember Me and Hollywood Bosses.
In 2014 she launched her lifestyle blog TheTig.com, and did increasing amounts of humanitarian work, campaigning on issues including clean water and gender equality.
She wrote on her blog: “I’ve never wanted to be a lady who lunches — I’ve always wanted to be a woman who works.”
She found time for romance, too, reportedly dating Canadian chef Cory Vitiello between 2014 and 2016. Apparently that relationship was on the rocks when Meghan first met Harry at London’s Soho House, in July 2016. Since then their romance has been a whirlwind,
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And although she is a celebrity in her own right, nothing could have prepared Meghan for the level of scrutiny it would bring.
Even so, she remains the same confident, complex woman she always has been.
She insisted: “Nothing about me changed. I’m still the same person that I am, and I’ve never defined myself by my relationship.”