Prince Harry’s girlfriend Meghan Markle uses first interview to declare they are truly in love and hints a Royal wedding may happen
PRINCE Harry’s American girlfriend Meghan Markle has given her first interview about their romance, announcing: “We’re a couple. We’re in love.”
Actress Meghan, 36, told Vanity Fair that her relationship with Harry was “a great love story”.
The star’s candid chat sparked triggered a frenzy of speculation about a Royal wedding.
Royal experts said Harry, 32, would have known about and approved the interview.
The American actress, 36, told Vanity Fair magazine: “We’re a couple. We’re in love.
“I’m sure there will be a time when we will have to come forward and present ourselves and have stories to tell — but I hope what people will understand is that this is our time.
“This is for us. It’s part of what makes it so special, that it’s just ours. But we’re happy. Personally, I love a great love story.”
Her choice of words were immediately interpreted by Royal watchers as a strong hint that an official engagement announcement is on the cards.
There will be a time when will have to come forward and present ourselves
Meghan on her relationship with Prince Harry
Meghan, star of TV legal drama Suits, gave the interview shortly before heading off on a romantic holiday with Harry, 32, in Botswana last month.
The Prince and his PR team will have known it was coming — and so must have approved Meghan going public about the romance, which began in July last year.
During the interview Meghan refers to Harry as her “boyfriend.”
But there are already rumours that he proposed while in Botswana — and the couple are merely waiting for the right time to make the announcement.
Harry has told before how he would love to have children — and he appeared elated on Monday at the news that sister-in-law Kate is pregnant again.
In the interview, Meghan talked of the difficulties of having a relationship in the withering glare of the public spotlight.
She said: “It has its challenges, and it comes in waves — some days it can feel more challenging than others.
“And right out of the gate it was surprising the way things changed.
“But I still have this support system all around me, and of course, my boyfriend’s support.
“I can tell you that at the end of the day I think it’s really simple.
“We’re two people who are really happy and in love.
“We were very quietly dating for about six months before it became news and I was working during that whole time.
“And the only thing that changed was people’s perception.
We're a couple, we're in love. It's special
Meghan on her relationship with the royal
“Nothing about me changed. I’m still the same person that I am and I’ve never defined myself by my relationship.”
Meghan insisted she is oblivious to the media attention.
She said: “I don’t read any press. I haven’t even read press for Suits.
“The people who are close to me anchor me in knowing who I am. The rest is noise.”
The next few days is likely to put that calm resolve to the test as Royal fans and commentators go into overdrive in the wake of the Meghan’s interview.
She spoke to the magazine at the house in Toronto she shares with rescue dogs Bogart and Guy.
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It has been her home while filming Suits and she joked she had suffered “seven Canadian winters — a long time for someone who grew up in southern California.”
During the interview and photo shoot — in the October issue of Vanity Fair on sale Friday, September 8 — Meghan said she was “thrilled” to work with a photographer who didn’t touch up pictures.
She added: “At almost every photo shoot they would airbrush out” her freckles.
She said: “I’ve always loved my freckles.”
Meghan, whose mum is African-American, has told in the past of her struggle at being a “mixed race” actress — describing herself previously as “ethnically ambiguous.”
She told interviewer Sam Kashner she was “going where the wifi is weak” after their chat — a reference to the Botswana trip.
Meghan posed for pictures in an off-the-shoulder black and white corseted ball dress, styled by the magazine’s fashion director.
She revealed she had planned to turn up to her Suits audition in casual black jeans and top.
But on her way there she realised she needed to look like a glamorous lawyer and picked up a £30 black dress from H&M, which she did not try on in advance.
Meghan also talked about her own family, including her parents' divorce.
She said: “What’s so incredible, you know, is that my parents split up when I was two. I never saw them fight. We would still take vacations together.
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Dad Thomas Markle was an award-winning Hollywood lighting director and gave her and friends a hand by doing the lighting for their early school plays.
She said: “My parents had been so supportive, watching me audition, trying to make ends meet, taking all the odds-and-ends jobs to pay my bills.
“I was doing calligraphy and I was a hostess at a restaurant — all those things that actors do.
“My father knew how hard it is for an actor to get work, so he above all people was so proud that I was able to beat the odds.”
During a 35-year career, Thomas did the lighting for soap General Hospital and sitcom Married with Children.
Meghan said: “Every day after school for ten years I was on the set of Married with Children, which was a really funny and perverse place for a little girl in a Catholic-school uniform to grow up.”
She also talked about the difficulty of growing up in Los Angeles at a time of race riots and unrest sparked by police racism.
The infamous beating of Rodney King by white police officers in 1991 sparked race riots on her own doorstep when she was 11.
Meghan, telling how she and her friends were sent home from school as the rioters burned and looted, said: “There was ash everywhere.”
She recalled telling mum Doria Ragland: “Oh, my God, Mommy, it’s snowing!”
She said her mother answered: “No, flower, it’s not snow. Get in the house.”
The magazine also interviewed Meghan’s friend Serena Williams.
The tennis legend said she had given Meghan some advice on how to deal with the media spotlight.
She said: “I told her, ‘Be who you are, you can’t hide’.”
Meghan and Harry’s relationship became public in October.
Weeks later he revealed his upset at his inability to protect her from online bullies — decrying the “sexism and racism of social media trolls.”
- WILLIAM and Kate have been awarded damages of 100,000 euros — £91,465 — for breach of privacy after a French magazine published topless photographs of her.
They were taken with a long lens as the couple holidayed at a chateau in Provence in 2012.
Clearest sign yet of royal nupitals
By Emily Andrews, Sun Royal Correspondent
ROLL out the bunting, dust down that Union Jack and buy a hat.
Meghan going public with her love for boyfriend Harry is the clearest sign yet of a royal wedding next year.
Yet Meghan and her prince need to be careful. Although this will have been sanctioned by Harry, it’s unheard of for any royal girlfriend to give this kind of interview.
It marks a huge departure from the way the royals do business. Even in today’s world, a princess-in-waiting should keep calm, carry on and keep her mouth shut.
Meghan looks amazing in a glitzy photoshoot across page after page of Vanity Fair magazine.
But it leaves her open to accusations that the previously little-known Suits actress is cashing in on her Harry connection.
More likely, this is a careful and orchestrated attempt by Kensington Palace to reposition the American’s public image and prep her as a princess.
Harry and Meghan asked to be left alone. So if KP were behind this glossy production, it blurs the rules of engagement.
If Harry and William are prepared to bare their souls to TV cameras, and Meghan to open her heart to a US magazine, then what price their future privacy?
Even royals can’t have their cake and eat it.