The children of Princess Grace and Prince Ranier III of Monaco may have appeared to live a gilded life, with a beautiful former Hollywood screen siren as their mother, a royal father and a palace to live in.
But Princess Caroline has reportedly given a glimpse into the impersonal relationship she and her siblings, Prince Albert and Princess Stephanie, had with Grace and Ranier as young children.
Speaking in a book to be published in celebration of Albert’s 60th birthday, Caroline revealed that as children, she and her siblings were closer to their beloved nanny than to their parents and that until they were 14, they never even ate at the same table as the prince and princess.
Her comments were reported by numerous outlets that follow the royal family of Monaco, after Albert himself spoke to French magazine Point de Vue about the book, called simply Albert II of Monaco, which is based on interviews with the prince, his sisters, their nanny Maureen Wood and others that know them well.
According to the reports, Caroline remembered that Maureen, who they called Nana, was central to their lives as young children, so much so that they were not upset when their parents went abroad on state visits, but devastated when Maureen, pictured below with the children in 1961, left the palace for her annual vacation.
“Until we were 14, we wouldn’t eat with our parents … For my brother and I, Maureen was the key figure in our life … When we were little, we were probably closer to our nanny than to our parents,” the princess recalled, according to royalcentral.co.uk.
“When she was leaving Rocagel [one of the official royal residences], Albert and I would yell ‘Don’t go, don’t go!’. We were sad for days. Most often than not, our mother would end up calling her to ask her to come home earlier than planned.”
In his own interview with Point de Vue, though, Albert remembers forcing a closer relationship with his parents later in life, describing Princess Grace as “such a loving mother, who gave you so much, who gave you her help and confidence so unconditionally”.
“My mother, like my father, also had a great sense of humour,” the royal remembered. “Both of them knew how to take life on the right side thanks to this distance, the distance they put into everything. Do not take it all too seriously, they told us. Do what you have to do, and do it well. But yourselves, do not take yourself too seriously. ”
In 2017 Prince Albert gave a rare interview on the death of his beloved mother 35 years ago in a car accident – a death from which his father never recovered.
The monarch on Monaco had married the gorgeous Grace Kelly when he was 33 and she was 26, and the Oscar-winning actress gave up her glittering career to serve the principality as its princess. She was just 52 when she died on September 14, 1982.
“It was pretty obvious that he was deeply affected and he wasn’t quite the same man as he was before the accident,” Albert said last year of his father, who died in 2005.
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