I first met Crown Princess Mary nine years ago in Kuala Lumpur. By this time Tasmania’s Mary Donaldson had already captured the hearts of the Danish public. The fairytale story of how she met her prince in a bar during Sydney’s Olympics was very much old news and the new Crown Princess, wife and mother was already established as a much-admired member of the Danish royal family, one of the oldest dynasties in the world.
Her positive influence on Crown Prince Frederik was palpable, their four children the perfect heirs and now the Crown Princess was ready to fly. As I soon discovered, this thoroughly modern royal was eager to shape the extraordinary new role she found herself in and use this regal platform in exciting and surprising ways.
Love may have propelled her into an alien world of palaces and tiaras, but she wasn’t going to sit back and just look pretty, nor did Denmark want that of her. The Danes like their royals to be strong leaders they can look up to, able to represent the democratic heart of a small wealthy country that regularly punches above its weight in global humanitarian endeavours.
“I have always been very aware that being Crown Princess is a position that comes with unique possibilities. From the very beginning, I was given the freedom and support to shape my own role and figure out how I could contribute to making a difference for the Danish people,” Mary says today in a stunning new pictorial memoir, Mary H.K.H., that she is happy to share exclusively with The Weekly.
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