Princess Lilian of Sweden, 1915–2013

When the young Lilian Davies was told that the handsome man staring at her in a London nightclub during World War II was His Royal Highness Crown Prince Bertil of Sweden, she responded, “And I’m the Queen of Sheba.” But he really was, and their meeting led to a royal marriage 33 years later.

Born in Swansea, Wales, as the daughter of a coal miner, the blue-eyed beauty moved as a teenager to London, where she modeled hats and gloves and took minor roles in films, said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). In 1940, she married Scottish actor Ivan Craig, “whose career never flourished beyond bit parts.” Craig was soon drafted and dispatched to fight in North Africa, and Lilian started working in a factory making radios for the Royal Navy.

In 1943 she had her fateful meeting with the prince, then the naval attaché at the Swedish Embassy in London. But “it wasn’t until he fetched her with his car following an air raid that the romance blossomed,” said The Independent (U.K.). Davies’s marriage was not an impediment. “She divorced in 1945 on amicable terms, her husband having also met someone new while abroad.” But marrying the prince was another matter, especially after his older brother, Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf, died in a plane crash in 1947. Bertil’s other two brothers had already married commoners and relinquished their places in the royal succession, and his father the king “refused to give a blessing to a marriage between Bertil and Lilian, so as not to jeopardize the future of the monarchy.”

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For decades thereafter, Bertil’s “obligations to the throne and Lilian’s status as a divorced commoner prevented them from making their love public,” said the Associated Press. They lived together in Stockholm and a French village, but Davies stayed discreetly in the background, and the couple’s “lifelong dedication to one another gripped the hearts of Swedes.” Only after his nephew, the current King Carl XVI Gustaf, took the throne did Bertil get permission to marry Davies. After they wed in their 60s in 1976, Princess Lilian became a substitute grandmother to the king’s children. “If I were to sum up my life, everything has been about my love,” she said about Bertil before he died, in 1997. “He’s a great man, and I love him.”