Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex

The Duchess of Sussex, who graduated with a bachelor's degree in theater and international studies from Illinois' Northwestern University in 2003, may have gained fame from being on Suits from 2011-2018, but she was on the Hollywood scene for years before landing her big break.

During her acting career Meghan appeared on Deal or No Deal as a suitcase model, and also had roles in 90210, Without a Trace, Castle and Horrible Bosses. 

In 2016, she became the Global Ambassador for World Vision Canada and she also once ran her own lifestyle blog, The Tig, which she shut down after her romance with now-husband Prince Harry went public. The pair married in a stunning ceremony at St. George's Chapel, Windsor, on May 19, 2018. 

Photo: Alexi Lubomirski/Twitter/@kensingtonpalace

Kendra Spears, Princess Salwa Aga Khan

Her beauty mark and long legs earned Seattle-born Kendra Spears the moniker "Little Cindy" (a reference to supermodel Cindy Crawford) and helped her sashay from the international catwalk into the arms of Prince Rahim, the eldest son of the Aga Khan – billionaire spiritual leader of the world's Ismaili Shia Muslim community.

Once a fan of thrift shops and grunge, Kendra broke onto the fashion circuit aged 19 in the 2008 Ford Supermodel of the World competition and was often baffled by hectic nature of her new life. "Sometimes it's hard to understand all the chaos that goes along with this business," she told SpanishVogue.

Photo: OLIVIER MORIN/AFP/GettyImages

She subsequently graced the covers of French Elle and Chinese Vogue and went on to do campaigns for Diane von Fürstenberg and Prada as well as catwalk shows for Dolce & Gabbana and Marc Jacobs. Her story took an even more fairytale turn when she was introduced to Prince Rahim at a party by her friend Naomi Campbell, fell in love and became Princess Salwa Aga Khan.

Prince Rahim was, of course, following a dyed-in-the-wool family tradition when he asked the catwalk queen to marry him. Not only did his father marry British-born model Sally Crocker-Poole but his grandfather married Rita Hayworth and his great-grandfather took Miss France as his fourth wife.

Photo: Gary Otte/The Ismaili via Getty Images

Marie-Chantal Miller, Crown Princess of Greece 

Though born in London, Marie-Chantal was an American citizen, before renouncing her citizenship in 2011. With boarding school in Gstaad and a stint working for Andy Warhol as a 16-year-old intern in New York, her world was one of opportunity. The daughter of an American tycoon and an Ecuadorian beauty, she dipped into art history, singing and breeding horses – and then she met her match, Crown Prince Pavlos of Greece. 

Their first encounter was engineered by a mutual friend – a blind date that had been in the cards for a year and a half. As it approached, Marie-Chantal got cold feet but, unable to call it off, she had no choice but to take her seat next to the handsome Pavlos at dinner. “It was love at first sight,” she told Vanity Fair. "I knew that he was the person I would marry.”

Photo: Marie-Chantal

Pavlos, it turned out, felt the same and two years later he proposed to his Princess-to-be on a ski lift in Gstaad. Their London wedding boasted the largest congregation of royals in the city since Queen Elizabeth's 1947 wedding to Prince Philip. 

"I bring all this energy and he gives me all this calm," she said, explaining the successful dynamics of their partnership.

Photo: Tim Graham/Getty Images

Wallis Simpson, The Duchess of Windsor

American socialite Wallis Simpson was famously referred to as "That woman" by the British royal family in the 1930s. The rest of the country accused her of being a gold digger and of "setting out to steal the throne of England," as she herself puts it in Wallis Simpson's Diary, edited by Helen Batting. 

Though she would eventually marry the Prince of Wales, her life wasn't exactly a fairytale. Due to her father's death when she was still very young, Pennsylvania-born Wallis and her mother were dependent on her uncle. However, he was generous enough to send her to the most expensive school in Maryland where she made sure she was top of the class and immaculately dressed.

Photo: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images

By the time Wallis first met the then Prince of Wales, she was married to her second husband, London-based shipping executive Ernest Simpson. The occasion was a hunting weekend, hosted by his mistress Lady Furness. Due to a bad cold, Wallis and the Prince hardly spoke, but there were other house parties and soon Wallis' wit won her a place in the Prince of Wales' heart. 

On the death of his father George V, the Prince of Wales was crowned Edward VIII, but his reign was to last all of ten months. Choosing Wallis over the throne, he abdicated in 1936 and went to France where Wallis had taken refuge. There they lived in what they called Windsor Villa in Bois de Boulogne.

Photo: Central Press/Getty Images

Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco

The most famous American princess of all, Hollywood star Grace Kelly truly looked the part when she married Prince Rainier II of Monaco in a wedding that was hailed as "A Fairytale of Modern Times."

From an affluent Philadelphia family, Grace was part ice queen and part passionate romantic, a contradiction which was exploited by Alfred Hitchcock, who described her as "a snow-covered volcano." That could be exactly what captivated Prince Rainier when they met in 1954, during a Paris Match shoot at the Pink Palace in Monaco. Following the meeting, Rainier proclaimed himself charmed by Grace's freshness, maturity, sensitivity and culture.

Photo: RDA/Getty Images

Grace and Rainier began to exchange letters and soon the Prince was organizing a U.S. tour during which he spent a week with Grace and her family in Philadelphia. The Prince was a huge hit with Grace's family and by the end of the week, he proposed and she accepted. 

The wedding was, of course, a grand affair with MGM studios producing a half-hour documentary of the event entitled, The Wedding in Monaco. To any who doubted her motives, Grace was to say, "When I married Prince Rainier, I married the man and not what he represented or what he was. I fell in love with him without giving a thought to anything else."

Photo: AFP/Getty Images

Lisa Halaby, Queen Noor of Jordan

The first American to become Queen of an Arab country, Lisa Halaby was a preppy Princeton architecture graduate, remembered by her classmates for standing out from the crowd and also for her eclectic taste in men.

This certainly proved true when Lisa fell in love with with King Hussein of Jordan, 16 years her senior, after they met at a reception in Amman. At the time, she was working on design for Jordan's national airline and the King, an experienced jet pilot with a love of anything to do with aviation, was to cross her path again and again. A friendship developed and soon Lisa was invited to lunch in the king's Aqaba Palace, a business meeting that was to last eight hours!

Photo: Gilbert Carrasquillo/FilmMagic

Outspoken and unorthodox by nature, Lisa surprised few of her family and friends when she became Queen Noor of Jordan in 1978 but they worried she would struggle with the Jordanian lifestyle and her role at the palace. She quickly adapted, however, declaring before the wedding that, "My career is my life with His Majesty the King."

As Queen, she won the hearts of the Jordanian people, showing great loyalty to her husband until his death from cancer in February 1999. She even left his bedside to comfort the grieving Jordanians keeping a vigil outside the hospital.

Photo: STF/AFP/Getty Images

Rita Hayworth, consort to Prince Aly Aga Khan

Brooklyn girl Rita Hayworth's life was a rollercoaster ride that at one point threw her from arms of famed director Orson Welles into the territory of kings. 

Born to Latino showbiz parents in 1918, she became Columbia Studios' favorite star after they had transformed her into a raven-haired seductress. In the 1940s, she became a fave pin-up girl for WWII soldiers. But though she may have been portrayed as a 'good time gal', it was just a veneer. In 1941, she revealed, "I naturally am very shy and suffer from an inferiority complex."

Photo: Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images

This didn't stop her from moving into the society's highest echelons. Emerging from the ruins of her marriage to Welles in 1948, Rita met her Prince, Prince Aly Khan, at a party on the French Riviera. 

Abandonning Hollywood, Rita married Aly in 1949, but once again happiness eluded her. Not long after their daughter Princess Yasmin was born, the marriage was falling apart; by 1953, it was over – and Rita was back on the silver screen.

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Hope Cooke, Her Highness Hope La of Sikkim

She was a New York debutante and he was the widowed King of Sikkim. It seemed an unlikely match, but when Hope Cooke's eyes met those of Palden Thondup Namgyal across the bar of Darjeeling's Windamere Hotel, they recognized in the other a sadness that drew them together and decided her fate as Her Highness Hope La, the Queen consort to the head of Asia's smallest Kingdom. 

Sikkim was, in Hope's own words, “very harmonious” and undoubtedly offered her the kind of safe haven she had missed out on as a child. In the absence of both parents, she was brought up in New York by grandparents who offered little in the way of affection. So searching for meaning in her life, she travelled East. "I've never been so happy… India!" she writes in her autobiography, Time Change. "My heart explodes… The East is my home… I must stay near India somehow."

Photo: Douglas Miller/ Keystone/ Getty Images

When Hope met Palden Thondup Namgyal, she was taking a typing course in Darjeeling. In her book, she remarks on his "Chaplinesque loneliness" which seduces her into marrying him in 1963. After the wedding, Hope threw herself into the role of mother to the King's three orphaned children, reasoning, "These children will be happy. The wheel of unhappiness that both my husband and I grew up on will not go to this generation."

But while Hope found solace in her new family, the King did not. His behavior grew erratic and the marriage disintegrated. When India finally claimed the tiny kingdom as its own in the early 1970s, Hope took her two birth children and one stepchild back to New York. She finally divorced the King in 1980, just two years before his death from cancer.

Photo: Dinodia Photos/ Getty Images