Charlene Wittstock 2011 infographic
Caricature shows Charlene Wittstock.
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MONACO

Charlene Wittstock marries Prince Albert of Monaco

By Chris Dinsdale

July 1, 2011 - July 2, 2011 - Prince Albert of Monaco ends decades as one of Europe’s most eligible bachelors when he marries Charlene Wittstock, a former Olympian swimmer from South Africa.

His playboy lifestyle and apparent reluctance to settle down frustrated Monaco royal-watchers for years, but Prince Albert II is finally due to tie the knot when he marries his South African girlfriend Charlene Wittstock, 20 years his junior, in civil and religious ceremonies on July 1-2.
 
Indeed, at one point it seemed so unlikely that the son of Prince Rainier and Princess Grace would produce an heir with the legitimate right to rule the principality that its laws were changed to allow succession to continue through the female line instead.
 
Born on March 14, 1958, Albert was the second child of Prince Rainier and former Hollywood actress Grace Kelly. He studied in Monaco and then at the prestigious MIT in the United States before serving in the French Navy. Beyond Monaco, he was perhaps better known for his sporting achievements, including judo and football. He competed in the Olympics three times with the Monaco bobsleigh team.
 
Prince Albert dated a string of glamorous women, including model Claudia Schiffer and actress Brooke Shields, and his bachelorhood became something of a sore point in the conservative principality when it emerged that he had fathered two children out of wedlock, a son to a Togo-born flight attendant and a daughter to a Californian woman he had met on holiday.
 
When Prince Albert became ruler of Monaco on the death of Prince Rainier in 2006, he began shaking off his playboy image. He stepped up his longtime humanitarian work -- he had become president of the Monaco Red Cross in 1982, and had founded the Monaco Aid and Presence Association, which runs projects in Brazil, Romania and throughout Africa.
 
He also began seeing Wittstock, a former Olympic swimmer and statuesque blonde who would become a regular presence at his side over the next few years. The daughter of a sales manager and swimming coach, Zimbabwe-born Wittstock's background was perhaps more ordinary than that of some of his previous conquests: she is reported to have taken lessons in French and European court rituals in preparation for her new life as Her Serene Highness, The Princess of Monaco.
 
Their nuptials will end a long wait for a royal wedding in the principality -- the last occasion was the 1956 marriage of Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly, whom some say Wittstock resembles. Some even see it as finally drawing a line under a long rocky period in the history of the family, which has sometimes seemed overshadowed by the death of Princess Grace in a car crash in 1982, and the unhappy and/or unorthodox love lives of Monaco's other princesses, Albert's sisters Caroline and Stephanie, which have often made headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Sources
PUBLISHED: 06/06/2011; STORY: Joanna Griffin; PICTURES: Bob Hoare
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