Catherine, Princess Royal

Full name
	Catherine Charlotte Natalie Victoria Lauren Charles Frederick

Catherine
Catherine
Princess Royal
Born	Catherine Charlotte Natalie Victoria Lauren Charles Frederick; 28 January 1967 (age 57); Buckingham Palace, London
Spouse	Alex Atkinson (m. 1999)
Issue; Detail	Princess Julianne; Princess Audrey;
Full name
Full name
	Catherine Charlotte Natalie Victoria Lauren Charles Frederick
House	Hanover
Father	Charles III
Mother	Lauren Bacall
Religion	Protestant

Catherine, Princess Royal (Catherine Charlotte Natalie Victoria Lauren Charles Frederick; born 28 January 1967) is a member of the British royal family, and the current title holder of Princess Royal since 1975. As the eldest daughter of the late King Charles III and American actress, Lauren Bacall, she was bestowed upon with the title following the death of her grand aunt, the late Princess Alexandra.

From the 1990s to the early 2000s, Catherine first gained international fame as a Victoria's Secret Angel, a profession that earned her both acclaim and criticism from the wider public. Following her retirement in 2004, she subsequently opted for a modestly successful tennis career of her own, in which she twice won the Wimbledon Championships in 2006 and 2007 respectively. Then, in 2011, she announced her retirement from professional tennis, followed by the princess herself being mostly involved in the causes of environmentalism, and animal conservation. Currently, she is the royal patron of a number of charities or organisations related to both causes, located across the United Kingdom. On August 1999, she married Alex Atkinson, a retired American lawyer, with whom she has two children, Julianne and Audrey.

Early Life

Catherine was born on January 28th 1967 as the eldest daughter of King Charles III and Lauren Bacall. Named Catherine after one of her parents' close friends, the American actress, Katharine Hepburn, she was subsequently named after her third-great grandmother, Queen Charlotte, her maternal and paternal grandmother, Natalie Bacall and Queen Louise, and lastly after her own mother and father.

In contrast to her predecessors, Catherine and her siblings' respective upbringings were completely void of any royal nannies, as Queen Lauren herself had insisted on personally raising her children. Nevertheless, amidst some initial hardships, Catherine and her younger sister, Princess Alexandra in particular, were quick to become generally close with their mother. While she mostly enjoyed warm relations with her brothers, she reportedly exhibited a certain degree of rivalry towards her younger sister in an unofficial competition for their mother's affection. Regardless, both princesses shared a number of common interests themselves, ranging from swimming to horseback riding. At the age of eight, Catherine was made the new Princess Royal by her father, thus succeeding her grand-aunt, the Duchess of Uppland, whom had previously held the title prior to her death at the time.

Since she was only a year apart from her younger sister, the two enrolled together at the Brentford School for Girls and were said to had performed "moderately well" in their studies, with Catherine herself in particular possessing a sizable degree of advantage in Physical Education.

Princess Royal

While her younger sister had promptly chose to seek a military career soon enough after graduation from high school, Catherine herself chose to further studies in academics. To that end, like her two older brothers, she was allowed to travel abroad to the United States, where she then chose to enroll at the University at Albany, located in the eastern state of New York. However, unlike her older brothers before her, the princess reportedly lived a mostly independent lifestyle while residing in the North American country, although her parents' old residence of Wales House in the city of Albany itself was said to be her preferred off-campus residence, not least due to its proximity and familiarity with the princess. At the same time, under the guise of keeping her royal identity a secret, Catherine also adopted an alias of her own, thereby naming herself Jane Watts as a coverup. Nevertheless, sometime on February 1989, she sparked a brief controversy when she was notably fined by state police for an offence of speeding while driving her personally-owned Chevrolet Corvette. However, in the following March, she gained much personal fame when she was appeared live on public television alongside then United States President, George H. W. Bush, with whom she held a public and spontaneous discussion on both global and domestic events.

Having been made a Counsellor of state by her father at the age of twenty two, that is upon finishing her own studies, Catherine then began to soon undertake a series of duties herself, ranging from royal functions such as attending public events to representing her country abroad through various international visits. Thus, on December 1991, she undertook her first task as a state counsellor by holding an official visit to the newly created Russian Federation, which had then recently emerged out of a dissolved Soviet Union, during which she met the inaugural President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, with whom she then went on a state-sponsored trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway, similar to that of her parents' having done so themselves with the then Soviet leader, Nikita Khruschev, during the 1950s.

The Eight-Nation Asia Tour

In the following months of January to March, Catherine conducted a series of state visits, then known as the Princess Royal's Eight-Nation Asia Tour, during which she successively visited the countries of China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore. All the eight successive trips conducted by the Princess Royal were equally subject to mass media coverage, with Catherine's own general openness with the public and her "warm and lovely" attitude being unanimously praised by various international observers.

Despite the overwhelmingly warm, positive nature associated with her respective visits, she notably faced only one assassination attempt, which occurred during her visit to the Philippines, when a random, disaffected Filipino citizen allegedly attempted to stab the princess as she was being escorted through the passageway of Manila International Airport in the capital city of Manila. While the assassination attempt itself was quickly foiled by armed security guards, the princess nevertheless persisted in her subsequent touring of the country amid heightened security fears for the British royal. During the visit, she notably praised then President Corazon Aquino for "restoring normalcy and tranquillity to a nation scarred with unrest and corruption", with the latter part of the statement receiving much particular criticism from supporters and family members of the already deceased, and notorious former President, Ferdinand Marcos, for which the princess was criticised for supposedly breaching her traditionally mandated neutral stance in public.

Modeling Career

While furthering her studies in the United States, Catherine, under her alias of Jane Watts, was first scouted by the New York-based IMG Models agency. Then, upon being successfully hired as a model by the agency, the princess initially opted on keeping her actual royal identity secret, although this was soon discovered by the agency's founder, Mark McCormack, whom nevertheless agreed to keep Catherine's true identity a secret, unless told otherwise by the latter herself. However, as a result of her then newfound priorities, both Catherine and McCormack agreed to initially put her modeling career on hold, although she would continue to remain under the agency itself, having first debuted at the 1988 New York Fashion Week show. Then, following a subsequent return to the industry, she proceeded to further model for various designers, namely Ray Aghayan, Steven Alan, Emilio Pucci, Fendi, Betsey Johnson, Anna Sui, and others.

In the year 1997, which was seen as being the supposed "peak" of her modeling career, she was listed as being the fourth highest paid supermodel, with earnings reportedly amounting to around $3.5 million dollars.

1990 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue Controversy

On February 12th 1990, the Princess Royal notably sparked large controversy within both the United States and the United Kingdom, when she markedly appeared on the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue magazine's annual cover that year. The magazine cover, which featured the princess dressed in a risqué, white two-piece swimsuit while carefully posing on top of the famed Darwin's Arch rock formation in Ecuador, saw an initial ban on its circulation by the British government in the United Kingdom due to its overly risqué nature. At the same time, Catherine herself openly commented on the much controversial magazine cover, which she referred to as an "opportunity of a lifetime", in addition to emphasising the fact that she was the very first cover model of the magazine to be of both British nationality and of royalty status. Soon enough, following a settlement personally mediated by the princess herself, the magazine cover was ultimately allowed to be circulated within the United Kingdom, albeit with a disclaimer attached to each publication and the condition that it be sold at a slightly higher price than usual, as to theoretically lessen the number of purchases of the issue itself in particular by its regular consumers.

Victoria's Secret

Not long after her infamous Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue photoshoot, sometime on March 1990, Catherine, having consistently expressed further interest in the modeling industry, was soon scouted and afterward cast by the famed lingerie company, Victoria's Secret. Almost immediately, due to her inherited royal status, the casting proved much controversial and sensational in its entirety, with one British tabloid newspaper having notably dubbed her Princess Royal of Lingeries. In a follow-up public interview with NBC, Catherine otherwise publicly defended her controversial decision, which she simultaneously likened to "women being allowed to vote when they were not allowed to before", along with it being a supposed milestone for women, as she then proceeded to claim, "It's not every day you get to see a strong, confident princess stepping out of the grand palaces onto the catwalk or so trying out fabulous lingerie herself. It's a rarity and has never been done before". Then, following her inaugural walk on the Victoria's Secret runway the same year, during which she gained much acclaim for both her beauty and her persistently bold nature, Catherine proceeded to make further appearances for the brand's succeeding shows in the following years, with the princess being chosen to open the show in the years 1994, 1995, 1997, 1998, and 2001. In particular, following her first opening of the show in 1994, Catherine was named Most Beautiful Royal by Vogue, while Vanity Fair labeled her Sexiest British Royal.

For the 2001 show, which would be Catherine's final opening for the brand, she was eventually chosen by organisers to wear the prized "Fantasy Bra", then officially known as the "Heavenly Star Bra" which, at a total worth of $12.5 million, is to date, the second most expensive lingerie set after Gisele Bündchen's "Red Hot Fantasy Bra/Panties", which totaled instead at a worth of $15 million. In 2004, she walked in her final Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, thus totaling an amount of thirteen catwalks for the brand.