Lively Swedish Princess In Reported Romance

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30998, 2 March 1966, Page 2

Lively Swedish Princess In Reported Romance

A report that Princess Christina, 22year - old • grand - daughter of King Gustav of Sweden may marry 23-year-old Prince Michael of Kent, has raised many eyebrow’s in Sweden, say a London correspondent.

Not that the Swedes would disapprove of the match. They would be delighted. But It 'was generally expected that Princess Christina would follow the example of her sister. Princess Margaretha. who married a commoner, the British businessman, Mr John Ambler. Princess Christina Bernadotte has always been renowned for her bright, breezy remarks and her informal attitude to life —informal even by Swedish standards. Her upbringing has been

little different from that of scores of other Swedish children. She went to college in Stockholm where she specialised in French studies and in 1964 she spent a year at Radcliffe College, Massachusetts. Her teacher described her as “dangerously intelligent.” When she had a coming-out party at Stockholm’s Drottningholm Palace in 1960 it was attended, not by hordes of socialites, but by a score of her classmates and friends. The only Royal guest present was Princess Beriedickte of Denmark, one of her lifelong companions. Bored By Protocol Formality bores and even distresses the Princess to such an extent that she can be quite headstrong about not obeying the whims of protocol. Once, when she was attending a debutantes’ ball at the Palace of Versailles, she refused to curtsy to Princess Alix Napoleon who was receiving the guests. Her reason? —a slight difference of

opinion between her great-great-grandfather and Napoleon about 150 years earlier. Merry-eyed, elfin-faced Christina is the daughter of

Princess Sibylla and the late Prince Adolf Gustav who was killed in an air crash in 1947. Like her three sisters, Margaretha, aged 31, Birgitta, aged 29, and Desiree, aged 26, she is exceptionally beautiful. Some people say she is the most beautiful of the four. Both Princess Christina and Prince Michael are great-great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria. (AH rights reserved.)