Royal Exes You Didn't Know Passed Away
In the 1990s, the British royal family was rocked by one of the biggest tragedies to hit the monarchy in living memory: the death of Princess Diana. Though, while she may be the most famous royal ex to have passed, she's far from the only one.
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00:00In the 1990s, the British royal family was rocked by one of the biggest tragedies to
00:05hit the monarchy in living memory — the death of Princess Diana. Though,
00:10while she may be the most famous royal ex to have passed, she's far from the only one.
00:16Prince Harry dated TV presenter Caroline Flack in 2009. He wrote about the experience in his memoir,
00:22Spare, recalling that some friends introduced them at a restaurant.
00:25He described her as, quote,
00:27"...funny and sweet and cool."
00:29At the time, she had hosted shows like Gladiators,
00:32and she would go on to helm mega-hits like The X Factor and Love Island.
00:37I'm here at Love Island. We're literally putting the finishing touches
00:41to the villa, and the contestants, the islanders, are gonna be going in in the next couple of days."
00:45Despite her fame, though, the prince recalled,
00:47"...she wasn't taken aback that I didn't recognize her. She didn't have a big ego."
00:52Flack also wrote about that relationship in her own memoir,
00:55complimenting him in Storm in a Sea Cap for how well he handled intense interest from the media.
01:01Unfortunately, that was their undoing. In 2023, Prince Harry testified to a
01:06British court that a photographer tracked them on a date, saying,
01:09"...I was so shocked — and livid — that the two photographers from Icon Pictures
01:14knew where we would be and were already there, waiting for us to arrive."
01:18Similarly, Flack wrote,
01:20"...once the story got out, that was it. We had to stop seeing each other.
01:23I was no longer Caroline Flack, TV presenter. I was Caroline Flack, Prince Harry's bit of rough."
01:30Caroline Flack, the former Love Island host, died by suicide in 2020.
01:35Prince Harry addressed her death in spare, laying her struggle at the feet of the media.
01:40Princess Beatrice dated a man named Paolo Liuzzo in the mid-2000s, when she was only 17.
01:46Liuzzo was a bit of a bad boy. After all, he'd been arrested the year before.
01:51The royal family at large didn't approve of their relationship, but Beatrice's mother,
01:56Sarah Ferguson, released a statement at the time, saying,
02:00"...we all have our own journeys and have to learn our way."
02:03After they went their separate ways in 2007, Liuzzo spoke at length with the Daily Mail.
02:08He claimed Prince Andrew owed him money, revealed that the princess and her sister
02:12attended parties where drugs were being consumed, and that Sarah Ferguson had condoned it all.
02:17He also insisted that Beatrice was made to dump him at the request of her mother.
02:22In February 2023, Liuzzo died of a drug overdose in Miami. A friend told The Independent that
02:28he'd been in a bad state, dealing with deaths and drug addiction. He began using a lot of
02:33pharmaceutical drugs, but that later led to cocaine and harder drugs.
02:38Seven-time Oscar nominee Richard Burton is remembered for his tumultuous love life.
02:43In particular, his legendary on-again-off-again relationship with Elizabeth Taylor.
02:48His Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? co-star wasn't the only Elizabeth that Burton dated, however.
02:54During a break from one of several romances with his sometimes-wife,
02:58Burton also dated Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. In fact, at one point,
03:02they were engaged to be married. In 1974, four months out from a divorce from Taylor,
03:08he told The New York Times,
03:09We are going to get married as soon as it is practicably possible."
03:13He meant, after all, that the princess herself was married to someone else at the time.
03:19Who are you looking at?
03:21Elizabeth told Australian Woman's Weekly at the time,
03:24Richard is my man. I think he's just lovely, lovely."
03:28She didn't seem intimidated by the actor's legendarily bad moods, insisting,
03:33I can handle Richard. I'm spoiled, obstinate, and hot-tempered.
03:37How's that to take on Richard Burton?
03:40They never actually got married. In 1975, Burton remarried Elizabeth Taylor,
03:45only to re-divorce her less than a year after that. He died in the 1980s from a brain hemorrhage.
03:52Princess Marta Louise, a member of Norway's royal family, announced in 2016 that she was
03:58seeking a divorce from Ari Bien, her husband of more than a decade. The couple had several
04:03children together, whom they planned to continue to raise together, but otherwise, they wanted to
04:08go their separate ways. In 2017, Bien made headlines on his own when he accused disgraced actor Kevin
04:14Spacey of sexual misconduct. Apparently, Spacey and Bien were speaking after a Nobel Prize ceremony
04:21in 2007 when the actor assaulted him. Bien said on Norwegian radio P4,
04:26After five minutes, he said,
04:28Hey, let's go out and have a cigarette. Then he puts his hand under the table and grabs me.
04:32I am a generous person, but this was a bit more than I had in mind."
04:36Bien died by suicide on Christmas Day in 2019. In a statement, King Harold of Norway said,
04:43We are grateful that we got to know him. We grieve that our grandchildren have now lost
04:47their beloved father. Viewers of The Crown will remember that Princess Margaret,
04:52Queen Elizabeth II's sister, was involved in an infamous affair with group captain Peter Townsend.
04:58He was a Royal Air Force officer who worked in the palace when they fell in love.
05:02Townsend once gushed over the princess, writing,
05:05She was, by nature, generous, volatile. She was a comedian at heart, played the piano with ease,
05:12and loved to sing the latest hits, imitating her favorite stars. She was coquettish,
05:17sophisticated. She could make you bend double with laughing, and also touch you deeply in your
05:22heart. Unfortunately, however, the pressures of the royal family kept them from being together,
05:28even though Townsend had divorced his first wife. Instead, they went their separate ways.
05:33Princess Margaret released a statement in 1955, which read,
05:37Mindful of the Church's teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble,
05:41and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations
05:45before any others. Townsend died in 1995. George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury,
05:52revealed in a 2023 documentary that when he visited Princess Margaret on her deathbed,
05:57she mourned their lost love. He said,
06:00Here is a woman who longed for love and commitment,
06:03and the love of her life was forbidden from her. And there was a deep human sadness in that.