Stéphanie de Monaco

Stéphanie was born to Rainier III and Grace Kelly on 1 February 1965 at Prince's Palace in Monaco. She is the youngest of their three children, after Caroline and Albert II. Her godparents are her maternal uncle John B. Kelly Jr. and paternal first cousin Elisabeth-Anne de Massy. Her mother, who described Stephanie as a "warm, bright, amusing, intelligent and capable girl" and a "good athlete", lovingly called her "wild child" (French: enfant terrible).

On 13 September 1982, while returning home from their farm in Rocagel, France, Stéphanie and her mother had a car accident. Grace died the next day, on 14 September, while Stéphanie sustained a hairline fracture of a neck vertebra.

Although the official report of the incident was that Grace suffered a stroke while driving, rumors began that Stéphanie, who had to miss her mother's funeral due to her recovery, was the one actually driving. Stéphanie herself refused to speak publicly about her mother's death until 1989, when she gave an interview to the author Jeffrey Robinson, insisting that the story was untrue. She said, "There was a lot of pressure on me because everyone was saying that I had been driving the car, that it was all my fault, that I'd killed my mother... It's not easy when you're 17 to live with that."

She did not discuss the subject again until a 2002 interview with the French magazine Paris Match in which she repeated her earlier denial, and discussed the trauma of being beside her mother at the time of the accident. She said, "Not only did I go through the horrible trauma of losing my mother at a very young age, but I was beside her at the moment of the accident. Nobody can imagine how much I've suffered, and still suffer."

Princess Stéphanie was educated at the Dames de Saint-Maur in Monaco, and then at the école and collège Dupanloup in Boulogne-Billancourt, France. Stéphanie earned her baccalauréat from the Cours Charles de Foucauld in 1982. During her school years, she studied classical dance and piano, and competed in gymnastics and horse riding. She also attended Camp Oneka, an all-girls' summer camp in the Pocono Mountains, in the United States, where her sister and mother both had previously attended.

In 1983, after her physical recovery from the accident that killed her mother, Stéphanie started an apprentice programme at Christian Dior under the direction of head designer Marc Bohan. The following year, she debuted as a model on the biannual haute couture special published by Spanish magazine ¡Hola!, a venture that she repeated in 1990. In 1985, Stéphanie covered German Vogue and the American edition of Vanity Fair. She also became the spokesman of the Swiss beauty line La Prairie, for which she was photographed by Horst, and she appeared on the cover of French Vogue, photographed by Helmut Newton in September 1986. ...

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