Mary Donaldson, born in 1972 on the Australian island of Tasmania, has spent more than two decades living a true fairy tale that culminated in 2024 with her coronation as queen of Denmark, after the surprising abdication of Queen Margrethe. Married to King Frederik since 2004, the commoner Mary became the first person not born in Europe to become queen consort of a monarchy in the old continent.
But the path to the Danish throne has not always been easy for Queen Mary, due to a long string of scandals over the years. Some scandals that she has managed to weather through a firm strategy of institutional silence and relentless professionalism. All of this to become the most valuable and popular asset of the Danish monarchy.
Mary first had to face Frederik’s reputation as a party prince and Casanova, and the initial rejection from his mother-in-law, Queen Margrethe. Also the controversy over her luxurious Verbier mansion (Switzerland) that they rented and whose expenses sparked a major political debate about the use of funds and the opacity of their properties. But it was undoubtedly the alleged infidelity of the now Danish monarch with Genoveva Casanova that rocked their marriage.
In late 2023, photographs of Prince Frederik strolling in Madrid with the Mexican socialite surfaced, triggering an international media crisis. “Any such claim is not only completely false, but also maliciously distorts the facts,” the ex-partner of Cayetano Martínez de Irujo asserted at the time, while the Danish Royal House maintained silence.
The Love Story of Mary and Frederik
It all began with a debate about chest hair at Slip Inn, a pub in Sydney, in 2000, during the Olympic Games. That night, two young women – Mary and her friend Beatrice Tarnawski – met some guys. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, that group consisted of Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark, his brother Prince Joachim, his cousin Prince Nicolas of Greece and Princess Martha Louise of Norway. “All the girls at the table were debating what was better: a man with hairy chest or one without hair, and the princes were wearing unbuttoned shirts,” Tarnawski revealed about that conversation.
Los reyes Federico y Mary de Dinamarca.
Mary, who was 28 at the time, had no idea who she was talking to. “The first time we met, we shook hands and I didn’t know he was the Crown Prince of Denmark. About an hour later, someone came up to me and said, ‘Do you know who these people are?,'” the current queen of the Nordic country revealed in 2003. “But from the moment we started talking, we never stopped,” she added.
Born in Hobart in 1972 to a Scottish family, Mary’s father was a mathematics professor and her mother, an executive assistant at the University of Tasmania. The youngest of four siblings, she studied in local schools and later pursued studies in commerce and law. She then moved to Melbourne and Sydney to work in advertising and, subsequently, in the real estate sector, shortly before that unexpected pub encounter changed everything.
After meeting at the Slip Inn, the couple began a secret long-distance romance. Frederik traveled to Australia several times during the following year. Then, in 2001, a Danish magazine, Billed Bladet, followed the prince to learn more about his “secret Australian girlfriend”. The scoop then published that it was Mary Donaldson, a “pretty, outgoing, talented girl and perhaps a future princess-in-waiting”.
How Mary Won the Danes
Frederik did not hesitate to invite her to move to Copenhagen. Before the move, she hired an image consultant to begin her transformation from commoner to future queen. The couple officially became engaged on 8 October 2003. Queen Margrethe had advised her future daughter-in-law to learn Danish before her wedding in 2004. At that time, Australian media picked up the story of a real-life fairy tale princess. The Slip Inn broadcast the wedding and offered free Carlsberg beer to anyone with a Danish passport.
Mary and Frederik, with their four children.
Since then, the Danish kings have formed a large family with four children: the heir Prince Christian and the princes Isabella, Vincent and Josephine. In addition to her role as mother and queen, Mary Donaldson has enthusiastically dedicated herself to various social causes such as women’s rights and the LGBTQ+ community. “I have always had a strong sense of justice: that everyone should have the same opportunities, regardless of their background,” she told the Financial Times in 2022.
Her mother, Henrietta, died in 1997, before Mary met her future husband. “I am sure she would be very happy to see me where I am, not only happy in my family life and as a mother, but also to see that I have taken advantage of my new situation and the resources and skills I have to create a platform with which to make a difference in what I can,” she recently told Australian Women’s Weekly. “And I think she would probably be smiling.”
