Princess Charlene Admits to 'Incredibly Painful Year': 'Sometimes It's Hard to Smile'
Princess Charlene often seems sad in photos — and she knows it.
In an end-of-year cover story with South African magazine Huisgenoot, Monaco’s princess tackles the issue, explaining, “people are very quick to say, ‘Oh, why isn’t she smiling in the photos?’
“Well, sometimes it’s hard to smile,” acknowledges the mother of 5-year-old twins Prince Jacques and Princess Gabriella. “They don’t know what’s going on in the background.”
In the interview, the usually press-shy princess, who is married to Monaco’s Prince Albert, offers surprisingly candid insights.
Noting that “the past year has definitely hit me hard,” she explains that it has been an “incredibly painful” year marked by the deaths of two friends within 10 days and concern over the health of her father, who underwent surgery in her native South Africa.
At the root of her sadness, she says, is homesickness. Although her brother Mike Wittstock and his family also live in her adopted country of Monaco, the princess regrets being at distance. “I have the privilege of having this life, but I miss my family and my friends in South Africa and I’m often sad because I cannot always be there for them,” she says.
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Last February, she took her children for their first experience in South Africa.
“I’d dreamed of taking them there for a long time, showing them South Africa, certainly, but also Benoni, the city where I grew up,” she said recently. “The children were impatient to see Grandpa and Grandma. On the plane, when we arrived, we were all three looking through the porthole and Jacques cried, ‘Wow, this is the country where you come from, Mom? It’s so big!’ It was very moving for me.”
