Wife of Romania’s last monarch

Born: September 18, 1923;

Died: August 1, 2016

QUEEN Anne of Romania, who has died aged 92, was the loyal and modest wife of Romania's last monarch, the exiled King Michael.

Born Princess Anne of Bourbon-Parma, she met Michael in November 1947 when they had both come to London for the wedding of the future Queen Elizabeth II and Philip Mountbatten.

In a 2013 documentary with the Romanian public broadcaster TVR, Anne said she was formally introduced to Michael, who was in uniform, at a reception at Claridge's hotel in London and she responded by clicking her heels and standing to attention. She said he proposed to her soon afterwards, while driving.

Michael returned to Romania and was forced to abdicate by the communists on December 30 1947, and went into exile. He returned after communism ended and Anne's first visit to Romania was in Easter 1992.

"Michael lost a country but won an exceptional woman," commentator Stelian Tanase, an acquaintance of the royal couple, said. President Klaus Iohannis called her an important symbol of wisdom and dignity.

Related to several European royal families, she was born in Paris and brought up in Italy. During the Second World War, she and her family fled to New York where her father worked for a gas company. Anne also later worked as an ambulance driver with the French Army.

After meeting Kind Michael, she largely avoided the spotlight but was known for her wit and devotion to her husband. For a time, the couple lived in Hertfordshire where they established a market garden and poultry farm. The venture was not a success though and they left Britain after four years.

The couple were married in an Orthodox ceremony in Athens in 1948 after Pope Pius XII refused to give Anne, who was half French and half Danish, dispensation to marry a non-Catholic. In 1966, they had another ceremony in a Catholic church in Monaco.

As an exile, King Michael was obliged to work for a living, first as a test pilot for Lear Jets and latterly as a stockbroker.

When King Michael was again refused entry to Romania in the late 1990s, Anne visited several times and acted as his emissary. She will have the most lavish royal funeral in Romania since the death in 1938 of Queen Marie, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

Her body will be flown from Switzerland to Romania and will lie in state for one day in Peles Castle in the mountain resort of Sinaia where Michael was born, and then in the Royal Palace in Bucharest for one day.

She will then be buried with other members of Romania's royal family at the Curtea de Arges cemetery on August 13 in central Romania.

Anne died on Monday afternoon at a hospital in Morges, Switzerland, surrounded by family including four of her daughters, a statement from the royal house said.

Michael, 94, who is suffering from cancer, visited her every day. She is survived by Michael and their five daughters.