House of Grimaldi Monarchy of Monaco

HSH The Prince HSH The Princess HSH The Hereditary Prince HSH The Countess of Carladès HRH The Princess of Hanover HSH Princess Stéphanie

Princess Stéphanie of Monaco, Countess of Polignac (Stéphanie Marie Elisabeth Grimaldi; born 1 February 1965) is the youngest child of Rainier III, Prince of Monaco and actress Grace Kelly, and the sister of Albert II, Prince of Monaco, and Caroline, Princess of Hanover. Currently the tenth in the line of succession to the Monegasque throne, she has been a singer, swimwear designer and fashion model.

Stéphanie was born to Rainier III and Grace Kelly on 1 February 1965. She is the youngest of their three children, after Caroline and Albert II. Stéphanie was named after her great-great-great-great-grandmother Stéphanie de Beauharnais. Her godparents are her maternal uncle John B. Kelly Jr. and paternal first cousin Elisabeth-Anne de Massy. Her mother, who described Stéphanie 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 version was that Grace suffered a stroke while driving, it was rumoured 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."

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