On October 3, 1990, Princess Caroline of Monaco was in Paris when the telephone delivered the second great wound of her life. Off the coast near Monaco, her husband, Stefano Casiraghi, was driving a 42-foot catamaran called the Pinot di Pinot at nearly 150 kilometers per hour when it struck a wave and flipped backward into the Mediterranean. His throttleman, Patrice Innocenti, was thrown clear and survived. Casiraghi, strapped into his seat, took the full weight of the five-ton boat as it slammed down on top of him.
Rescue crews rushed him to the Princess Grace Hospital in Monte Carlo, but he was pronounced dead on arrival. He was thirty years old. Caroline was thirty-three, a widow with three children aged six, four, and three, none of whom she felt able to tell herself. It fell to her father, Prince Rainier, to walk into a room in Monaco and explain to two small boys and a little girl that their father was not coming home.
The Grimaldi family had carried a story about itself for seven centuries, a piece of medieval folklore insisting that no Grimaldi would ever find happiness in marriage. The most common version held that Prince Rainier the First, who ruled at the turn of the fourteenth century, kidnapped a Flemish woman, and she repaid him with a curse upon every descendant: Never will a Grimaldi find happiness in marriage. Other tellings swapped the Flemish maiden for a witch condemned to burn or a monk wronged in the family’s founding deception of 1297, when François Grimaldi seized the fortress of Monaco disguised as a Franciscan monk before drawing a blade. There was no thirteenth-century document recording any of it.
What existed instead was a marital record across generations so consistently catastrophic that the supernatural framing began to feel less like an explanation than a description. By the autumn of 1990, the curse had stopped being funny for Caroline. She had married a Paris playboy her mother had warned her against and watched it collapse in twenty-eight months. She had lost that mother on a mountain road.
She had now lost a husband to the sea. Caroline Louise Marguerite Grimaldi was born on January 23, 1957, at the Prince’s Palace in Monaco, the first child of Prince Rainier III and the former Hollywood actress Grace Kelly. For fourteen months she was heir presumptive to one of the oldest ruling houses in Europe, until the birth of her brother Albert on March 14, 1958. Monaco’s succession rules preferred a son, and the firstborn was quietly leapfrogged before she could walk.
She was educated at elite institutions in France and Britain, earned her baccalauréat with honors, studied at Sciences Po in Paris, and took a diploma in philosophy at the Sorbonne with minors in psychology and biology. She was fluent in five languages. But what the continental press cared about was what she wore in Saint-Tropez, not what she read at the Sorbonne. The daughter of the most famous actress alive was the undisputed cover star of European celebrity journalism, and the gap between the woman and the rumor of the woman would become the central conflict of her existence.
Her first marriage was to Philippe Junot, a Parisian venture capitalist seventeen years her senior, painted by the press as a complete boulevardier. They crossed paths at a legendary Paris nightclub, and when Caroline was sent to the United States to put an ocean between them, he followed her across it. Prince Rainier agreed to the marriage grudgingly, and only after a British newspaper published a photograph of a topless Caroline beside Junot on a yacht. Princess Grace harbored no illusions.
According to the journalist Gwen Robins, Grace privately delivered a verdict of cold maternal precision: I give it two years. The wedding in June 1978 was a final gorgeous performance of old-world glamour, with 650 guests including Ava Gardner, Cary Grant, and Frank Sinatra. It came apart almost as fast as Grace had predicted. The civil divorce came through on October 9, 1980, twenty-eight months after the wedding, landing almost exactly on Grace’s sardonic schedule.
On the morning of Monday, September 13, 1982, Princess Grace set out in her eleven-year-old metallic green Rover to drive down from the family’s country home at Roc Agel to the palace, with her youngest daughter, seventeen-year-old Stephanie, beside her. Grace had dismissed her chauffeur that morning because luggage filled the back of the car. The route wound down a mountain road known to be treacherous. Shortly after 10:00, the car missed a curve and plunged more than a hundred feet down a rocky embankment.
Stephanie escaped through the driver’s side window and survived with a fractured vertebra in her neck. The first medical bulletins described Grace as stable, but they badly underestimated the trauma to her head. Later examination revealed two brain hemorrhages, the first most likely a stroke that had impaired her ability to control the car before it ever left the road. She never regained consciousness.
On September 14, the doctors told Prince Rainier the brain damage was irreversible, and the decision to terminate life support was his to make, taken with the agreement of Caroline and Albert. Grace Kelly died on September 14, 1982, at the age of fifty-two. On September 18, close to 100 million television viewers watched the funeral cortege move through Monaco to the cathedral where Grace had married Rainier twenty-six years earlier. Rainier wept repeatedly through the service.
His son would later say he was never quite the same again after the accident. Caroline was twenty-five years old, freshly divorced, and she had just become the only functioning adult left standing at the center of a shattered royal house. Within months of Grace’s death, Rainier began appointing Caroline to the roles her mother had left empty. She was named president of the Monaco Garden Club, president of the Arts Festival, and most consequentially, by sovereign decision in December 1982, president of the Princess Grace Foundation.
Rainier said as much the following year: after Grace’s death, a miracle happened. Princess Caroline filled her mother’s role. She embodies the same spirit as her mother. She would go on serving as de facto first lady of Monaco from 1982 until 2011, nearly three decades, standing in for her father and then, after Rainier’s death in 2005, for her brother Albert.
The man who pulled her out of mourning was an Italian named Stefano Casiraghi, a wealthy industrialist’s son who had studied economics at Milan’s Bocconi University and gone into the family’s real estate and export businesses. According to Italian reporting, it was Robertino Rossellini, an old close friend of Caroline’s, who introduced the two during a cruise in the summer of 1983. The courtship was swift. They married in a civil ceremony on December 29, 1983, in the Hall of Mirrors of the Princely Palace, beneath a portrait of Caroline’s late mother.
There was no Catholic wedding because the Vatican annulment of the Junot marriage was still pending. Asked about marrying without the church’s blessing, Caroline answered with frankness: I wanted a real home and children. It was difficult for my conscience, but I was overwhelmed by the desire to have children. The children came in quick succession: Andrea on June 8, 1984, Charlotte on August 3, 1986, and Pierre on September 5, 1987.
By every account of those who knew them, this marriage was a happy one, a genuine contrast to the Junot chapter. For seven years, the curse seemed to have lost the thread of her. Stefano Casiraghi was not a casual amateur. Over his career, he competed in eighty offshore powerboat races, won roughly a dozen of them, set a speed record of 277 kilometers per hour on Lake Como in 1984, and took the world championship off Atlantic City in 1989.
Going into the 1990 season as reigning world champion, he had already decided to retire after the 1990 World Offshore Championship. He never reached the finish of it. There had been a warning: just three weeks before the fatal race, his boat had exploded during a competition off the Isle of Guernsey, and he had walked away uninjured. On Wednesday, October 3, 1990, the World Offshore Championship ran along the coast between Monaco and Nice in three-to-four-foot waves.
About fifteen minutes into the second heat, Casiraghi and Innocenti were trying to make up time because earlier in the race they had stopped to rescue another pilot whose vessel had caught fire, an act of plain courage that had cost them the lead. Traveling at roughly 150 kilometers per hour, the catamaran struck a wave and flipped backward. Innocenti was thrown clear. Casiraghi stayed with the boat.
The experts who later studied the wreck concluded that he would most likely have survived had the catamaran carried a full canopy, and his death drove sweeping reforms through the sport. No title was awarded in the 1990 championship as a mark of respect. He was buried at the Chapelle de la Paix beside his wife’s grandfather, his funeral held at the cathedral eight years almost to the season after Grace’s. In the months after Stefano’s death, Caroline moved with her children to Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, a small town in the south of France, to move away from the gossip and hoopla of Monaco.
They lived quietly in a rented villa. The children went to the local public school. Caroline confirmed the period years later, describing how after his death she retreated with her children to a small town in Provence where they could mourn in private. The grief did not stay inside her.
Beginning in 1996, Caroline started to lose her hair. Medical commentators believed it was alopecia totalis, an autoimmune disorder that can be triggered by severe and prolonged stress on top of a genetic predisposition. She never confirmed the diagnosis herself, and the term came from medical commentators reading her appearance rather than from any palace announcement. In time, she lost all of it, and eventually the hair grew back, but for a stretch of years, one of the most photographed women in Europe carried the physical evidence of her mourning on her own scalp.
Between the second and third marriages, there was the French actor Vincent Lindon, a relationship that lasted several years through the early and mid-1990s, was widely reported, and never led to marriage. For a few years she was, by her family’s standards, almost free. She did not stay free. The man she married in 1999 was Ernst August, Duke of Brunswick, born in 1954, head of the German House of Hanover.
Through George I, the Hanoverians connect to the British Crown, which made Ernst August a distant cousin of Queen Elizabeth II. By marrying a Roman Catholic, Ernst August forfeited his own place in the British line of succession. They married in a quiet civil ceremony on January 23, 1999, Caroline’s forty-second birthday, in Monaco. The marriage carried a tangible upgrade in rank, elevating Caroline’s style from Her Serene Highness to Her Royal Highness, and she became the Princess of Hanover.
Their daughter, Princess Alexandra, was born on July 20, 1999. On paper, it looked like an ascent. It was, in fact, the curse arriving in a new costume, and the costume was a title. Ernst August’s conduct in the years after the wedding became a source of international embarrassment and private anguish.
In 1999 he was accused of assaulting a journalist with an umbrella. In 2000, on the island of Lamu in Kenya, he allegedly attacked a German businessman with a knuckleduster. That same year at the Expo 2000 World Exhibition in his own German city of Hanover, he was photographed urinating against the wall of the Turkish National Pavilion, drawing a formal diplomatic complaint from the Turkish Embassy. The Kenya assault followed him through the courts for years.
In 2004 he was convicted of aggravated assault and causing grievous bodily harm, and a 2009 retrial produced a conviction for battery that a higher court upheld in 2011. Between and around the convictions ran a parallel record of physical collapse, with alcohol-related hospitalizations reported in 2005, 2011, 2017, and 2018, and emergency surgery for pancreatitis in 2019. In July 2020 he was taken to the psychiatric unit of a hospital after calling the police for help and then fighting the officers when they arrived. Later that year an Austrian court handed down a ten-month suspended sentence and required him to undergo psychological counseling.
Caroline had separated from him by 2009 and returned to live permanently in Monaco. The couple have never divorced. If the third marriage was the curse in its newest costume, the case that bears the name of that marriage was the one fight in which Caroline turned the family’s defining affliction into a permanent victory for everyone who came after her. By the early 2000s, she had spent three decades as one of the most photographed women in Europe, trailed by paparazzi while shopping, dining, cycling, skiing, riding horses, and taking beach holidays, all of it without her consent.
The German courts had repeatedly thrown out her attempts to stop the publication, classifying her as a contemporary public figure par excellence who simply had to tolerate being photographed in public places. In 2004, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg decided the case of von Hannover versus Germany, and on June 24, the third section found unanimously that Germany had violated Caroline’s right to private life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights when its courts denied her damages over photographs of her shopping, sitting in a restaurant courtyard, and at a private beach club. The decisive question, the court held, was whether the photographs contributed to a debate of general interest, and these did not, serving only to satisfy readers’ curiosity about a celebrity’s private life. Even people known to the general public could legitimately expect not to be followed constantly by photographers.
The judgment became final and now sits in European media law curricula as the foundational precedent for celebrity privacy rights. It is arguably the most consequential thing Caroline ever did. The girl photographed topless on a yacht in 1978 became in 2004 the legal author of the right to be left alone, a right the rest of Europe would inherit from her. From the wreckage, she assembled one of the deepest records of cultural patronage in European royal history.
She founded Les Ballets de Monte Carlo in 1985 with the choreographer Jean-Christophe Maillot, realizing a dream her late mother had carried. She took over the Foundation Prince Pierre and its literary and musical prizes, led the Amade Mondial, and served across more than four decades as president of the Princess Grace Foundation, and was appointed a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in December 2003 for her work protecting children and securing education for girls and women. Her three Casiraghi children grew up and out into the world she had tried to shelter them from. Andrea married Tatiana Santo Domingo in 2013 and stands forth in Monaco’s line of succession.
Pierre, who as a small boy lost his father to a powerboat, grew into an offshore racing enthusiast himself, taking up the very sport that had killed Stefano. And Charlotte, who founded the Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco, divorced the film producer Dimitri Rassam in 2024, four years after marrying him at an abbey near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, the same town where Caroline had taken her children to mourn their father. The story does not resolve. It folds back on itself, generation after generation, town after town.
And the woman at the center of it buried a mother and a husband before she was thirty-four, lost her hair to the cost of it, walked out of a third marriage with her dignity and a landmark privacy judgment intact, and spent the rest of her life proving that a Grimaldi who cannot find happiness in marriage can at least build something the legend cannot touch.