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American television personality Oprah Winfrey hopes Queen Elizabeth’s death will bring the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, closer to the rest of the royal family.
Speaking on the sidelines of the Toronto Film Festival, the media mogul discussed the possibility of the couple reconciling with the royal family after a strained relationship in recent years.
Harry and Meghan joined Prince William and wife Kate Middleton on a walkabout among crowds on Saturday following the death of their grandmother, raising the prospect of a rapprochement between the brothers.
Oprah hopes it was the first step in bringing the whole family back together again, with relations between Harry and his father, King Charles, and brother, William, said to have been particularly strained.
The couple had been in Britain on a brief visit when the queen died on Thursday.
The two sons of King Charles, once so close after the death of their mother Diana in a Paris car crash in 1997, have fallen out in recent years after Harry and Meghan gave up their royal titles to move to the United States.
In the Oprah interview, Meghan, who is biracial, and Harry claimed unnamed members of the royal family had “concerns and conversations” about how “dark” the skin of her son Archie, now three, would be.
“Those were conversations the family had with him. They didn’t want him to be a prince or princess, not knowing what the gender would be, which would be different from protocol, and that he wasn’t going to receive security,” she said.
“In those months when I was pregnant, all around this same time, so we have in tandem the conversation of, ‘you won’t be given security, not gonna be given a title’ and also concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he’s born.”
Asked by Oprah if there were concerns her child would be “too brown” and it would be a problem, Meghan said: “If that is the assumption you are making, that is a pretty safe one.”
The former Suits actress, who was at the time pregnant with daughter Lilibet, also claimed she was left feeling suicidal due to the scrutiny placed on her after becoming a member of the royal family, alleging she received no support for her mental health issues after she spoke with a senior member of the institution asking for help.
William reportedly invited the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to join him and his wife for the walk on Saturday, terming it “an important show of unity at an incredibly difficult time for the family."
Prior to the Queen's death, Harry and Meghan were last in the UK in June to help celebrate Queen Elizabeth's Platinum Jubilee, but local media reported that there was no public interaction between the couple and William, Kate and the rest of Harry's immediate family members.
