Wessex, Sophie, countess of

▪ British royal

née  Sophie Helen Rhys-Jones 

born Jan. 20, 1965, Oxford, Eng.

      British consort (1999– ) of Prince Edward (Wessex, Prince Edward, earl of and Viscount Severn), the youngest child of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, duke of Edinburgh.

      Rhys-Jones's father ran an import-export business that sold automobile tires to Hungary, and her mother was a part-time secretary. After attending West Kent College, a private girls' day school, and a local secretarial college, she worked briefly in a bar and later as a press officer for Capital Radio (a London-based popular music station) and as a concierge at a winter sports resort in Switzerland. There she became romantically involved with an Australian ski instructor and followed him to Australia. When that relationship ended, Rhys-Jones returned to London and began working for the public-relations company Maclaurin Communication and Media. In 1996, with business partner Murray Harkin, she set up a public-relations company, R-J H. On her engagement to Prince Edward, Rhys-Jones made it clear that she intended to continue with her career after she was married.

      Rhys-Jones married Prince Edward on June 19, 1999. Although the couple insisted it was an informal, family occasion, the wedding was attended by Britain's royal family on the grounds of Windsor Castle and watched on television by an estimated 200 million viewers around the world. On the wedding day, the queen bestowed on Edward the title earl of Wessex and Viscount Severn (the senior title represented a geographic reference that could be found only in history books, for Wessex had ceased to be a formal region of England many centuries earlier). The new countess, who changed her professional name to Sophie Wessex, was noted for being down-to-earth and self-confident, and she was viewed as someone who might help the royal family's image, which had suffered following the 1997 death of Prince Charles (Charles, prince of Wales)'s first wife, Diana, princess of Wales. Sophie gave birth to a daughter, Louise, in 2003 and a son, James, in 2007.

Peter Jon Kellner

 

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