Stéphanie von Monaco turns 60: The wild princess was once

It is said that life draws its traces, the hard life, but also the good. Stéphanie from Monaco had both, the disasters and the joys of the jet set. On February 1, she celebrates her 60th birthday.

She is actually called Stéphanie Grimaldi, Princess of Monaco is only her title. She doesn’t have much to say in the Principality of Monaco, which has mastered her family, the Grimaldis, for many generations. Since 2005 her brother Prince Albert II (66) has been the ruling head of state of the tiny city state (2.08 square kilometers, 40,000 inhabitants) on the Côte d’Azur.

Her parents were world famous ones that virtually invented the radiance of Monaco. The father, Prince Rainier III. (1923-2005), with the marriage of the American Hollywood star Grace Kelly (1929-1982), initiated his principality as a world center of the jet set. That colored the couple’s three children. Caroline (68), Albert and Stéphanie grew up with the hype, were sometimes the focus of international attention.

Stéphanie was only 17 when a tragedy broke out about her life. She was sitting next to her mother on September 13, 1982 when her car with Gracia Patricia had an accident on a mountain road at the wheel. The princess died, Stéphanie survived with serious injuries to the cervical spine. Palast insider suspected that the relationship between Prince Rainier and his daughter has been particularly tight since this event.

After graduating from high school in Paris, she started studying fashion design, which she broke off to become an assistant at Dior and then work as a model. Then she started a music career as a singer in the mid-1980s. Her first LP “Besoin” made it into the international top 10, as did the singles “Ouragan” and “One Love to Give”. When the second tour was not particularly successful, she gave up the music industry. For now.

In 1991 she published her second LP with “Stéphanie”, and no great success. She then recorded with Michael Jackson (1958-2009) on his album “Dangerous” Den Song “in the Closet”, with her voice being alienated to recognition. The participation in the French benefit song “L’Or de Nos Vies” for AIDS research was the final end point as a singer.

But that does not mean that she has completely said goodbye to entertainment. In her way, Princess Stéphanie remained an entertainment size, whether she opened a jeans in Monte-Carlo or a café. She excited the greatest sensation with the selection of her friends and lovers; This often must have put the patience of her princely father to the test and earned her the reputation of a rebel.

“Rebellious about what? I’m not rebellious, I am always correct,” she said in 2024 in an interview with the French “Gala”. In her opinion, she “never did scandalous things. I just took life as it came. I acted according to my innermost feelings and get to the bottom of things.”

Her first great love was the French racing driver Paul Belmondo (61), son of the French superstar Jean-Paul Belmondo (1933-2021), who remained a fatherly friend until his death. Paul Belmondo followed another well-known son: Anthony Delon (60), son of the actor Alain Delon (1935-2024).

After this romance, the American actor Rob Lowe (60) conquered the heart of the princess. He had tried in vain to win Stéphanie for a film. A friend arranged the contact, the two met at a dinner in Paris. “When the starter comes, it is already sitting on my lap. At the dessert, neither of us is more interested in anything else than that disappear from there and go back to her apartment,” said Lowe in his biography.

He also got to know the prince at the Princess Grace Foundation in Dallas at the Junior Gala. “Princess Stéphanie and Lowe sat side by side, hugged and kissed during their corridors,” wrote the newspaper “Dallas Morning News” at the time. Rainier was also present at this party. “He looks at me from time to time, but it is clear that he is not intended to say hello,” Rob Lowe recalled in his memoirs.

He was followed in 1986 the 14 -year -old French Playboy Mario Oliver Jutard, who had several restaurants and night clubs in Los Angeles. The relationship between the two lasted two years and was a scandal for many because of the age difference. The separation followed in 1988. Jutard was murdered by burglars in his villa in his villa in the Dominican Republic.

The love for her next friend, the French businessman of the same age Jean-Yves Le Fur (1964-2024), did not last long. In 1992 her son Louis Robert Paul (32) was born, a year and a half later her daughter Pauline Grace Maguy (30). The father: Stéphanie’s former bodyguard Daniel Ducruet (60), whom she also married in 1995. Divorce followed in 1996 because Ducruet had an affair with a Belgian stripper.

In 1998 Stéphanie became the mother of a daughter again, the father of Camille Marie Kelly (26) was again a bodyguard, Ducruet’s successor Jean-Raymond Gottlieb (born 1967). Shortly after birth, the relationship broke up.

The love of the circus led her to the ten -year -old elephant computer and Swiss circus director Franco Knie (70), whom she knew from childhood. In 2000 the two became a couple, knee had separated from his wife after 20 years of marriage and lived with Stéphanie in a caravan in the Swiss circus camp. That lasted until 2002.

On September 12, 2003, the princess secretly married Adans Lopez Peres (49), almost ten years younger, the “London Evening Standard” wrote a little later that she supposedly returned to her first husband Ducruet. The second marriage was divorced in 2004. Since then there has been no news about the love life of the princess.

Her son Louis and his wife Marie (32) have now made the princess a double grandmother. It has long been out of the headlines, apart from reports on the international circus festival of Monte-Carlo, whose president Stéphanie is still. She takes care of nursing and her AIDS aid association Fight Aids Monaco.

It has also changed optically. It is difficult to recognize the beautiful, wild princess of yore. With her short, boyish haircut, dark glasses and mostly casual, relaxed outfits, she presents herself in a completely new look.