Fairytale in Los Angeles: Teenage Meghan Markle beams with joy as she poses with her high school sweetheart and friends at LA Christmas dance
- Photographs reveal Duchess of Sussex was a natural in front of the camera in Los Angeles even as a teenager
- Meghan can be seen smiling and looking comfortable while enjoying dances at Millennium Biltmore Hotel
- One photograph shows her smiling with then-boyfriend Luis Segura, who later become an estate agent
- Two others show her with friends at Christmas proms when she was pupil at Immaculate Heart High School
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She is now well versed in pulling the right poses whenever being photographed on a royal engagement.
But these photographs show how the Duchess of Sussex was a natural in front of the camera even as a teenager, when posing for festive pictures at her Christmas dances in Los Angeles, California.
Meghan Markle can be seen smiling and looking comfortable while enjoying the parties at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in 1996, 1997 and 1998 – two decades before she became a member of the Royal Family.
One of the photographs shows Meghan – then 16 and at Immaculate Heart High School – smiling with then-boyfriend Luis Segura, who went on to become an estate agent, at a Christmas prom in 11th grade in 1997.
Meghan Markle is pictured aged 16, smiling with then-boyfriend Luis Segura, who went on to become an estate agent, at the Immaculate Heart High School Christmas prom at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles in 11th grade in 1997
Meghan, now 38, is also seen in another picture posing one year earlier aged 15 in tenth grade with her friends Anise Hutchinson, Emanuella Jaskiewicz, Michelle Ramani and Lily Galli at the dance in 1996.
A third photograph from 1998 shows Prince Harry’s future wife aged 17 in 12th grade as she holds hands with another friend called Cecilia Donnellan.
In Andrew Morton’s book Meghan: A Hollywood Princess, he said she always took a good picture even as a child, writing: ‘She knew her angles – after all, she had been taught by the best, her father – and always posed sweetly.’
Meghan went to Immaculate Heart High School, a private Roman Catholic school in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles, where she studied from the age of 11 to 18, before going on to Northwestern University in Illinois.
She was voted as the school president – the equivalent of a head girl in Britain – and was also made homecoming queen. More recently, pupils at the school gathered at 3am on May 19, 2018 to watch the royal wedding.
A picture from 1998 shows Prince Harry’s future wife aged 17 in 12th grade as she holds hands with friend Cecilia Donnellan
Meghan is also seen in another picture posing one year earlier at the hotel in Los Angeles aged 15 in tenth grade with her friends Anise Hutchinson, Emanuella Jaskiewicz, Michelle Ramani and Lily Galli at the dance in 1996
Speaking previously about her time at the school, mixed race Meghan recalled a mandatory census the children had to complete in her English class, aged about 12, where they had to tick one of the boxes to indicate ethnicity.
But the options were white, black, Hispanic or Asian. Meghan said: ‘There I was – my curly hair, my freckled face, my pale skin, my mixed-race, looking down at these boxes, not wanting to mess up, but not knowing what to do.
‘You could only choose one, but that would be to choose one parent over the other – and one half of myself over the other. My teacher told me to check the box for Caucasian. ‘Because that’s how you look, Meghan,’ she said.
‘I put down my pen. Not as an act of defiance, but rather a symptom of my confusion. I couldn’t bring myself to do that – to picture the pit-in-her-belly sadness my mother would feel if she were to find out. So I didn’t tick a box.
‘I left my identity blank – a question mark, an absolute incomplete – much like how I felt. When I went home that night I told my dad what had happened.’ She said he told her: ‘If that happens again, you draw your own box.’