In another life, they’d be the King and Queen of the Hellenes. He was the Crown Prince of a deposed monarchy and she was the heiress who stole his heart on a blind date. Three years later, their wedding would be one of the biggest royal gatherings in Europe.
Crown Prince Pavlos of Greece and Marie-Chantal Miller, a British-American heiress, met in 1992 at the 40th birthday party of Philip Niarchos in New Orleans. Niarchos’s father, Alecko Papamarkou, knew both through their fathers and figured they’d be a great pairing.
“I was completely taken. I’m not the kind of person who had girlfriends and then had little affairs on the side,” Pavlos would recall to Vanity Fair in 2008. “I always had a girlfriend and moved on and went to another one. But the moment I saw Marie-Chantal, I said, Well, this is what I’ve been looking for. Alecko was right.”
The couple were sat next to each other at dinner and couldn’t take their eyes off of each other. “It was love at first sight. I knew that he was the person I would marry,” Marie-Chantal told Vanity Fair.
Ahead of their 1995 wedding, the couple sat for an interview with Hello! and Pavlos recalled “I was immediately struck by her delicate features and her stunning beauty. Then I soon discovered that we had so much in common. She is one of the most loving people I have ever met in my life. She loves children, animals and the environment.”
Marie-Chantal, the middle daughter of Robert Miller, a businessman who created duty-free shipping and founded an empire, had spent her early years in Hong Kong, Switzerland, Paris and New York, studying and landing in the tabloids as one of the three Miller Sisters (older sister Pia was once a Getty and younger sister Alexandra was once Princess Alexandra von Fürstenberg).
Over Christmas 1994, as the couple were heading up a Gstaad mountain for some holiday skiing, the would-be king dropped down to one knee in the gondola lift and proposed to his fashionable girlfriend.
Marie-Chantal accepted his proposal and her engagement ring included a personal touch: a sapphire from the collection of her future mother-in-law Queen Anne-Marie flanked by a heart-shaped diamond.
The couple would joke about wanting to elope in Scotland, but confessed to Hello! that their families were both too large and too far-flung to ever seriously consider doing it. Instead, they set their sights on London, where King Constantine and Queen Anne-Marie had based themselves in the years following their exile from Greece.
The million-dollar wedding, paid for by Robert Miller and planned by Lady Elizabeth Anson—first cousin of Queen Elizabeth II—was once of the most lavish royal weddings in the United Kingdom since Princess Elizabeth married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten in 1947; more monarchs attended their nuptials than the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981.
But before Marie-Chantal walked down the aisle, she began taking the steps to fulfil her role as future royal. She and Pavlos travelled to Istanbul to be blessed by the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople and she converted to Greek Orthodox, taking the Greek name María.
The week before their wedding, Queen Elizabeth II hosted a tea party at Claridge’s in their honour. Following that, Marie-Chantal’s parents hosted a pre-wedding champagne reception and ball at Wrotham Park. Queen Margrethe, traveling from Denmark aboard the royal yacht Dannebrog, threw her nephew and his fiancée another party aboard the yacht.
Finally, on 1 July 1995, Pavlos and Marie-Chantal were married at St Sophia’s Cathedral in London in front of 450 guests, with a further 850 watching on television screens at Hampton Court Palace—including Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.
In addition to the Greek Royal Family, witnessing a Greek Orthodox ceremony conducted entirely in Greek, were Pavlos’s close family, the Spanish Royal Family and the Danish Royal Family; as well as royals from Belgium, Jordan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Deposed royals from Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, France, Italy, Portugal, Hanover, and Iran.
“She’s a wonderful girl and he’s a very lucky boy,” King Constantine told Hello!
(Nicky Economou/ Greek Royal Family)
The couple lived in the United States while Pavlos finished his schooling, then divided their time between New York City and London. Pavlos and Marie-Chantal now have five children: Princess Maria-Olympia, Prince Constantine-Alexios, Prince Achileas-Andreas, Prince Odysseas-Kimon, and Prince Aristides-Stavros.
In 2023, after the death of King Constantine, Pavlos became head of the family—though not king in his own right—and the family moved back to Greece. In 2024, they applied for Greek citizenship and chose the surname ‘de Grèce’ in recognition of their family’s past.
On their 29th wedding anniversary in July 2024, Pavlos shared a family photo to his Instagram account and wrote: “Today we celebrate 29 years of happy marriage – thank you for our wonderful children and our lives. I still feel just as I felt on the day we got married.”
