Monaco’s Prince Albert II and his wife, Princess Charlene, are expecting their first child together, they announced today.
The 36-year-old former South African Olympic swimmer — now officially titled Her Serene Highness The Princess of Monaco — and her husband, 56, issued a statement through the royal palace expressing their “immense joy.”
The statement reads: “Prince Albert and Princess Charlene have the immense joy to announce they are expecting a happy event. The birth is due at the end of the year.”
The news is sure to end speculation about why Charlene, after nearly three years of marriage to Albert, had not yet provided an heir to the principality. Sources tell Page Six she was “coming under increasingly intense pressure to get pregnant” in the years following their opulent wedding in July 2011.
Prince Albert is the son of the late Prince Rainier III and actress Grace Kelly, who ended a career in Hollywood to become Princess Grace but died following a car crash in 1982.
Albert is the father of at least two children. But neither Jazmin Grace Grimaldi, who recently graduated from Fordham, or Alexandre Coste, 10, can become a future monarch. Under Monaco’s constitution, they cannot take the throne because they were born out of wedlock.