Royal Family Members Who’ve Worked Regular Jobs Just Like The Rest Of Us

Kate Middleton is the future Queen Consort, but that’s probably not something she imagined in a thousand years when she was growing up. After all, the Princess of Wales used to do one of the most humble of jobs in her youth. And she’s not above doing it every so often now, either, even though she’s one of the most famous women in the world.

Before joining the royal family, Kate Middleton worked as a waitress! In 2019 she returned to her hospitality roots and served some drinks made by celebrity chef Mary Berry for a TV holiday special. She said, “Reminds me of my university days when I did a bit of waitressing.” Berry asked her if she was any good, to which Kate answered, “No, I was terrible!” Luckily she’s far better at her royal duties.

Princess Eugenie and her sister Princess Beatrice have royal titles, but they’re not actually what’s called “working royals.” So they’re free to pursue whatever careers they choose in between attending fancy royal events. Eugenie ended up getting herself degrees in art history and English literature from Newcastle University, and then she went to work in the world of fine art.

Nowadays, the princess is the director of an art gallery in London, Hauser & Wirth. And she loves it. Eugenie told Harper’s Bazaar in 2016, “I've loved art since I was very little. I knew I definitely wouldn’t be a painter, but I knew this was the industry for me. I love being able to share my passion for art with people.”

Imagine if every time you got a new job, it made the national news? Well, that’s just life for a famous princess. Back in 2008 headlines declared that Beatrice, then fifth-in-line to the throne of Britain, had landed a job working as a personal shopper in London’s Selfridges. And even more shocking, it was — gasp — unpaid.

Apparently, Beatrice was a natural. But since then, she’s found a new career path in consulting. Now, the princess, who also has a BA in History from Goldsmiths, holds the important position of Vice President of Partnerships and Strategy at a software company named Afiniti. Impressive!

Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson, once wife of Prince Andrew and still a member of the wider royal family, let slip a surprising revelation back in 2018. She told the Swedish TV show Skavlan, “I cleaned lavatories when I was 18, and graduate’s bedrooms; they all left it very messy.” According to her, she was especially good at cleaning the mirrors.

It makes you wonder, did she ever scrub her own toilet in Buckingham Palace? But the cleaning wasn’t even her only job. Sarah went on in the interview, “And then I waitressed in a strudel house. I don’t cook, I just took the strudel out of the deep freezer and put it in the oven; that’s cooking. Then I married a prince, it was great!”

Princess Charlene of Monaco was just regular old Charlene Wittstock until she met Prince Albert, a member of the royal family of Monaco and the son of Hollywood icon Grace Kelly. Charlene herself looked a little like Kelly, the newspapers noted at the time. But she wasn’t an actress — she was a sportswoman, and a very accomplished one at that.

Charlene was a champion swimmer who had competed for South Africa. She even entered the 2000 Summer Olympic Games, where she came in fifth with her team in the women’s 4x100m medley competition. And it was her career that led to her eventual royal status — it was during a swimming event that she met Albert, and the rest is history.

Tom Parker Bowles tries to stay out of the spotlight, but you’ll recognize his surname no matter what. He’s the son of Camilla Parker Bowles, and not only is he the stepson of King Charles III, he’s the monarch’s godson as well. But he doesn’t live off the riches of the family into which his mom married: he has a regular job.

Tom is a food columnist for Tatler magazine, plus an author, and you might have also spotted him on food-themed reality TV shows if you watch a lot of British TV. He didn’t get his love of cooking from Camilla, though. He told the Evening Standard newspaper in 2013, “My mum could do basics, like roast lunches, but I can’t remember her really teaching me.”

Even ardent royalty fans might not have heard of Lady Sarah Chatto, but she was a definite favorite of the late Queen Elizabeth II. As the daughter of Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones, she was actually Elizabeth’s only niece, and the two were very close. But Sarah’s job is quite far removed from the day-to-day life of the royal family.

Sarah went into the entertainment industry after graduating and picked up a job as a wardrobe assistant on a film called Heat and Dust. You might not have heard of it, but it was a huge deal for the minor royal — she met her husband Daniel Chatto on the set. After that she took up another visual art, painting, and has won several awards for her work.

Marie-Chantal Miller was a wealthy heiress who ended up married to the Crown Prince of Greece, but that didn’t mean she was about to give up her career dreams. Ever since high school she had loved all things art and design — she had even had an internship with Andy Warhol at one point — and she was determined to continue in that field.

While pregnant with her prince’s child, Marie-Chantal decided to create her own children’s clothing line. And it was a big success. In 2008 she told Vanity Fair magazine, “The business is what makes me me. That’s why I called it Marie-Chantal — with no ’princess’ or anything. It gives me my independence. It gives me incredible pleasure and focus. And it belongs to me 100 percent.”

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that Prince Harry has stepped down as a working royal as of 2020. But he actually considered doing it long before then, because he loved his career in the British Army so much. To him being a soldier wasn’t just a royal duty, it was something that transformed his entire life.

In 2017 Harry told the Mail on Sunday newspaper, “I felt as though I was really achieving something [in the army]. I have a deep understanding of all sorts of people from different backgrounds and felt I was part of a team. I wasn’t a prince, I was just Harry.” He added, tellingly, “Being in the army was the best escape I’ve ever had.”

The royals of Denmark seem to have a lot more leeway with their lives than the British royals do. Take Prince Nikolai, for example. His father, Prince Joachim, said that he was happy for his son to do whatever he wanted with his life. And so Prince Nikolai followed his dream.

Today, Nikolai is a pretty successful model. And with those cheekbones, can you really say you’re surprised? He’s walked alongside Cara Delevingne at London Fashion Week, among other high-profile gigs. He doesn’t plan to be a model forever, though. In 2019 he told the Danish magazine Tæt på, “I do not want a career as a model. I’d rather look at it as a job, which can help me along the way while educating me.”

Princess Sofia of Sweden is one royal who’s not afraid to get her hands dirty. During the coronavirus pandemic the hospitals of her country were overwhelmed, so she did an emergency training program, donned some scrubs and got out on the front line as a hospital worker. Her name tag read simply “Sofia” — no royal title in such a time of need.

Sofia, and all the others who completed the program, weren’t allowed to interact with patients directly. Yet they still had important work to do, such as cleaning and cooking. The Swedish royal family declared in a statement, “In the crisis we find ourselves in, the princess wants to get involved and make a contribution as a voluntary worker to relieve the large workload of health care professionals.” And she did a great job.

The fabulously named Lady Rose Victoria Birgitte Louise Gilman (née Windsor) is the daughter of Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester. When she was born in 1980 she was actually 12th-in-line to the throne of Britain, but obviously later royal births bumped her back a lot. She’ll never have the crown on her head, but that’s fine; she has a pretty cool job anyway.

Rose is an art assistant who’s worked on some pretty high-profile stuff, including two Harry Potter films — Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. She uses the name “Rose Windsor” at work, and no royal title. Fun fact: she shares both initials and a birthday with Harry Potter main character Ron Weasley.

Has anyone in the royal family had a more fascinating journey than Camilla? She went from Charles’ mistress to a figure of public hate but then, eventually, rose to become Queen Consort of the United Kingdom. And she might be more down-to-Earth than some have been in the past, because in her youth she wasn’t waited on hand and foot.

Once upon a time Camilla worked as an assistant at a prestigious interior design company called Colefax and Fowler… but she got fired! Her old workmate Imogen Taylor wrote a book about her own experiences at the firm and mentioned that the future Queen Consort was fired by their bad-tempered boss after coming in late. Not that it probably matters to her much now, of course.

Joachim of Denmark has quite a lot going on in his life. He’s not the heir to the throne, but he often steps in for his mom the Queen when she’s not in the country, plus he’s a lieutenant colonel in the Danish army. But the rest of the time he does another, also very important, job.

Joachim actually runs a working farm, and it's something he was always interested in. He worked on one in Australia and studied the business of agrarian economics alongside his work for the military. These days his farm operates from an estate called Schackenborg, and apparently it exports thousands of Christmas trees to Hong Kong every year. Joachim also usually sends one to his ex-wife Countess Alexandra every year. Awww.

Poor Prince Edward. After dropping out of the Marines in 1993 he floundered around looking for something to do. Eventually he decided to start his own TV production company, Ardent Productions, and make TV shows about royal history. But as people pointed out at the time, he didn’t actually have any of the experience or qualifications required to be a successful producer.

So unfortunately for Prince Edward, Ardent Productions was a massive flop. An anonymous insider told The Guardian newspaper in 2002, “They’re a sad joke in the industry, really. As time has gone on, their incompetence has become more and more obvious. There have been very small examples of vanity TV companies before, but not on this scale.” And after nine years of that “sad joke”, Ardent was no more.

Arguably, Queen Letizia of Spain was a kind of proto-Meghan Markle. She had a job that involved working in front of cameras, she was a “commoner” and she was a divorcee, something that caused consternation when a royal announced his intention to marry her. Unlike Meghan, though, Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano wasn’t an actress.

Letizia was in fact a journalist and news anchor. She would have been a familiar face to many Spaniards before she even became Queen, because she was an anchor on the popular newscast Telediario 2 and reported on some of the biggest global events of the early 2000s — even broadcasting from war zones in Iraq. And then when she married then-Prince Felipe in 2003 she went from reporting the news to being it.

Lady Louise Windsor, the daughter of Edward and granddaughter of Elizabeth, made headlines in 2022 when she was discovered working a normal job. While waiting for her A-level results, the newspapers reported, the teenage royal went to work in a garden center and was paid a mere £6.83 an hour for till work and pruning the plants.

The Sun interviewed a few of Louise’s customers. One said, “I couldn’t believe it was Lady Louise — I had to look twice. She is a really modest and sweet young woman who is polite and attentive to customers. She seemed to be loving the job. You’d never imagine the Queen’s granddaughter would take on a role working behind a till.”

Of course, everyone knows that Meghan Markle was an actress before she married Harry. But making it in the acting industry isn’t easy, and she had a few less prestigious jobs beforehand. One of them was being a glamorous “briefcase girl” on the game show Deal or No Deal, a job she ended up doing from 2006 to 2007.

That wasn’t all she did before acting and then becoming a royal. When Meghan was 13 years old she worked at a Los Angeles froyo shop with the wonderfully punsome name of Humphrey Yogart. And when Meghan mentioned the shop during her famous interview with Oprah, there was a sudden influx of yogurt-loving royal fans descending upon the place.

Before Prince William began focusing more and more on his royal duties, he trained as a helicopter pilot. That’s a skill he put to good use: remembering the lessons his mother Princess Diana taught him about looking after the less fortunate, he signed up with the East Anglian Air Ambulance to help people who were in dire need of help.

It wasn’t an easy job and William ended up being quite badly affected by it. During a 2021 video call with other first responders, the future king said, “Something that I noticed from my brief spell flying the air ambulance with the team is, when you see so much death and so much bereavement, it does impact how you see the world.”

Though Diana Spencer was born into the sort of wealth and aristocracy that makes one a perfect royal bride, she wasn’t afraid to knuckle down and work for a living. Before she married Charles she had a variety of jobs including dance instructor, nanny and even house-cleaner. But she had one job that you might not know about.

Diana worked as a teacher the Young England Kindergarten school in Pimlico, and by all accounts she loved working with kids. It could be argued that her experiences at the nursery changed the royal family forever, too. Young England Kindergarten was a Montessori school, and Diana insisted her sons be educated the Montessori way. And when William grew up, he likewise sent his own children to a Montessori nursery.