In the videos, Mary Donaldson is at first shy and nervous, but soon begins to blossom in front of the camera. In one clip Page shared with this masthead, her star pupil, wearing a pink knee-length skirt, high heels and casual white top, is seen walking across a room learning how to turn “correctly”, being reassured that “practice makes perfect” when it comes to improving her stride.
Eventually, Mary looks confident and poised. Over the course of the filming she reportedly lost 5 kilograms.
Just as Julie Andrews’ character Queen Clarisse Renaldi of Genovia in The Princess Diaries instructed the ungainly Anne Hathaway’s Mia Thermopolis that royalty “do not schlump”, it was Page who taught the future Princess Mary “how to enter a room with grace and poise”.
Queen Margrethe’s surprise announcement that she would step down in favour of her son, Crown Prince Frederik, came during her annual New Year’s address.Credit: Getty
“Mary has been very good for my business … I don’t need to advertise,” Page admitted this week, saying she spent years researching and perfecting the course after a decades-long career of modelling and acting.
However, her previous brushes with royalty extended only to portraying the Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt in a big-budget TV commercial for Cleopatra soap in the late 1980s.
Page vividly recalls the day she realised her former pupil was dating the Danish royal. The smitten brunette missed her final lesson to go on a date with Prince Frederik, who had quietly slipped back into Sydney during their early courtship days.
“She told me she had family from overseas visiting … months later I saw her photo on the front page of a newspaper, all done up with Prince Frederik. I said out loud, ‘that’s our Mary!’ She was a very eager student, she had a sense of urgency about learning how to project herself,” Page said.
Denmark’s Crown Prince Frederik and Princess Mary in the early years of their relationship.Credit: AP
Decades later, Page insists her StarMaker classes remain just as relevant today, and after a three-year hiatus, she is about to launch them online.
However, she’s entering an increasingly crowded market. Plans are afoot for the June Dally-Watkins school to reopen its doors in Sydney this year offering similar “self-improvement” courses, while the Sydney School of Protocol is already running classes on how to use a knife and fork, along with “correct table posture”.
June Dally-Watkins’ managing director Jodie Bache-McLean, who first studied under the late “Miss Dally” 41 years ago, described Princess Mary as “a magnificent role model for young people”.
“We teach people to be gracious and have empathy for others, to be polite and confident … for a lot of young people glued to their phones, those skills are not being learned. I think the coronation of Queen Mary will be an inspiration for a lot of young girls to learn these forgotten skills,” she said.
