Queen Silvia turns 80 and in connection with her birthday, TV4 is now releasing the documentary “Silvia – My life as queen” in two pieces. In it, the queen looks back on her past life – both the time before and after she became queen of Sweden.
Viewers get to experience when she relives the first meeting with King Carl XVI Gustaf, who was then crown prince, in the stands in Munich. He spied her through binoculars from only a meter away.
– I felt that someone was looking at me and when I turned around, it was a young man who was looking at me with binoculars, but it was only a meter apart – he also laughed, he himself thought it was a bit ridiculous, says the Queen Silvia.
– Maybe that’s what made it click? she continues.
Did everything to keep the relationship a secret
At first they tried by all means to keep the relationship a secret, during the first year of dating they did everything to mislead the press. But one summer day in Borgholm, the photographer Bertil Jigert captures them in a picture.
– Bertil had been sitting and having coffee somewhere and saw that bright blue car and understood that they were there, says Karin Lennmor, former editor-in-chief at Svensk damtidning.
In the picture that Bertil Jigert manages to take, King Carl XVI Gustaf and the then unknown woman are clearly visible, sitting together in his car.
– Then I see that there is a woman sitting next to the king, she is dark-haired and very beautiful. Then I understand that this could be the king’s girlfriend and nobody knows who she is, says Bertil Jigert.
“Pang said it then”
When there was a big dinner party in Falsterbo a week later, all the photographers focused on a woman sitting next to the king, all but one. Bertil instead focused on the one who would become Queen Silvia, who slipped in discreetly.
– I took pictures of the unknown woman without the other photographers noticing, he says.
This almost a year after the King and Queen’s first meeting in Munich – after months of playing cat and mouse with the press. Queen Silvia had dressed in wigs, lay in the back seat of cars and hid behind bushes.
– The coin actually fell down when you realized that the first picture at the bar was the same woman who was sitting in the car – bang said it then, says Karin Lennmor.
– It has been published all over the world, an enormously selling picture, says Bertil Jigert.
Stream the documentary
At the age of 80, Queen Silvia looks back on her life and talks candidly about her time before and after she became Queen of Sweden.