The role of Queen Fabiola on screen could quite well have been played by Dame Angela Lansbury, who, incidentally, is three years older than Fabiola and is alive and well even now, at 95

The role of Queen Fabiola on screen could quite well have been played by Dame Angela Lansbury, who, incidentally, is three years older than Fabiola and is alive and well even now, at 95. As for how Fabiola and Baudouin met, there are three most popular versions of their encounter. The first: Baudouin came incognito, as an ordinary Belgian aristocrat, to a party where Fabiola was socialising, and fell in love with her. The second version is more prosaic, but no less cinematic: the exiled Queen of Spain, Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg, invited the young King of the Belgians to stay with her in Switzerland, where she planned to match him with one of her granddaughters, and invited her goddaughter Fabiola as cover for the plot, but everything went awry. Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, Cardinal Suenens, maintains that in reality it was the Irish nun Sister Veronica O’Brien, chosen for the role of matchmaker for Baudouin, who called upon a nurse from a charitable mission to help in the affair, a woman of aristocratic origins who knew high society, and that woman was Fabiola.