Cressida and Harry... yes, it's on: How this beguiling 23-year-old aristocrat named 'Smally' just might have captured her Prince
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Wild about Harry: Cressida Bonas (right) pictured with Georgia Forbes at the Ralph Lauren Wimbledon Party last year
If Cressida Bonas’s life was a novel, she would be Kitty from Anna Karenina. Blonde, beautiful, sweet and self-possessed, she’s what Tolstoy would have described as ‘delicious’.
Arriving at the ball and smiling at herself in the mirror, she’s whirled around the ballroom by her handsome, well-connected-at-Court, Army officer Count Vronsky.
She’s confident but also innocent and slightly naive all at the same time – and anyway, she’s got the best catch in the room.
Last weekend, beneath the Westway flyover after the Notting Hill Carnival, Cressida was in something slightly trendier than oceans of tulle and cool velvet; she wore a short skirt and strappy shirt, and the ball was the ETA rave.
She danced only with girls while friends protected her from unwanted attention, and then left for an after-party in nearby Ladbroke Grove.
Unfortunately her Vronsky – Prince Harry – wasn’t there; he hadn’t been able to use his tickets, having been dispatched to Scotland to see the Prince of Wales to discuss the fallout from that night in Vegas, followed by a shooting party on Monday.
But Cressida danced underneath the motorway without a care in the world, because on her recent holiday on Richard Branson’s Necker Island she and Prince Harry got closer than ever.
After pressure from his friends, he revealed to her the dates of his return to Afghanistan and they discussed getting serious about each other.
Cressida’s closest friends say she is laid-back about the press storm around her, but is bored by the paparazzi picture of her looking like a rabbit caught in the headlights leaving the Mayfair nightclub where she was first seen with Harry in July.
She is also irritated by the references to her being a Burberry girl or ‘aspiring model’. In fact she’s into dance and worked hard at Leeds University.
And it’s her half-sister Gabriella Calthorpe (who operates under the pseudo-surname Wilde) who is currently on the Burberry billboards.
Otherwise, the Prince’s world is one that she’s known for years, and it doesn’t particularly impress her.
At Leeds her boyfriend was Harry Wentworth-Stanley – whose stepfather, George Milford Haven, is a cousin of the Queen – and she’s been a long-standing fixture in the fun-loving Royal Lodge set that surrounds Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie.
Smitten: Prince Harry, pictured partying in Las Vegas (right), is said to have fallen hard for Cressida
Party girl: Cressida pictured on holiday in a yellow bikini and a pink wig
As a result, she has known Harry for years. Indeed, the general feeling in the social set is that if Harry manages to bag her, he’ll be the lucky one.
Cressida’s family is one of the most beautiful, glamorous and fun aristocratic families of all.
She looks the spitting-image of her mother, the Sixties It Girl Lady Mary-Gaye Curzon, who is four-times divorced and rules her brood from Jubilee Place just off the Kings Road in Chelsea.
Mary-Gaye’s annual Christmas card is a spectacular advertisement for a social master race: on it are five of the most ridiculously good-looking siblings in the country.
With Cressida, there is Pandora Cooper-Key, and Georgiana, Isabella and Jacobi Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe.
Isabella, the actress who is engaged to Sam Branson, may have famously – and apocryphally – turned down Prince William.
But now it’s 23-year-old ‘Cress’ who may be stumbling towards that Buckingham Palace balcony moment.
So who is this girl who has the potential to be our next Royal duchess?
After her parents divorced when she was five, her early years were spent between the pretty National Trust pile Hinton Ampner in Hampshire, which is set in rolling late-19th Century gardens and is where her mother and financier step-father Christopher Shaw live majestically, and the Norfolk home of her father, businessman Jeffrey Bonas.
Out on the town: Harry was seen kissing and cuddling Cressida at Mayfair club Le Salon last month, but the aristocrat is apparently not a fan of the paparazzi picture of her leaving the venue afterwards (right)
In her tweens she spent three years at the Royal Ballet School. ‘But the pressure was too much,’ says a family friend. ‘And she didn’t want to go down the ballet route so her parents took her out.’
Then it was off to Prior Park College in Bath on a sports scholarship. ‘She’s always loved sport,’ says the friend. ‘She was thrilled when she became a world record holder after the London Marathon.’ (This was in the 32-man ‘caterpillar’ that included Princess Beatrice and was the largest number of runners to finish a marathon tied together.)
After Mary-Gaye’s final divorce, the family brood moved to Chelsea. The Calthorpes – once dubbed ‘Britain’s fittest family’ – are a Mitfordian clan of fashion mavens with mad nicknames.
Cressida is ‘Small’ or ‘Smally’ as she’s the littlest; Isabella is ‘Bellie’; Jacobi is ‘Cozy’; Pandora is ‘Baba’.
And it doesn’t stop there. Cressida’s cousin Richard Dinan – son of Mary-Gaye’s sister, Lady Charlotte, and a star of reality TV show Made In Chelsea – is ‘Lamb’.
Cressida and her siblings are best friends and she is often to be found around Notting Hill’s Portobello area where her sisters all now live.
While she was growing up at Jubilee Place, Cressida’s home was filled with old-school jazz that wafted out into the SW3 air.
Sister act: Cressida, front, at nine, with Georgina, left, and Isabella
Her reading material was Jane Austen and Nancy Mitford. Of the bunch, Cress is the dreamy, romantic one.
Perhaps it is because she is the daughter of a fashion-forward Sixties swan that when she does hit the scene, she eschews the big designers and instead goes for hippie and floaty in the summer – she’s mad about Jean Shrimpton. In the winter she rocks back with silver jewellery.
She loves jumpsuits and is obsessed with American supermodel Erin Wasson. She wears a silver ring from the model’s collection that she never seems to take off.
And she’s a ‘trainer girl’ who’s rarely seen in heels – this summer she’s been living in an ever-darkening pair of white Superga sneakers – not a Cinderella slipper in sight.
Yet while Cressida swims in a society circle, she’s no Sloane.
Friends say she was one of the most popular ‘babes’ in the sixth form at Stowe, which she loved.
‘It was non-stop laughter and mischief for two years,’ says a school friend. ‘Our group of girls were all quite different and arty, which is more Cress.’
She got an A, B and a C respectively in her drama, English and sports science A-levels.
‘Stowe is where her love for drama grew, along with her confidence,’ says the friend. ‘She was brilliant as the cockney housekeeper Mrs Swabb in Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus, Miss Julie in Strindberg’s eponymous play and as Laura in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.’
Pedigree: Miss Bonas, left, with mother, sister Isabella and Isabella's father
But she was missing her dancing, so after a year out as a ski instructor she headed to Leeds to study dance for three years.
She did keep acting, however, becoming a member of the Leeds Dugout Theatre company, and starred as Desdemona in Othello at the Edinburgh Festival in August last year.
At Leeds she lived in a house with five friends including best friend Georgia Forbes. ‘We all partied a lot,’ says a university friend.
‘Cress always said she preferred Leeds nightlife to London nightlife. She would say that no one in London clubs really lets go – they just “ponce” around a table.
'She prefers to go and see live music, to festivals and go to nights where she can really dance and not worry about high heels.’ A Middleton this is not.
Despite the fun, she earned a 2:1 in dance and at the end of last summer, along with Georgia, she headed to Sydney.
‘She was terrified about settling down and getting a job in London. Those two girls are both quite free-spirited,’ the friend says.
In Sydney, they fell in with Johnnie Weinberg, son of businessman Sir Mark Weinberg and former Bond girl Anouska Hempel, and Aussie grandee Tim Holmes-a-Court.
Here she divided her time between babysitting cricket commentator Mark Nicholas’s six-year-old and waitressing at a bar on Bondi Beach.
‘She was terrible at it,’ laughs a member of the Sydney set. ‘She got told she was too dreamy and couldn’t carry four plates properly so she was moved to behind the bar where no plates were involved.’
When her visa ran out this summer she returned to London and – despite being very close to her mother – moved out of the family’s palatial pad to Shepherd’s Bush.
‘She wanted to get out of Chelsea,’ a source says. ‘She finds that whole Sloane scene boring.’
This summer looks to have been a fantasy one of music festivals and being wooed by a Prince.
She hosted Saturday nights at Mayfair club Le Salon, with brother Jacobi’s girlfriend Irene Forte – where the new Royal romance was inadvertently outed.
The couple weekended at Womad, the music festival at Charlton Park in Wiltshire, and then partied together on the beach on Necker.
But now it’s back to reality. Prince Harry will return to Army duties, and this week Cressida goes to The Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in Greenwich to study contemporary dance.
As she danced in the streets of Notting Hill for hours last weekend with best friend Georgia and not a care in the world, Cressida seemed to be in her natural habitat. There’s nothing artificial about her and no sense of her having an eye on the prize.
Several ‘surfies’ fell in love with her in Australia but she just wasn’t interested. Saving herself for a Prince, perhaps?
‘She’s so sweet and calm. She doesn’t do drugs. And she and Harry are so funny together. She’s perfect,’ her friend says.
Let’s just hope that this Vronsky doesn’t bolt.
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