Sarah Ferguson, also known as Fergie, was a friend of the late Princess Diana, until the pair fell out shortly before Diana’s death.
Diana even re-introduced the Duchess of York to her now ex-husband Prince Andrew.
While Sarah and Andrew had known each other as children, it was Princess Diana, then married to Prince Charles, 69, who invited Sarah to the Royal Ascot with her brother-in-law.
She then invited both Sarah and Andrew to stay at Highgrove, her and Charles’ country home.
Andrew and Sarah later became engaged in 1986 after courting for a year. Remarking on the match at the time, journalist Sue Arnold described Sarah as the “perfect foil” to Princess Diana.
“Fergie, as she’s known to her friends, is a jolly nice girl, supremely suited to the role of second-string daughter-in-law, horsey, bouncy, with an unthreatening I.Q,” she wrote in Vanity Fair.
“Diana chose well, for though Sarah is pretty, she’s no real competition.”
“In looks and attitude she is the perfect foil to the charismatic Diana.”
Sarah was two years older than her family friend Diana, whom she met for weekly lunch dates.
Describing their relationship in her 1996 autobiography, Sarah described Diana as her “best friend”.
She wrote: “She was two years younger than I, and I strove to support and protect her as I would a younger sister—as I still do today, as a best friend.”
However, a fierce rivalry ensured after Sarah “wooed” members of the royal family, bonding over favourite sports such as skiing and horseback riding.
“Sarah wooed everybody in this family and did it so well. She left me looking like dirt,” Diana revealed to biographer Andrew Morton in 1992.
The pair later came together in 1996 – they holidayed together in South of France after Sarah divorced Prince Andrew in May 1996, and Diana divorced Charles in August 1996.
However, the pair stopped speaking in 1996 after a falling out. Diana died the following year in August 1997.
Speaking to Harpers Bazaar in 2011, Sarah said: ““Because we were like siblings… we rowed. And the saddest thing, at the end, we hadn’t spoken for a year.
“I tried, wrote letters, thinking whatever happened didn’t matter, let’s sort it out.
“And I knew she’d come back. In fact, the day before she died she rang a friend of mine and said, ‘Where’s that Red? I want to talk to her.'”
Sarah has claimed not to know why her and Diana’s friendship ended. However, it has been reported that the twosome stopped talking, because of something Sarah did.
The theory is that their fallout was down to Sarah’s 1996 book, My Story, where Sarah shared an unflattering story about the late Princess of Wales.
The Duchess of York was quoted saying she had got a verruca after wearing a pair of shoes borrowed from Diana.