Long before Mary and Frederik met at the Slip Inn on Sydney's Darling Harbour, another Australian woman fell in love with a handsome royal.
A century before Mary's royal wedding, Elsie Caroline Thompson caught the eye of an Indian king, the maharajah from Tikari, while on a stage tour in India.
The actress, singer and comedienne from Sydney caused quite the stir in the Australian press when she fell in love with the royal, formally gave up her career and moved to India to become his second wife.
"It was a relationship that was very unusual for the time," says Chris Kunz, Elsie's great nephew and author of the book, Maharani: The First Australian Princess.
Their story had all the hallmarks of a real life fairy tale with Elsie becoming the maharani, Sanskrit for "great Queen", devoting herself to women's education and frequently travelling to Europe with her husband before outside forces divided them.
While they never divorced, the young Australian moved back home in May 1926 and did not see the maharajah again.
She was joined by a handful of other Australian women who married men from Indian royalty and European dynasties throughout the 20th century.
"Elsie was the first Australian to marry overseas royalty, the first Australian-born queen, and by my calculation, Mary Donaldson was the ninth Australian to marry overseas royalty, and the fourth Australian-born queen," Mr Kunz said.
Molly Finke and Joan Falkiner followed in Elsie's footsteps by marrying Indian maharajahs and becoming maharanis.
Three others fell in love with Russian aristocrats in exile and the cousin of George V of England.
In the 1970s, a commoner named Susan Cullen-Ward married a gun-toting Albanian royal who'd been banished from his home country during the rise of communism across Europe.
For much of her married life, she laid claim to the title Queen Susan of the Albanians, though it was never officially recognised.
From an alleged poisoning plot to uprooted royals on the run and a secret romance that divided a family, these are just a few accounts of Australia's royal encounters.
Elsie Thompson, the first Australian-born royal
In 1904, Elsie Caroline Thompson was performing on stage in Calcutta on opening night when she caught the eye of not one, but two royal men sitting in the audience.
The young beauty from Millers Point in Sydney, who went by her stage name Elsie Forrest, had made the audience laugh with a joke about the orchestra being out of time with the show, according to Mr Kunz.
Two royals, the Rajah (prince) of Cooch Behar and the Maharajah of Tikari, were watching the production and swiftly became enthralled by her beauty and humour.
"[Afterwards] one of them sent a huge bunch of flowers to her hotel, and the other one, drove there a week later to try and pick her up and take her on a drive," Mr Kunz said.
But Elsie Thompson was married to another man, George Stillwell, and was obliged to keep travelling as an actress for the Sandow Company.
She spent a few years in India before following her husband back to Sydney to file for divorce.
Free to marry again, she returned to India and announced her engagement to the Maharajah of Tikari, Gopal Sharan Narain Singh in 1909, defying a race and class divide.
"In those days, Australia was seen more as a white establishment and anyone breaking the colour lines — [in this case] marrying a dark Indian maharajah — was almost never seen at all. And so it was quite a sensation," Mr Kunz said.
Elsie converted from Christianity to Hinduism, learned the local language and adopted Indian customs expected of royals.
"Though the wedding was a quiet one, everything went off with much eclat," The Wondonga Express reported in June 1909.
Unable to have children of her own due to endometriosis, Elsie devoted herself to the education of young girls in her local community, a cause that was close to her heart given her upbringing and love of reading and poetry.
"Her father was a bookseller and stationer in Erskine Street. So she had a background in reading from a very young age … and she wanted young girls in India to have the same sort of opportunity," Mr Kunz says.
"So she tried to insist that as many [girls] as possible can get an education in the Tikari area."
The newlyweds remained in India but frequently travelled to Europe, where Elsie occasionally sang and the maharajah took part in race car driving, alongside his work with the British armed forces.
When World War I broke out, he served as the personal driver for Sir Douglas Haig, who was the chief of the British Expeditionary Force, prompting Elsie to move to London to be with her husband.
But things took a turn for the pair in 1921 when external factors drove them apart.
"There were other forces she really didn't get on with [inside Tikari]. In the Raj [Britain's ruling class in India], [men] who had grown up [and] went to school with the maharajah … tried to persuade him that he should turn his back on her, and then subsequently, they benefited from that," Mr Kunz said.
Elsie attempted to patch things up with the Maharajah but they were unable to reconcile.
She moved back to Australia in 1926 and started living with another man, while pursuing her husband in court for an ongoing annuity.
She spent years waiting for money that never arrived, according to Mr Kunz, eventually selling the jewels her husband had gifted her to get by before she was committed to a mental asylum.
"[Her] family, even when she was being put in an asylum, didn't do their utmost to get her out," Mr Kunz said.
"They just felt it was too complicated and too difficult a situation."
Elsie died in 1967 and was buried in an unmarked grave until her niece, Mr Kunz's mother, visited the cemetery and uncovered her story.
"When someone's locked away for the last 18 years of their life, amongst some people who would probably have been diagnosed today as mad, and others who were probably just unfortunate, it's not a happy ending to life," he said.
"But the only good thing I can find is that I know that she performed regularly, she was able to sing regularly for the other [patients] in the asylum she was in, and that that was something which she always loved to do."
Queen Susan of Albania and her gun-loving royal husband
Not long after Elsie's death, another young Australian from the eastern Sydney suburb of Waverley met her royal match.
Susan Cullen-Ward had grown up on the family sheep station near Cumnock in rural New South Wales, studying art history and architecture in Sydney before setting her sights on a new life abroad.
At a dinner party in the late 60s, the young divorcee was introduced to a dashing Albanian by the name of Leka Zog.
The heir to the Albanian throne, Leka and his family had been forced to flee the country when he was just two days old after Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's army invaded.
After the death of his father in 1961, he became the self-proclaimed Albanian king in exile.
Banished by Albania's communist government, Leka struck up friendships with other powerful leaders including Spain's King Juan Carlos, Iran's Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and then-Californian-governor Ronald Reagan, to whom he famously gifted a baby elephant.
He invited his Australian love interest to join him in Europe, and the pair were soon engaged.
In 1975, Susan married Leka at a ceremony in Biarritz, in southern France, and became Her Majesty Queen of the Albanians.
The newlyweds lived together in Madrid for three years before being expelled after the Spanish government reported that it had found an arms cache on the grounds of Leka's home.
According to Queen Susan, the real reason for their expulsion had been the growing strength of an uprising by the Albanian people against its communist rulers.
Leka's attempts to build a training camp for the Albanian Liberation Army in Libya had been disrupted by a military coup, but he continued to lead the resistance movement in exile.
"Four countries, which I will not name, put pressure on the Spanish government … to put pressure on King Leka to leave the country because he was getting rather close to an overthrow of Albania by military means," she told the ABC in 1990.
In King Leka's obituary, the Daily Telegraph described a close shave during the family's escape from Europe:
"During a refuelling stop in Gabon, their aircraft was surrounded by local troops, said to have been hired to capture him by the Albanian government. The soldiers backed off when [Leka] appeared at the aircraft door armed with a bazooka."
After fleeing Spain for Rhodesia — now known as Zimbabwe — they ended up in South Africa, where they lived together in a "shabby" house outside of Johannesburg for 10 years.
At her first official engagement in South Africa, Queen Susan opened an art exhibition raising funds for the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, greeting hundreds of celebrities and foreign dignitaries with all the confidence and grace of a true monarch, according to an account by a close family friend.
"She had broken through to that crowd with her very first words and, knowing she had each guest in the palm of her hand, she then proceeded to deliver an impassioned plea for the plight of the destitute," Michael De Kock recalled in his eulogy for the late queen.
"From time to time during that brilliant speech she glanced at her notes. But throughout, her sincerity, her humanness and her care and concern for all living things rung in every one of her carefully chosen words."
Having welcomed a precious baby boy in 1982, Susan was pining to return to Australia and visit her family, but she ran into trouble with the authorities.
The Department of Foreign Affairs refused to issue a passport in the name of Queen Susan, but in a compromise, then-foreign minister Andrew Peacock agreed to "Susan Cullen-Ward, known as Queen Susan".
Susan refused to travel on what she deemed "an illegal passport", issued in her non-married name.
Leka was briefly permitted to enter Albania during the 1990s, but stayed for less than 24 hours on the first visit, and became entangled in an attack on the capital during the second, after a referendum to restore the monarchy failed.
According to Albania's royal court, Leka drew great love and strength from his wife's phone calls during this turbulent period, in which she reminded him "we are with you, we are well, my love to the Albanians".
Tried in absentia, the king in exile was sentenced to three years imprisonment for organising an armed uprising, but the conviction was later downgraded and Leka was pardoned in 2002.
The family was finally free to resettle in Leka's homeland. Upon their return, authorities seized an arsenal of weapons including Kalashnikovs, grenades and hunting rifles.
Queen Susan saw out her final days by her husband's side at the family residence in Tirana, before dying of lung cancer in 2004.
She was laid to rest at the Royal Mausoleum, where hundreds of mourners gathered to farewell the woman they saw as their unofficial queen.
Australian royal connections lost in time
As well as Susan and Elsie, Mr Kunz says in researching his book he came across at least six other Australian women who married into foreign royalty before Mary Donaldson became Crown Princess of Denmark.
He acknowledges there may be more Australians who have married into other royal families around the world.
In 1915, a young woman named Molly Fink captured the attention of Marthanda Bhairava Tondiman, rajah of the Indian state of Pudakota, during a visit to Sydney.
"Molly, without gems to glitter, possessed the jewel of beauty — tresses of true gold like a nimbus, and eyes of turquoise," Smith's Weekly gazette wrote in 1927, adding the Melbourne-born beauty had "personal charm and a character of her own as well".
The pair were wed later that year after a whirlwind courtship, but like Elsie before her, Molly received a lot of media attention for marrying outside her race and was shunned by the palace.
Under King George V's instruction, India's British government refused to recognise the marriage or allow Molly to use the title Her Highness.
She joined her husband in Pudakota, but was there for less than five months.
When Molly fell pregnant with their first child, an unknown opponent tried to poison her with oleander leaves. The rajah suspected the palace was behind the plot, and whisked his wife away, back to Australia.
The couple settled in Sydney, where they raised their son, Martanda Sydney Tondaiman.
When it became clear the British government would never recognise Martanda as rightful heir, the rajah renounced his claim to the throne and the family moved to Europe.
They became active in high society circles, rubbing shoulders with novelists, artists, playwrights and socialites. But Molly fell on hard times after her husband's sudden death in 1928.
With her assets frozen, she stole away to America with the help of a millionaire art collector, and took up various sales jobs from Palm Beach to New York.
She died in 1967, her ashes placed next to her beloved rajah's at a crematorium in London.
Another Australian turned royal, Joan Falkiner, was a wealthy heiress on a European holiday with her mother and sister when she caught the eye of an Indian noble and honorary aide de camp to King George VI.
Taley Muhammed Khan was 55 when he met 19-year-old Joan in Freiburg Germany, on the border of Switzerland, in 1937.
Despite the stark age gap, the pair hit it off, striking up a secret correspondence when Joan returned home to Australia.
Two years later, Joan shocked her family when she sailed to Bombay without their consent to marry him.
A Melbourne socialite disappearing under the cover of darkness to marry a foreign prince caused a scandal at home and made a splash in the Australian newspapers, according to one of Joan's family members.
"It was quite daring really, especially as they left overnight. And everybody was saying things like, 'Oh Joan was supposed to come to lunch tomorrow,' and so on," Joan's cousin, Lawre, told Suzanne Falkiner, a distant relative of Joan.
After her marriage, the British Raj refused to confer a title on Joan and she was not allowed to appear beside her husband for official functions due to their disapproval of interracial marriage.
This changed years later when India officially became independent and the Australian was officially recognised in Britain as Her Highness.
Joan lived in relative peace with her husband, remaining by his side until his early death in 1957.
Mr Kunz's list of other Australian royals includes two women who married into the Russian aristocracy in exile: Pauline Curran from Hobart, who married Prince Maximillian Melikoff in 1926, and Margaret "Sheila" Chrisholm from Sydney, who married Prince Dimitri Alexandrovitch Romanov in 1954.
Another Australian, Anne Pearl Field from Launceston, became the second wife of Prince Christian of Hesse-Phillippstahl-Barchfeld, a cousin of both George V of England and Czar Nicholas II of Russia, in 1958 after the two widowers met in Cannes, France.
Helen Simmons from Perth rounds out the list with her marriage to Mukkaram Jah — the Nizam of Hyderabad, which translates to ruler — in 1979.
There are striking similarities in the experiences of Australia's royal women, many of whom were swept up in what appeared to be real life fairy tales.
But despite the glitz and glamour of royal life, some of these women did not have the happy endings of storybooks.
"That's the way life goes.You can have all the money in the world and all the positions, but not everything works out your way," Mr Kunz said.
More than 100 years after the first Australian married a royal, Queen Mary will chart a new path when she accedes the throne.
Since her marriage to the Crown Prince, she has devoted herself to progressive causes, become fluent in Danish and won over her prospective subjects.
Unlike the Australian royals who preceded her, she will assume the role of Denmark's ruler with decades of experience as a royal and without a challenge to her title.