How Meghan Markle went from minor celebrity to English royalty

Meghan Markle’s life took a fairy-tale turn when she was set up on a blind date with Prince Harry last year.

For one thing, the California native went from being a minor celebrity — with a starring role in the cable drama “Suits” — to the most Googled actress of 2016.

And now, the biracial blogger and humanitarian is about to become the first American to marry into the royal family in 81 years.

“It’s a new chapter, right?” Markle, 36, said of giving up her gig on the USA network’s “Suits” to focus on her new role as a royal.

“I’ve ticked this box, and I feel very proud of the work I’ve done there, and now it’s time to work with [Harry] as a team.”

She was born Rachel Meghan Markle in Los Angeles in 1981 to a white father and black mother.

Her parents — lighting director Thomas Markle and clinical therapist Doria Ragland — divorced when she was 6, but she has said they remain a close-knit family.

“I was born and raised in Los Angeles, a California girl who lives by the ethos that most things can be cured with either yoga, the beach, or a few avocados,” the self-described foodie once wrote on her lifestyle blog, The Tig, which she recently shut down.

In an essay written for Elle magazine in 2015, Markle discussed coming to terms with her racial identity and how conflicted she felt in seventh grade when forced to check a box indicating her ethnicity.

“You could only choose one, but that would be to choose one parent over the other — and one half of myself over the other. My teacher told me to check the box for Caucasian. ‘Because that’s how you look, Meghan,’ she said,” Markle wrote.

“I couldn’t bring myself to do that, to picture the pit-in-her-belly sadness my mother would feel if she were to find out. So, I didn’t tick a box.”

When she came home, her dad said, “If that happens again, you draw your own box.”

Markle attended a Catholic high school and went on to Northwestern University. There, she majored in drama and international relations and became the first person in her family to graduate from college.

“As a biracial actress, [Markle] was quite aware about how people respond to race and racial differences and ideas of otherness,” Harvey Young, the theater department chair at Northwestern, told the Chicago Tribune.

“She had a very sophisticated understanding of what it means to live in a racial body that gets perceived and is treated differently based upon communities in which you find yourself.”

In 2002, she made her first TV appearance on the soap opera “General Hospital,” and while struggling to make her mark in Hollywood, fell for Trevor Engelson, 41, a TV and movie producer from Great Neck, LI.

The pair dated for six years before tying the knot in September 2011 at the Jamaica Inn in Ochos Rios, Jamaica.

That same year, Markle got her big break, landing the role of Rachel Zane on “Suits.”

Her career took off just as her marriage came to an end. In August 2013, the pair divorced, citing “irreconcilable differences.” Reports suggested her work schedule was to blame.

Engelson, who produced the FX show “Snowfall,” made headlines in September when it emerged he was working on a Fox show about a man whose wife leaves him for a British prince.

“Divorce is hard. Sharing custody is harder. Sharing custody with the British royal family when your wife marries a prince, in the unforgiving spotlight of London’s tabloid media, is next level,” reads the premise of the as-yet-unnamed series.

Engleson and Markle never had children, and the actress didn’t meet Prince Harry until July 2016, when a mutual pal set them up on a blind date.

They managed to keep their courtship a secret for a few months — until the British press caught wind of the romance.

Some of the coverage was offensive.

“Prince Harry could marry into gangster royalty — his new love is from a crime-ridden Los Angeles neighborhood,” the Daily Star Online wrote last November.

The reports prompted Harry’s communications secretary to issue a rare public comment, decrying the “racial undertones of comment pieces” and “outright sexism and racism of social-media trolls and Web article comments.”

“Some of it has been hidden from the public — the nightly legal battles to keep defamatory stories out of papers; her mother having to struggle past photographers in order to get to her front door,” the statement said.

“The attempts of reporters and photographers to gain illegal entry to her home and the calls to police that followed; the substantial bribes offered by papers to her ex-boyfriend; the bombardment of nearly every friend, co-worker and loved one in her life.”

In an interview with Vanity Fair this year, Markle brushed off the press reports as “noise.”

“We’re two people who are really happy and in love. We were very quietly dating for about six months before it became news, and I was working during that whole time, and the only thing that changed was people’s perception,” she said.

“Nothing about me changed. I’m still the same person that I am, and I’ve never defined myself by my relationship.”

Markle said Monday that she and Harry were “totally unprepared for what happened,” and she “did not have any understanding of what it would be like.”

“At the end of the day, I am proud of who I am and where I have come from, and we have never put any focus on that, we have just focused on who we are as a couple,” she said.

In addition to acting, Markle has devoted herself to humanitarian causes, including going to Rwanda as an ambassador for Canada’s World Vision, which provides clean water to communities.

“I think what’s been really exciting as we talk about the transition out of my career and into my role is . . . the causes that are really important to me that I can focus even more energy on,” Markle said Monday.

“Very early out of the gate, I think you realize you have access or a voice that people are willing to listen [to], and with that comes a lot of responsibility, which I take seriously.”