Princess Astrid, Mrs Ferner, has died at 94, only two days after she was wheeled into Oslo Cathedral for the state funeral of her brother, Norway’s late King Harald V. The royal palace announced her death on Friday, September 11, 2026, saying she had died peacefully.
“The Princess fell asleep today, Friday 11 September, at the age of 94,” the palace said in a statement. Her life spanned wartime exile in the United States, a marriage that cost her the style of Royal Highness, and decades of service to the Norwegian crown.
King Haakon VIII, 53, her nephew, who succeeded Harald as monarch on Friday, August 28, ordered the flag above the Royal Palace balcony flown at half-mast on September 11 and again on the day of her funeral. Details of the ceremony had not been released when the palace announced her death, and no date has been set. Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said the princess will be buried at state expense and that flags will fly at half-mast across Norway.
King Haakon Pays Tribute to His Aunt
“Throughout her long life, Princess Astrid represented the Royal House in a warm and dutiful manner,” King Haakon said in his tribute. He said she had stepped into the role of first lady at just 22, after the death of his grandmother, Crown Princess Märtha.
She was “particularly committed to caring for and including the most vulnerable members of society,” the king said, and carried out her duties with “loyalty, dedication and an infectious sense of humor.” He described an aunt who was “never afraid to speak her mind,” who had been a key support to Harald and the wider family, and from whom relatives had learned a great deal.
In a joint statement, her five children — Cathrine, Benedikte, Alexander, Elisabeth and Carl-Christian Ferner — said: “In our grief, we stand together with gratitude. Thank you for all the wonderful memories. You will forever hold a great place in our hearts.”
A Sister at Her Brother’s Side
Astrid’s health had declined over the months before her death, and in March she received hospital treatment for pneumonia. It did not keep her from her brother. Harald, Europe’s oldest living monarch, was taken to a hospital on August 17 and treated for a bacterial infection in his blood; on August 27, the day before he died at 89 after more than 35 years on the throne, Astrid was photographed leaving the National Hospital in Oslo after several hours at his bedside.
In the days before her own death, the palace released photographs of the princess sitting alone beside her brother’s coffin in the Palace Chapel, and looking out of a palace window at the flowers left by mourners in Palace Square. Her final public appearance came at the funeral on Wednesday, September 9, after 13 days of national mourning, when thousands lined the procession route from the Royal Palace to Oslo Cathedral. Mourners included Britain’s Prince William, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and the kings of Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and Spain. Allison Hooker, the under secretary of state for political affairs, represented the United States.
Wartime Exile and a Life of Duty
Born on February 12, 1932, Astrid Maud Ingeborg first drew breath at Villa Solbakken, one of the royal residences in Oslo, and was the second daughter of the future King Olav V and Crown Princess Märtha of Sweden. Her name came from one of her godparents, her aunt Queen Astrid of Belgium. A great-granddaughter of King Edward VII and a second cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, she stood 18th in line to the British throne at birth.
She was eight when Germany invaded Norway in April 1940, and fled with her mother, her sister Ragnhild and her brother Harald, first to neutral Sweden and then to the United States, arriving in New York that August and attending school in Washington, D.C. Her father passed the war years in England at the side of King Haakon VII, where he acted as a military commander and a counselor to Norway’s exiled government. Back home in 1945, Astrid attended Nissen, a girls’ school in Oslo, was confirmed in the chapel of the Royal Palace on May 9, 1948, and studied for two years at Oxford in the early 1950s.
Her mother died of cancer in 1954 at 53. With Olav a widower who never remarried, and with Ragnhild settled in Brazil after her 1953 marriage to her bodyguard, Erling Lorentzen, the duties of first lady fell to Astrid, then 22. She accompanied her father to receptions, official functions and state visits for 14 years, until Harald married Sonja Haraldsen in 1968. She chaired the board of the memorial fund established in her mother’s name, which supports social and humanitarian projects, and was a patron of charities working with women and with young people with dyslexia, a condition she had herself. Her decades of work on behalf of the crown were recognized in 2002, when Norway’s government granted her an honorary pension. Late in life, a chihuahua named Wilma was frequently at her side.
The Marriage That Cost Her a Title
In the late 1950s she fell in love with Johan Martin Ferner, a businessman and Olympic sailor who had taken silver in the sport in Helsinki in 1952; the couple met when she took him on as crew for a yacht race. He was the son of the owner of an Oslo department store, and conservative figures in the Norwegian establishment objected to a commoner. Because he was also a divorcé, the church objected too. Astrid was said to have threatened to go on a hunger strike and to give up her royal duties unless her father consented.
Olav relented, though he had to ask the retired bishop of Nidaros to officiate after the bishop of Oslo refused. The couple married at Asker Church on January 12, 1961. The match cost Astrid the style of Royal Highness and her yearly allowance, and from then on she went by Princess Astrid, Mrs Ferner. She went on representing the monarchy and its charities well into her nineties. Her five children were born between 1962 and 1972. Johan Ferner died in 2015.
Once Harald was gone, Astrid remained as the only living child of King Olav V and Crown Princess Märtha; her elder sister, Princess Ragnhild, Mrs Lorentzen, died in 2012. She is survived by her five children and seven grandchildren. Astrid died as the eldest surviving descendant of Queen Victoria, a distinction that now passes to her third cousin, Anne Abel Smith, 94, a granddaughter of Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone.