Prince William Born: Heir to the British Throne

Prince William was born at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, London on June 21, 1982, the first child of Charles, Prince of Wales and Diana, Princess of Wales. He became second in line to the British throne from the moment of his birth, a position that shaped every aspect of his public and private life. Born William Arthur Philip Louis, he was educated at Wetherby School, Ludgrove School, and Eton College before attending the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where he earned a degree in geography. He trained as a military officer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and served in the Royal Air Force and the East Anglian Air Ambulance as a search-and-rescue helicopter pilot. His childhood was defined by his parents' highly publicized and acrimonious divorce in 1996 and his mother's death in a car crash in Paris on August 31, 1997. William was fifteen. The image of him and his brother Harry walking behind their mother's coffin through the streets of London became one of the defining images of the 1990s. He married Catherine Middleton at Westminster Abbey on April 29, 2011, in a ceremony watched by an estimated two billion people worldwide. They have three children: Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis. As Prince of Wales since September 2022, following his father's accession as King Charles III, William has focused on mental health awareness, environmental conservation, and efforts to modernize the monarchy's public image. He launched the Earthshot Prize in 2020, a global environmental award modeled on the Kennedy-era moonshot, offering five annual prizes of one million pounds each for solutions to environmental challenges. His public role has required balancing traditional royal protocol with the pressures of modern media and public expectation. His response to his wife's 2024 cancer diagnosis, and the couple's decision to announce it publicly, was widely praised as a model of transparency in an institution historically committed to privacy.