'As a girl she had to pass frosty messages between her parents': How Meghan Markle's family life was scarred by racism, bankruptcy and bitter feuding as the future princess's unseen photo album is revealed

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As the wedding guests file into St George's Chapel, Windsor, on 19 May, with the bride's contingent to the left of the aisle, the groom's to the right, as tradition decrees, the contrasting scene will tell its own poignant story.

On Prince Harry's side of the magnificent Gothic chapel, the pews will be packed with members of the extended Royal Family, from the Queen and Prince Philip, and Charles and Camilla, to his most distant cousins (plus scores of minor aristos, friends and dignitaries).

Across the divide, however, things will look very different. Apart from Meghan's reclusive father, Thomas, 73, who is expected to make a rare excursion from his modest beach-front home in Mexico to give her away, and her mother, Doria, 61, who will have flown in from Los Angeles, only a carefully selected handful of Meghan's relatives will be there to witness this momentous event.

Meghan (pictured as a baby with her father Thomas) is expected to have a handful of guests including her father, 73, and mother, 61 at her wedding in May

Notable absentees will include her half-siblings, Samantha Grant and Tom Markle Junior, who have caused Meghan such embarrassment since her romance with Harry became public (Samantha with her cutting remarks about members of her family, Tom Jnr with his drunken misbehaviour, including being arrested last year after allegedly putting a gun to his girlfriend's head). 

She has now reportedly washed her hands of them, telling Palace lawyers, 'I don't know these people.'

Damning words, if true. And ruthless, too, we might think, for a woman who has risen from humble beginnings and made it her mission to champion the cause of those less fortunate than herself. It might also be said that the Royal Family is not without blemishes.

Yet there is no denying that Meghan's kinsfolk are a decidedly quirky crew and that, while some of her relations are admirable and engaging characters, others are such loose cannons that they threaten to become an encumbrance to her.

Hers is a family where falling into debt is so commonplace that filing for bankruptcy has become almost endemic – this fate has befallen her mother, father and half-brother. Where people bad-mouth their own flesh and blood so routinely that it's impossible to know who to believe. Where feuds are so longstanding that even those involved can sometimes barely recall how they began.

The fractures in her clan run deeper than the San Andreas Fault. That she has soared into the ranks of royalty from such an unpromising background is little short of astounding.

The improbability of her ascent is amusingly summed up by Ava Burrows, the second wife of Meghan's late maternal grandfather, and one of her most level-headed relatives. 'Compared to other people's families, perhaps it is quite 'complicated',' the retired teacher tells me, acknowledging her euphemism with a chuckle.

On the cusp of her teens, Meghan with her father and nephew Thomas Dooley, the son of her half-brother

'I guess it's like your Downton Abbey, and we are the folks downstairs. I'm kind of expecting a visit from the men in black suits [by which she means either the FBI, or Buckingham Palace officials] to check us out.'

She pauses for a moment, then, slapping her knee, she laughs again and exclaims, 'Meggie marrying a prince? Who'd have thunk!'

Who indeed? Certainly Meghan's American forebears could never have envisaged that they would become part of the British royal lineage.

Many of her ancestors were slaves who toiled in the Deep South cotton and tobacco plantations and suffered decades of brutality and discrimination. She has written movingly about her great-great-great-great-grandfather, who was emancipated after Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery in 1865, whereupon he was entitled to choose a new name, and called himself Wisdom.

Genealogists have also traced her great-great-great-grandmother Mattie Turnipseed, a name probably derived from her enforced line of work and conferred by her white masters, in Georgia.

In 1885, Mattie gave birth to a mixed-race daughter, Claudie Ritchie, who fled to the marginally more enlightened state of Tennessee in search of a better life, and worked in a department store. Claudie's husband, Jeremiah Ragland, was also determined to move up, and started a tailoring business.

In later generations, the family's quest for advancement gathered pace. Though they attended a segregated school with scant resources, two of Claudie and Jeremiah's five children – Dora and Lillie – won college places. Dora became a teacher. Lillie earned such renown as an estate agency director that she was listed in the book Who's Who Among African Americans.

Their brother, Steve Ragland, ironed clothes in a cleaner's shop, and married the daughter of a hotel porter. In 1930, the couple moved to Los Angeles, where their son, Alvin – Meghan's grandfather – was born.

As Meghan grew older, her father would take her to the Hollywood studios where he worked, and he got her her first walk-on part, in the TV soap General Hospital

In many ways, this is where Meghan's story begins. Alvin was a mercurial, larger-than-life character and some family members say it is from him that Ms Markle takes her outgoing personality and penchant for performing.

Alvin was an antiques dealer (an interest that has passed down through her mother to Meghan) whose fortunes fluctuated. He also collected vintage cars. His first wife, Meghan's much-loved grandmother Jeanette, was the daughter of a hotel bell-hop and a lift operator.

In later life Jeanette suffered a stroke, and Meghan – by then in her teens – helped nurse her. She 'would sit there, talk to her, hold her hand, cook for her, and take care of her. Whatever she could do to bring comfort. She loved her grandmother,' says Jeanette's son Joseph Johnson.

Meghan's paternal ancestry is no less complex and fascinating. Her father's descendants were mainly Dutch, Irish and Scottish immigrants who settled in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania.

Gee whizz, Dad: Meghan, aged 12, being treated to a horseback ride by her father in Southern California

Meghan's (father moved to Los Angeles in his mid-30s, with Hollywood in his sights

Going back 15 generations, however, genealogists claimed to have established that one of Meghan's forebears, Christopher Hussey, who sailed to the New World in 1632 and helped found Nantucket, was also related to the Queen Mother – meaning, incredibly, that she and Harry might possibly be very distant cousins.

More recent prominent figures include her paternal great-grandfather, 'Papa Ike' Markle, who, I am told, stood 7ft 2in tall and possessed gargantuan strength (which would explain the bear-like physiques of Meghan's father and half-brother).

The son of this colossus, Meghan's grandfather Gordon, worked on the railroads, while her grandmother Doris sold cheap clothes and household goods in a 'five and dime' discount store, and baked 'whoopee pies' laden with chocolate and cream.

They were typical small-town, God-fearing, blue-collar Americans.

But like his older brothers, Mick, now 78 – who held senior public service posts and is now comfortably retired in Florida – and Fred, 76 (who has set up an independent ministry of the Eastern Orthodox Church in Florida), the ambitions of Meghan's father lay beyond the Pennsylvanian backwoods.

Meghan, pictured with her beloved rescue dog, Bogart, who wasn't well enough to move to the UK with Meghan so stayed behind in Toronto with some of her friends

Meghan (pictured with her beloved rescue dog Guy) was born in Los Angeles in 1981, with the family she was destined to join 6,000 miles away in London

At school, he enjoyed helping backstage with theatrical productions and despite being colour-blind became adept in the use of scenery and lighting. So, after taking a job setting up the pins at a bowling alley to save money, he headed for Chicago, where, concealing his visual impediment, he found jobs in theatres, and later on TV shows. 

This was in the mid-Sixties, a vibrant time in the Windy City, and at a party he fell for a stunning, redheaded hippie named Roslyn. Though she was fresh out of high-school, and he was barely 20, they quickly married and had two children – Samantha, now 53, and Tom Jnr, 51.

Within eight years, however, he and Roslyn were divorced. She declines to explain why they split up, telling me they were 'both at fault'. But a source close to her says Thomas was 'an absent dad' and, at that young stage of his life, he was 'not a family person'.

Roslyn started a new life with the children, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she still lives. With his professional reputation burgeoning, and Hollywood in his sights, Thomas moved to Los Angeles. It was there, when he was in his mid-30s, that a pretty young woman again turned his head.

Her name was Doria Ragland, she was around ten years his junior, and she was temping in the studios where he worked.

This was in the Seventies, the dawn of a supposedly more enlightened era. Yet in his insular home town, his relationship with an African-American woman might well have invoked mutterings of disapproval and hostile stares, even then. In some black neighbourhoods of Los Angeles, there would have been similar misgivings.

Thomas and Doria were in love, however, and these resolute characters were not about to let bigotry come between them.

Meghan's mother Doria Ragland (pictured right) is a  therapist, social worker and former air hostess

Meghan's mother (pictured) shares her daughter's love of exercise, yoga – and dogs

'I like to think he was drawn to her sweet eyes and her Afro,' Meghan has said. 'Plus, their shared love of antiques. Whatever it was, they were married [in 1979, in Thomas's home state of Pennsylvania] and had me.'

Rachel Meghan Markle was born in Los Angeles on 4 August, 1981. Six thousand miles away, in London, the family she was destined to join were celebrating the Queen Mother's 81st birthday. The toast to mark Meghan's arrival might have been less formal, but it was certainly no less joyful.

Before Doria brought the baby girl home from hospital, Thomas had made sure her bedroom was brightly decorated, and hung little angels and fairies in the bathroom.

Tom Jnr (who was then 14, and had come to live with them, along with his 16-year-old sister, Samantha) told me his father was so thrilled with his new baby that he would dance around with her wrapped in his beefy arms, and hold her up to the mirror so she could see him cuddling her.

'When Meg was born, Dad was a changed man,' he said. 'She was his whole world. The look on his face was priceless. Dad would take so many pictures of Meggie, she must have been the most photographed baby in the San Fernando Valley! He must have about 50,000 pictures stashed away.

'She was a really cute kid, too. You couldn't get a cuter baby. There was a lot of my father in her looks – you could see it around the eyes, and she has the turned-up Markle nose. Doria has a really nice complexion, and I think she gave Meg that million-dollar skin. So she resembled them both, and it made a great-looking combination.'

Much has been written about Meghan's childhood, not all of it accurate. Some reports have suggested she was raised in a gang-dominated ghetto, for example, but this is untrue. The reality is that for the first six years of her life, when her parents were together, her home environment was affluent. 

As I discovered for myself when I visited her former homes last summer, the family lived in an elegant, detached, Shaker-style chalet, with four bedrooms and a garden, in the serene Los Angeles commuter town of Woodland Hills. The neighbourhood was sufficiently desirable that Bing Crosby's son, Phillip, lived just up the road.

The reason the family had been comfortable when they were all living together is that Thomas was earning top dollar as a lighting director on the popular TV series General Hospital – for which he won an Emmy Award. In 1984, when Meghan was three years old, his expertise also earned him a senior role in TV coverage of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. 

Meghan's half-brother (pictured with Meghan as a baby), Tom Junior believes Samantha envied Meghan from the outset

Meghan and her half-sister Samantha (pictured left in 2008) are now estranged

Her father's glamorous job gave Meghan an enviable upbringing. He would show her off at the house-parties he liked to throw for his bohemian showbiz circle, and sometimes take her to work with him in the studios, where she was fussed over by the actors. As she grew older, she was also sometimes given small walk-on parts, fuelling her ambition to emulate them.

Thomas was so eager to see her tread the boards that he enrolled her in the famous, and very expensive, Little Red Schoolhouse which was a hotbed for prodigious child performers. The school's past pupils include Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney.

Meghan's father also helped out backstage with her school productions, particularly after she moved on to the private Immaculate Heart Girls High School, where she invariably won the best parts.

His indulgence and connections gave her a huge advantage over other children keen to climb the greasy pole to stardom. But Meghan's half-sister Samantha also harboured acting ambitions, and Meghan's half-brother Tom Junior says she felt deeply jealous of Meghan because she believed she hadn't received the same encouragement from her father.

In Tom Jnr's view, this was unreasonable. He says his father also tried to give Samantha (who had red hair, like both her parents, and was extremely pretty) a leg-up into showbusiness, but she 'blew it' by failing to attend auditions, and behaving like a young diva. The high-point of her brief career was appearing in a jeans commercial, he says.

Tom Jnr, who has two boys of his own with his ex-wife Tracy, Thomas and Tyler Dooley (they took their mother's last name), believes Samantha envied the new arrival from the outset, and never took to her.

Samantha (pictured), 53, now has multiple sclerosis and claims Meghan has been less than charitable towards Thomas Senior

DIANA WAS HER ROLE MODEL

Many girls dream of being a princess, and for the young Meghan, the one that really captured her imagination was Princess Diana. As a long-standing admirer of the Royal Family, Sonia Ardakani – whose daughter Suzy was one of Meghan's best friends – had videoed her 1981 wedding to Prince Charles, and she would re-run the film for Meghan and her daughters.

She also lent her a biography of Diana, and says Meghan came to regard Prince Harry's mother as a 'role model'. Of course, she was captivated by the princess's glamour, but what really impressed her was Diana's humanitarian work, her independence, and her ability to connect with ordinary people.

It resonated with a young girl whose sense of social justice had been fostered by the early excursions her mother took her on to the less-developed world. A girl who, when she was 11 years old, had been so enraged by a 'sexist' TV advert for washing-up liquid – which implied only women would use it – that she had written a protest letter to Hillary Clinton (the ad was eventually discontinued).

Model student: Rachel is Meghan's real first name (and the same as that of her character in Suits)

Meghan's fascination with Diana perhaps explains why she made a point of posing outside Buckingham Palace for this photograph (right), taken on a trip to London when she was 15, and first published in the Daily Mail.

So, what would the future hold for this fiercely driven, compassionate girl? Academically, she was extremely bright and excelled at English (writing her essays in such exquisite handwriting that she later supplemented her acting income by working as a freelance calligrapher). 

However, she had set her sights on an acting career, and turned down offers from other leading universities to study theatre and international relations at Northwestern University, whose performing arts faculty is prestigious. It meant moving across the country, to Illinois, and I am told her father missed her so badly that her absence lowered his mood. 

If Meghan expected her new student friends to be broadminded enough to avoid racial stereotyping, she was quickly disappointed. During her first week, when acquainting herself with the young woman who shared her dormitory, she mentioned that her mother was black and her father was white. 'And they're divorced? Oh, well, that makes sense,' came the stinging reply.

Meghan had by then grown into an eye-catching beauty, and had no shortage of propositions. But if she had a boyfriend at university, then he is being remarkably coy.

Instead, she formed a close and lasting bond with a gay student named Larnelle Quentin Foster, a flamboyant, warm-hearted African-American who also aspired to a thespian career. He has told me how they would cook elaborate meals together (Indian food was then her preference) and attend avant-garde performances.

As Mr Foster's parents were church pastors in Evanston, the town where the university campus was situated, Meghan spent a good deal of time at their house and attended their services. Laughing, Mr Foster told me that his parents were then unaware of his sexual orientation, and his mother was so fond of Meghan that she hoped their friendship would blossom into a romance.

'If my mother had had her way, of course I'd be with Meghan,' said Mr Foster, now a drama professor. 'She would say, 'Oh, I love Meghan so much!' I was like, 'Yeah, Mum, I do too,' but it was never going to happen.'

He feels 'pretty sure' Meghan knew he was gay, he said, but it was never openly discussed. As for her prospective suitors, they were green with envy. 'They'd say, 'How do you go out with her?' And I would say, 'Because I'm not trying anything!'

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Samantha is also alleged to have harboured bitter resentment over her father's marriage to an African-American, according to her mother Roslyn, and would tell friends her stepmother 'was the maid because she's black'.

But Samantha strongly denies this allegation and presents a very different story. Though some older members of her father's family did, indeed, object to his inter-racial marriage, and made distasteful remarks when Meghan was born, she claims she defended her baby half-sister from these slurs.

'You are talking about people who were raised in the environment where this kind of bigotry was the norm,' says Samantha. 'But the rest of the household was colour-blind.'

She also dismisses claims that she and Meghan weren't close, saying she taught her to walk and talk, and would carry her around on her hip, making quacking sounds to make her laugh, so that Meghan called her 'Daffy Duck'. She has produced photographs of the infant Meghan bouncing on her lap to show how she adored her.

Whatever the truth, Meghan has not spoken to Samantha for about ten years, and can hardly be delighted that her half-sister plans to publish a book called The Diary Of Princess Pushy's Sister; a title she now claims to be 'ironic'.

There is no dispute about the deep-seated enmity between Tom Jnr and Samantha, and they remain at daggers drawn. Among the many criticisms he makes of his 53-year-old sister – a writer and mental health counsellor living in Florida, who now suffers from multiple sclerosis and uses a wheelchair – is the claim that she is an embittered person who 'sponged' money from him and their father.

Samantha has not publicly responded to these accusations, but has – in turn – accused Meghan of being less than charitable towards Thomas Senior, and doubtless has her own grievances against her brother Tom. Yet sibling rivalry was not the only problem that faced the young Meghan. 

For reasons that have never been explained, relations between her parents became increasingly strained, and in 1987, when she was six years old, they were divorced.

They did all they could to protect her from the fall-out, agreeing to shared custody so that she would live with both of them. They would take turns at taking her on outings and collecting her from school, and always behaved civilly towards one another when they were together with Meghan. 

However, though she says her childhood was generally very happy, friends recall awkward moments when she was required to play peacemaker, and act as the 'go-between', passing frosty messages between them that began, 'Tell your mother …' or 'Tell your father ...'

The divorce also meant that life was not quite as comfortable for Meghan. In her mid-teens, when her mother's job as an air hostess frequently took her away, she stayed mainly with her father, for the most part in a tenement block, in a seedy area of Hollywood. Generally, though, for the first few years after the divorce she stayed mainly with her mother.

Meghan and her friend Ninaki Priddy perch on the railings at Buckingham Palace in 1996

From lover to fighter... just two of the unhappy roles she took during her decade 'on the hustle' in Hollywood - Then a $45 dress helped win her big break 

 On graduating, Meghan headed back to Los Angeles (via a few months in Buenos Aires, where she was an intern at the US embassy and learned Spanish) in pursuit of her Hollywood dream. There were to be many false dawns.

At some long-forgotten party, soon after her return, she met an actors' agent who asked to see a video she had made to showcase her talent. Having watched it, this fast-talking Mr Ten Per Cent delivered the age-old cliché: 'Stick with me, kid. You're going to make lots of money.'

It was an empty promise. Instead, it marked the start of her life 'on the hustle', as she puts it – a 'brutal' decade during which she fought tenaciously and, she admits, quite ruthlessly for her big break.

Look away, Harry! A decade ago Meghan (pictured left) accepted some less-than ladylike acting parts, as a temptress in 90210

There would be many dashed hopes before it came; some of which she might wish to forget. In 2008 Meghan won a two-minute part in the teen soap 90210, playing a foxy temptress caught performing a sexual favour for a high-school hunk in the front seat of his parked car, in broad daylight.

In this unedifying scene, the young man (who is cheating on his girlfriend) at first appears to be sitting alone at the wheel. Then, spotting a friend approaching, he guiltily glances down and adjusts his clothing. Moments later, a flustered-looking young woman – Meghan – rises into view from the passenger seat.

The following year, Meghan the minx became Meghan the cage fighter. Guest-starring as a tough army sergeant in Fight Knight (a spin-off of the Eighties TV series Knight Rider) she joined an underground fight club to investigate the truth behind the death of a military colleague.

Though she played the role admirably, it was another part that drew heavily on her physical attributes, requiring her to wear a sporty crop top that showed off her toned stomach as she fought viciously with a male opponent before a baying crowd.

Meghan (pictured as a cage fighter) revealed she failed many auditions before her role in the 2009 remake of Knight Rider as an army sergeant

Such roles may not have fulfilled her ambitions to become a serious actress, but at least she was beginning to make her way. Before this, as she has said, she suffered the indignity of failing many auditions.

Reclining in the bath with a bottle of wine and a packet of cookies, as she sometimes would, to help her blot out the sense of failure and rejection, Meghan decided there was a straightforward reason why directors chose not to cast her. She was neither 'black enough' for black roles, nor 'white enough' for white ones.

This blinkered attitude from the industry continued to frustrate her ambitions for a decade. Then, in 2010, as she approached her 30th birthday – a watershed age for actresses of her ilk – she was invited to read for a starring part in a new drama series, provisionally titled A Legal Mind. Having repeatedly forgotten her lines, she told her agent she had 'blown it'. 

But she was wrong. Her performance had struck a chord, and at last the shade of her complexion was of no consequence. Invited to a second audition, and advised to dress more conservatively, as the part demanded, she scraped back her hair and bought a plain black dress for $45 on the way to the studio.

Today, that cheap dress might well be hanging in her wardrobe at the palace. For as she celebrated landing her first starring role, Meghan vowed to keep it as a memento of the day, she declared, 'that changed my life'. 

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Meghan has described the unbreakable bond that developed between her and 'the woman who made me sip Carnation instant breakfast drink in the car on the way to Little Red Schoolhouse because, despite my not wanting to start my day with a meal, she said I had to have something in my system'.

Meghan preferred her second name to her first, Rachel, and adopted it from her late teens. But friends addressed her by various nicknames, such as MM and M&M, and her mother Doria (who proudly drove a car sporting the number plate MEGNME) simply called her, as she still does, 'Flower'. Now an accomplished cook, Meghan recalls how she learnt the kitchen arts from her mother, as they made dishes such as shrimp gumbo and tacos together.

Doria was also keen for Meghan to understand how privileged she was to live in a wealthy country, with good homes and schools, and plenty to eat. So, while others headed for the beach in the holidays, she took her daughter on educational trips to poor areas of Jamaica and Mexico, imbuing Meghan with the deep-seated social conscience that informs her humanitarian work today.

Doting as she was, Doria was an unashamedly old-fashioned disciplinarian. 'I want you home by that time, Flower, not because I'm worried about what you'll do, but because I'm worried about what everyone else out there is up to,' Meghan recalls her mother telling her, as she enforced an after-school curfew.

When Meghan reached the age where she wanted to wear outfits that displayed her figure, and began to attract the attention of boys, her mother also had firm words of warning. 'Honey, never give the milk away for free,' was her homespun adage.

Though America had supposedly moved on from the days when Meghan's maternal forebears couldn't sit together on buses with white people, or dine in the same restaurants, ugly undercurrents of racial prejudice still swirled beneath the surface of society, periodically causing her distress. 

As genetics would have it, she was born with a light complexion (which turned freckly during the summer) and, in a magazine article, she echoed the accusation levelled against her half-sister, Samantha, by recalling how people in the predominantly white community of Woodland Hills would mistake her 'caramel-skinned' mother for her nursemaid when she pushed her in her pram.

As Meghan was then very young, she was probably unaware of the slurs. As she grew older, however, her father realised she might feel confused by her biracial identity and thought of an ingenious way to help her to come to terms with it.

As Barbie and Ken dolls were then sold only in separate black and white sets, he bought one of each and merged them to present her with a box containing a white Ken and a black Barbie with two children, one black, the other white, thus replicating their own family.

Thomas Markle came up with a similar suggestion when Meghan faced a perplexing question at high school, aged 12 or 13.

Before she took an English exam, she was for some reason required to declare her ethnicity on a mandatory census form, but felt unsure which box she should tick because only four categories were listed: black, Caucasian, Hispanic or Asian. Meghan has described the angst this caused her. 

'There I was (my curly hair, my freckled face, my pale skin, my mixed race) looking down at these boxes, not wanting to mess up, not knowing what to do,' she wrote years later on her online blog. '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. I put down my pen, not as an act of defiance, but rather as a symptom of confusion.

'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. I left my identity blank – a question mark, an absolute incomplete – much like how I felt.'

Meghan wore a huge smile for her high school graduation day. She spent the early Nineties mainly living with her father in West Los Angeles, conveniently near to her school

When she got home that evening, she told Thomas about the episode. 'I never saw my father angry, but in that moment I could see the blotchiness of his skin crawling from pink to red … his brow was weighted at the thought of his daughter being prey to ignorance [on the part of other people],' she says. As his anger subsided he spoke the words she has always carried with her: 'If that happens again, draw your own box.'

By then, in the early Nineties, Meghan was living mainly with her father (who gave her more leeway than her mother) in West Los Angeles, a rather down-at-heel, but usually safe and peaceful area, conveniently near to the studios her father was working in, and also her school.

But the shockingly brutal, video-taped police beating of black taxi driver Rodney King in 1991, aligned with the subsequent acquittal of the four officers involved, had stoked racial tension across the entire city and sparked a wave of riots.

For a teenager whose parents were outwardly on either side of the divide (though surely united in their outrage towards the police) this made life still more problematic.

Sonia Ardakani, whose daughter Suzy was one of Meghan's best friends at high school, gave me an insight into the difficulties she faced. 'She lived in a very white neighbourhood [and] could have hidden the fact that she was biracial – it would have been easier for her,' she said.

'But she was very proud of being half-black and didn't hide the fact. She said it was a little hard for her. There was so much discrimination in our area. When I first sent my girls [who are mixed race] to school, in the 1980s, there were no black or Hispanic children, and they wouldn't even register my children. If you walked into a restaurant, they looked at you as if you were on another planet.

'My husband is Persian and I'm Mexican – so I think Meghan felt more settled with us. She would stay over, and spent a lot of time with our girls.'

Asked to describe Meghan's character, Mrs Ardakani extols her many virtues, but particularly remembers the kindliness Meghan showed when her husband, Matt, was shot and paralysed by a crazed gunman, who burst into his Los Angeles garage and began firing at random.

When a schoolteacher broke the news to her daughter Suzy, Meghan volunteered to go with her to hospital and prayed with her for hours at Mr Ardakani's bedside.

Revealingly, another trait Mrs Ardakani singled out was Meghan's single-minded determination to achieve something, once she had set her heart on it. 'She was always so determined and ambitious, and if she wanted something she got it,' her friend's mother says, stressing that this was an attitude she greatly admired.

Showing me an old photo of teenage Meghan running exuberantly down the street, Mrs Ardakani also remembers her inexhaustible zest. She wasn't one to chase boys, or hang out on the streets; she preferred skating, bowling, roller-blading, and horse-riding in nearby Griffith Park.

Meghan had a soft spot for animals, something she was able to fully indulge as a grown woman with her two rescue dogs Guy and Bogart, who lived with her when she was in Toronto filming her hit series Suits. When she was a teenager, however, her father lived in an apartment where he couldn't keep pets, so she would fuss over the Ardakani's family cat – aptly named Princess.

STILETTOS, A SKIMPY DRESS... AND £600 A SHIFT! 

For a young woman with serious acting aspirations and staunch feminist beliefs, it was the ultimate indignity. Yet at 25, Meghan was so hard up and desperate for TV work that she became a 'briefcase babe' on America's version of the cheesy gameshow Deal Or No Deal.

Though she earned £600 a day for the role, it meant parading alluringly on stage in a skimpy red dress and 5in heels, brandishing a silver case which – depending on the contestants' luck – might contain anything from a penny to a million dollars.

Behind the scenes there were worse indignities. According to Tameka Jacobs, one of the 25 briefcase girls who appeared with Meghan in the show in 2006, those with smaller measurements were made to stuff their bras with foam, while curvier ones had their bosoms held in shape with sticky tape.

Meghan (pictured aged 25) giving her all as a briefcase girl on Deal Or No Deal

Then there was the ordeal of the morning 'inspection', where a producer would line them up and walk along their ranks, like some leering sergeant major, to ensure they hadn't gained weight.

'Meghan's aspirations were to win an Oscar or to be on Broadway, so if you're in a minidress and high heels with your boobs taped together, when what you want to do is serious acting, then it's tough,' says Tameka, 38, now a photographer.

While Meghan made no secret of her lofty ambitions and would often slip away from the studio to audition for serious parts, she endured this humiliating rite-of-acting passage with good spirits. When costume-makers raised the hems of their frocks to reveal even more thigh, Tameka says, Meghan – who always carried briefcase number 24 – would amuse the other girls by grimacing, as if to say, 'Is this for real?'

Meghan revealed she would rather 'gloss over' the period of her career as a briefcase girl after finding fame on Suits

'Sometimes we'd mess around and squeeze our breasts together, and bend over, so you could see the layers of foam,' says Tameka.

Meghan, she adds, 'had a great figure and filled out her dress nicely' (despite having a secret weakness for pizza and crisps) and never seemed shy or insecure about flaunting herself on stage.

Nonetheless, after finding fame in the legal drama Suits, Meghan declared that she would rather 'gloss over' this period of her career.

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