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Europe|Duchess of Kent, Royal Who Comforted a Wimbledon Loser, Dies at 92
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/world/europe/duchess-of-kent-dead.html
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A member of an aristocratic family, she married the Duke of Kent, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II.
Sept. 5, 2025, 12:34 p.m. ET
Katharine, the Duchess of Kent, a member of the British royal family who was a longtime patron of the Wimbledon tennis tournament, died in London on Thursday. She was 92.
Buckingham Palace, which announced her death, did not provide additional details.
The duchess kept a low profile for a member of the royal family, fulfilling less visible duties and steering clear of scandal at a time when more prominent royals were sometimes embroiled in it.
To those who were not regular royal watchers, she was best known for comforting the losing finalist Jana Novotna in 1993 at Wimbledon, where the duchess was a regular. As The New York Times wrote at the time, Novotna “cried on the well-tailored shoulder of the Duchess of Kent.”
Katharine Lucy Mary Worsley was born on Feb. 22, 1933, in Hovingham in Yorkshire, England, the daughter of Sir William Worsley, a wealthy landowner, and Joyce Morgan Brunner.
Though not royal, her family was aristocratic — she was born in the estate Hovingham Hall, on land the family had owned for 400 years — and she mixed with the smart set.
That led her to meeting Prince Edward, the Duke of Kent, a grandson of King George V and Queen Elizabeth II’s first cousin. She married him in York Minster, the Gothic cathedral in York, in 1961 and became the duchess.
