Princess Astrid, Mrs. Ferner, the sister of Norway’s late King Harald V, has died at 94 — two days after she was wheeled into Oslo Cathedral for his state funeral. In its announcement on Friday, September 11, 2026, the royal palace said she had died peacefully.
“The Princess fell asleep today, Friday 11 September, at the age of 94,” the palace said in a statement. She had lived through wartime exile in the United States, gave up the style of Royal Highness in order to marry, and served the Norwegian crown for decades.
Her nephew King Haakon VIII, 53, succeeded Harald as monarch on Friday, August 28. He ordered the flag above the Royal Palace balcony flown at half-mast on September 11, and again for the day of her funeral. The Royal Palace has confirmed that the service will be held on Wednesday, September 23, at 1 p.m. at Ris Church in Oslo, and that it will be broadcast live on Norwegian television. The church stands near Vinderen, the neighborhood where the princess lived with her husband, Johan Martin Ferner, and raised their five children. Norway will bury her at state expense and fly flags at half-mast across the country, Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said.
That 1 p.m. start is the same hour at which King Harald’s funeral service began on September 9. King Haakon VIII is expected to lead mourners at Ris Church, which was consecrated and opened for worship in 1932 — the year Astrid was born.
King Haakon, Queen Mette-Marit, Crown Princess Ingrid and Queen Sonja will all attend, the Royal Palace has confirmed, along with Astrid’s children and other relatives. That group could include Prince Sverre Magnus, the king’s son, who does not hold formal membership in the Royal House.
King Haakon Remembers His Aunt
“Throughout her long life, Princess Astrid represented the Royal House in a warm and dutiful manner,” King Haakon said in his tribute. She had been only 22, he said, when the death of his grandmother, Crown Princess Märtha, left her filling the role of first lady.
Astrid was “particularly committed to caring for and including the most vulnerable members of society,” the king said, and she carried out her duties with “loyalty, dedication and an infectious sense of humor.” His aunt, he added, was “never afraid to speak her mind,” had been a key support to Harald and to the wider family, and had taught her relatives a great deal.
Her five children — Cathrine, Benedikte, Alexander, Elisabeth and Carl-Christian Ferner — said in a joint statement: “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.”
At Her Brother’s Side
The princess had been in declining health for months, and pneumonia put her in hospital for treatment in March. None of that kept her from her brother. Doctors admitted Harald, Europe’s oldest living monarch, on August 17 and treated a bacterial infection in his blood; on August 27, photographers caught her leaving the National Hospital in Oslo after several hours at his bedside, and the following day he died at 89, having spent more than 35 years on the throne.
Photographs the palace released in the days before her own death showed her seated alone beside her brother’s coffin in the Palace Chapel, and gazing from a palace window at the flowers mourners had laid in Palace Square. The funeral itself drew her last public appearance. Thousands lined the procession route from the Royal Palace to Oslo Cathedral that day — Wednesday, September 9 — closing 13 days of national mourning. Britain’s Prince William joined the mourners, as did Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and the kings of Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and Spain. The United States sent Allison Hooker, the under secretary of state for political affairs, as its representative.
Exile in Wartime, Then a Life of Duty
Astrid Maud Ingeborg arrived on February 12, 1932, at Villa Solbakken, one of the royal residences in Oslo. The future King Olav V and Crown Princess Märtha of Sweden had a second daughter in her, and one of her godparents — her aunt Queen Astrid of Belgium — supplied her name. King Edward VII was her great-grandfather and Queen Elizabeth II her second cousin, and at birth she stood 18th in line to the British throne.
Germany invaded Norway in April 1940, when Astrid was eight. She fled with her mother, her sister Ragnhild and her brother Harald, first to neutral Sweden and then on to the United States, reaching New York that August and attending school in Washington, D.C. Her father spent the war years in England alongside King Haakon VII, acting as a military commander and a counselor to Norway’s exiled government. The family came home in 1945, and Astrid enrolled at Nissen, a girls’ school in Oslo. The chapel of the Royal Palace hosted her confirmation on May 9, 1948, and Oxford took her as a student for two years in the early 1950s.
Cancer killed her mother in 1954, at 53. Olav was left a widower and never remarried, and Ragnhild had settled in Brazil after her 1953 marriage to her bodyguard, Erling Lorentzen, so the duties of first lady fell to Astrid, then 22. For 14 years she joined her father at receptions, official functions and state visits, an arrangement that ended when Harald married Sonja Haraldsen in 1968. The memorial fund established in her mother’s name, which supports social and humanitarian projects, had her as chair of its board. Charities working with women, and with young people who have dyslexia — a condition she shared — also counted her as a patron. In 2002, Norway’s government granted her an honorary pension in recognition of her decades of work on behalf of the crown.
She adopted Wilma, a rescue chihuahua, in 2022, after the loss of an earlier rescue dog named Tarzan. The dog features in her biography on the royal website: “Princess Astrid is rarely seen without her dog, Wilma. Dogs have been a cherished part of her life from an early age — she received her first from her parents on her second birthday.” As of September 17, the royal house had not shared any plan for Wilma’s care.
A Marriage That Cost Her a Title
Johan Martin Ferner, a businessman and Olympic sailor, had taken silver in the sport in Helsinki in 1952 before she fell in love with him in the late 1950s. The two met when she signed him on as crew for a yacht race. His father owned an Oslo department store, and a commoner drew objections from conservative figures in the Norwegian establishment; the church objected as well, because he was also a divorcé. 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 in the end, though the bishop of Oslo refused to officiate and the retired bishop of Nidaros had to be asked instead. Asker Church hosted their wedding on January 12, 1961. Astrid gave up the style of Royal Highness and her yearly allowance as the price of the match, and she was known from then on as Princess Astrid, Mrs. Ferner. Well into her nineties she was still representing the monarchy and its charities. The couple’s five children were born between 1962 and 1972, and Johan Ferner died in 2015.
Harald’s death left only one living child of King Olav V and Crown Princess Märtha, and that was Astrid; her elder sister, Princess Ragnhild, Mrs Lorentzen, had died in 2012. She is survived by her five children and seven grandchildren. Queen Victoria’s eldest surviving descendant at her death, she hands that distinction now to her third cousin, Anne Abel Smith, 94, a granddaughter of Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone.
