Sarah Ferguson shares late Queen’s words helped get through difficult period

Sarah Ferguson recalled how her former mother-in-law Queen Elizabeth encouraged her to let her personality shine through.

The Duchess of York told Hello! Magazine that the late Queen was “one of the only people who saw me properly” and gave her a sound advice before her death in September 2022.

“She said: ‘Sarah, being yourself is enough,’” Fergie told the outlet.

The ex-wife of Prince Andrew got candid about how she felt that people would find her exuberance rather off-putting.

“I haven’t shown my huge personality properly, because I’ve tried to keep it under the cushion,” she told the outlet.

“‘It’s too much,’ or: ‘Shut up, no one wants to hear from you.’ I remember my father telling me: ‘You’re a bore.’”

However, she added that the encouragement from Queen Elizabeth and the past year’s cancer diagnosis had led her to not hold herself back anymore.

“And now I’m just not excusing myself anymore,” she enthused.

Fergie confirmed a breast cancer diagnosis last June and revealed that she’d also been diagnosed with skin cancer in January.

“I think it woke me up,” she told the magazine, “It gave me a swift kick in the butt and told me: ‘Right, are you going to start living now, at 64, or are you going to keep on not quite living?’ You don’t have to be what everyone wants you to be: just be yourself.”