Born Stéphanie Marie Claudine Christine de Lannoy on 18 February 1984 in East Flanders, Belgium, the newly crowned Grand Duchess of Luxembourg is the youngest of eight children. Her father, the late Count Philippe de Lannoy, is descended from the 13th-century noble family of Hainaut. Stéphanie’s ancestor, Charles de Lannoy, 1st Prince of Sulmona, served the Habsburg Emperors Maximilian I and Charles V, winning great renown as the victor of the battle of Prava in 1525 and winning him the title of Imperial Count.
Stéphanie’s mother, the late Alix della Faille de Leverghem, was also of noble blood. A daughter of Baron Harold della Faille de Leverghem, she was a descendant of one of Antwerp’s noble houses and could trace her lineage back to Hélène Fourment, Countess de Bergeyck. At the time of her death, Alix was living in the Lannoys’ ancestral seat, Château de Hun, where she served as the honorary librarian of the municipal library.
The official presentation of Countess Stéphanie de Lannoy as the fiancée of then Hereditary Grand Duke Guillaume in 2012 at the Grand Ducal Palace in Luxembourg
Photonews/Getty Images
Grand Duchess Stéphanie studied at Sancta Maria de Ronse school before continuing on to Collège Saint-Odile in France. After a return to Brussels, she studied Russian language and literature in Moscow, then read for a degree in German philology at the University of Louvain. A fierce academic, Stéphanie completed her master’s degree in Berlin at Humboldt University. Given this passion for linguistics, it is perhaps no wonder that the new Grand Duchess of Luxembourg is fluent in four languages, French, English, German, and Luxembourgish, and speaks two others: Dutch and Russian.