WASHINGTON -- Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, sits at a quiet cafe table chatting about royals and romance -- two topics with which she has become intimately acquainted.

Britons have known her as a merry bride of Windsor, then a military wife, then a career-minded divorcee. Americans know her best in this latter chapter, when she came here to find her voice, her fortune and herself -- as a children's book author, then a self-help maven. The former Weight Watchers spokeswoman is now a Hollywood producer, and her new movie is a love story set inside Buckingham Palace. "The Young Victoria" (which opens in Pittsburgh on Christmas Day) fills the big screen with the passionate 19th-century embraces of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

Ferguson brightens when asked if there has ever been another true love inside the stuffy palaces of the British royal family.

Her enthusiastic answer is her own with Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, the second son of Queen Elizabeth II, fourth in line to the British throne, the man she married in full fairy-tale style in Westminster Abbey in 1986, the father of her two daughters, and from whom she was publicly and painfully divorced in 1996. The enthusiasm is telling: Might there be something, behind the palace walls, rekindling?

As she talks about her true and deep romance with Andrew -- "all we wanted to do was be with each other" -- she leaves the clear, lingering impression that her ex-husband is not a man she thinks of in the past tense. She suggests, with her words and the sparkle in her blue eyes, that divorce was not the end of their love story.

"I have never found a better man," says Fergie. "I don't do anything without his blessing."

In fact, she says, she and Andrew live in the same royal residence in Windsor, just outside London. The two are very close to their coming-of-age daughters, Princess Beatrice, 21, and Princess Eugenie, 19.

On these shores, Ferguson is more open than she might be at home about her losses: Her mother was decapitated in a car accident in Argentina in 1998. The year before, Princess Diana, whom she describes as "my best friend," died in a Paris car accident. Ferguson's father, who suffered from melanoma, succumbed to a heart attack in 2003.

Now 50, Ferguson says life has gotten easier with age. And it always helps to get along with the mother-in-law. A sign of Andrew and Sarah's ever-closer relationship was Queen Elizabeth's invitation last year to the family gathering at Balmoral Castle, ending a perceived ban on the duchess' inclusion. Ferguson called the queen "the greatest lady I have ever met in my life."

Her prince is still a prince and, in Ferguson's telling, their life is more modern arrangement than fairy tale -- something approaching a grown-up version of love on their own terms.

"We are the happiest divorced couple in the world," she says.

"If Andrew were sitting here right now he would say, 'If only we had fought harder for our own love ...' "

Having left behind her Weight Watchers days, Ferguson is enjoying being Hollywood Sarah. She pitched the idea for "The Young Victoria" to British producer Graham King when he was working on "The Departed." She hoped he would enjoy a departure from the Boston mob saga and instead would want to focus on the young, fun and romantic side of Britain's longest-ruling monarch, who is often pictured as the mourning widow with a black veil over her head. Victoria was less dour than her portraiture, and, should you require evidence of passion: She had nine children with Albert before outliving him by 40 years.

The movie focuses on their love and how the young couple navigated the palace handlers. It was filmed inside actual British palaces and landmarks, with Ferguson turning the proverbial keys: She helped arrange access and used her unique status as a former member of the royal family to help as needed. Her eldest daughter, Beatrice, has a cameo in the movie, which stars Emily Blunt ("The Devil Wears Prada").

As a young bride in Buckingham Palace, Ferguson's fashion sense and shape were criticized by the tabloids, which called her crass and compared her unflatteringly with her friend, Princess Diana. One, she recalls, even proclaimed that "82 percent of men would rather sleep with a goat than with me."

In England, it has remained harder for her to reinvent herself. Shortly after separating from Andrew in 1992 and days after being with the royal family, she was photographed topless on the French Riviera with an American financier named John Bryan, who appeared to be paying some homage to her toes.

The monarchy, already in crisis because of the strained marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, was brought a notch lower in public esteem and many blamed Fergie, who was seen as a protocol-flaunting party girl.

Reputation rehab came mainly in the United States, where people generally admired her for being willing to work and not sit on her royal duff.

She has written 32 books in all and invented Budgie the Little Helicopter. She hit nearly every American city with Weight Watchers. She hosted TV shows and appeared on everything from an episode of "Friends" to "The Tyra Banks Show" to "Larry King Live." She raised millions for charity.

She still prepares for life's financial ups and downs, she admits, and has a few projects in mind. Next, she says, she would love to have her own U.S. television show, interviewing people over a cup of tea. She would like to expand what she calls "the Sarah brand," perhaps even starting her own line of food.

"Do I get an easier time here? Yes, a much easier time in America," she says. "Because people allow me to be myself. The British press has basically torn me to pieces for 18 years."

"I am a British citizen and a closet American," she says. On this side of the Atlantic, she says: "I am allowed to be Sarah. It's good to be Sarah. ... I believe I am what I am and who I am, and why is that not good enough?"

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