Queen Sirikit met her future husband, King Bhumibol, while studying music in Paris, where her father was at the time stationed as Thai ambassador to France.
“It was hate at first sight,” she said in a 1980 BBC documentary about the Thai monarchy, Soul of a Nation, adding that he had arrived late to their first meeting.
“He said he would arrive at four o’clock in the afternoon. He arrived at seven o’clock, kept me standing there, practising curtsy and curtsy,” she said.
The couple married on 28 April 1950, just a week before King Bhumibol was crowned in Bangkok.
As a young couple in the 1960s, Queen Sirikit and King Bhumibol travelled around the world, meeting famous faces including US President Dwight Eisenhower, the late Queen Elizabeth II and Elvis Presley.
During that decade, she frequently made international best-dressed lists.