Alexandra: the Princess and the Pedigree : Royalty: Southland will get a good look at the most popular and accessible member of the British royal family this week.

When she was a child, she liked to turn cartwheels and be called Sandra. Her ambition was to be a circus bareback rider.

She did become an accomplished horsewoman, but these days, don’t call her anything but “your royal highness.” Because Alexandra Helen Olga Christabel, Her Royal Highness Princess Alexandra, Hon. Lady Ogilvy, GCVO, has a richer royal pedigree than the Queen of England.

When Princess Alexandra arrives in Southern California this week to lend the British Royal Family’s presence to the Festival of Britain in Orange County, residents will get a look at not only the queen’s first--and favorite--first cousin, but a descendant of King George V, King Edward VII, Queen Victoria, King George I of Greece, King Christian IX of Denmark and the ill-fated Czar Alexander II of Russia.

Although she is unknown to most Americans, in Britain, Alexandra is the most popular and accessible of the royals.

Throughout her adult life she has taken on the role of what has come to be known as the “professional princess,” representing Britain and the Royal Family at official engagements at home and abroad.

She wears the royal mantle lightly, however.

She is “ . . . a woman of unstuffy charm and classic beauty, regal in presence but highly accessible,” author Ralph G. Martin wrote in his book, “Charles and Diana.” “When she was Diana’s age, she was also known as a marvelous dancer, a gay conversationalist who loved to laugh, adored children, had a craving for sweets and was a ballet addict. Her favorite jazz piece was ‘Ain’t Misbehavin.’ ”

But in her professional role, “she’s got an enormous interest in whatever she’s doing. That’s the main thing that comes across,” said Sir Eldon Griffiths, a member of Parliament who lives part time in Orange County, lectures at UCI and is the president of the county office of the World Affairs Council. “She does her homework and she’s very well briefed. She, in fact, goes at it very hard.”

The princess visited Los Angeles in 1971, in connection with a promotion of British menswear. She will return briefly after her Orange County visit--next Monday and Tuesday--to, among other things, meet with Mayor Tom Bradley, visit Union Avenue Elementary School and observe a program for mothers of children born with a crack addiction at County Harbor/UCLA Hospital.

Mona Mitchell, the princess’ private secretary, said in a telephone interview from London that Alexandra was delighted by her last visit to Southern California and “thoroughly enjoys travel.”

That sort of schedule has become meat and potatoes for most members of the Royal Family, said John Houlton, a British vice consul based in Los Angeles. “They take their profession quite seriously,” he said. “We think the princess in a sense serves in an ambassadorial role. She’s a figurehead that people are interested in meeting.”

In a country of people whose ancestors absolutely hated King George III, modern British royals often are received with the sort of adulation usually reserved for rock stars.

“In California,” said Griffiths, “royalty is a rarity and its scarcity value gives it a much higher profile. There’s a curiosity that is much more acute here than in Britain.”

Mere curiosity, however, does not fully explain the fawning looks that members of the British Royal Family see turned on them when they come here.

“We find it intriguing, too. I have to say, that people in the U.S.--and in France, too, which is also a republic--are so intrigued,” said Houlton. “I think that part of it is that the Royal Family are very much a national symbol of something that has endured for centuries. It has an air of majesty and romance to it. They’re a symbol of permanence in a rather impermanent world these days.”

Princess Alexandra has felt the glare of celebrity almost all her life.

Born on Christmas Day, 1936, (her fourth name commemorates her birthday), Alexandra is one of three children, and the only daughter, of Prince George and Princess Marina, Duke and Duchess of Kent. Her birth, said her grandmother, Queen Mary, was “the only nice thing to have happened this year”--the year of the abdication of Edward VIII.

She can trace her paternal lineage to Queen Victoria and, on her mother’s side, to Czar Alexander II of Russia. (Queen Elizabeth is descended from royalty only on her father’s side.)

Alexandra’s father, the son of King George V and Queen Mary, died in 1942 in a plane crash on his way to tour RAF bases in Iceland. The princess was raised at Coppins, her family’s country home in the Buckinghamshire village of Iver, by her mother, who was a daughter of Prince Nicholas of Greece and his wife, the former Grand Duchess Helen of Russia.

Though Alexandra’s mother was known as one of the most stylish and glamorous royals of her day, she enrolled her daughter as a student at Heathfield, an exclusive English girls’ boarding school, making Alexandra the first British princess to attend a regular school.

She continued her formal education in 1953-54 at a finishing school in Paris, staying with the family of the Count of Paris and studying French and music. When she returned to England, she took a nursing course at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London, where she was known simply as Nurse Kent.

By the late 1950s, Alexandra had begun to take on more official royal duties, but she had also come to be known as the eligible young princess and began to be seen more in London social circles.

Confrey Phillips, a English-born pianist who performs regularly at the Westin South Coast Plaza Hotel in Costa Mesa and once played in London hotels and nightclubs, remembered that during that time Alexandra was “a very likable lady. At that time she was first sort of stepping out. She liked to be with friends and have a nice social evening somewhere privately. When I had my nightclub in Mayfair (The Colony on Berkeley Square) she’d come along with her friends and a couple of times with her husband-to-be, although that hadn’t been announced at the time. She liked dancing and loved music.”

She apparently loved Phillips’ music, because Phillips said he and his trio were hired to play at Buckingham Palace for the princess’ 21st birthday celebration.

“There were about 200 people there,” said Phillips, “and it was a great success, a great party. There was continuous dancing.”

The dancing kept up, said Phillips, even when his band took a break. A group of Princess Alexandra’s friends who were amateur musicians acted as a relief band.

“She’s not at all aloof,” said Phillips. “She’s very relaxed and always has a lovely smile and a wonderful soft disposition about her. She’s not wet and frumpish like some of these aristocrats can be. She’s the least forbidding person you could meet.”

During the time she knew Phillips, Alexandra also became acquainted with a young commoner named Angus Ogilvy. Born in 1928, Ogilvy was the younger son of the Earl of Airlie and grandson of Mabell, Countess of Airlie, who was a close friend and lady-in-waiting to Alexandra’s grandmother Queen Mary. After an eight-year friendship, the princess and Ogilvy were married in Westminster Abbey on April 24, 1963.

Ogilvy, by his own choice, was not catapulted into the aristocratic stratosphere by his marriage to Alexandra. When the queen offered him an earldom (a common practice when a princess marries someone of lesser rank), Ogilvy refused.

“I don’t see why I should get a peerage just because I married a princess,” he said at the time.

But the queen did confer a knighthood on Ogilvy in 1989, making him a Knight Commander in the Royal Victorian Order. A businessman who is on the boards of directors of several British companies, Ogilvy accompanies the princess on many of her trips abroad (he will come with her to Southern California) and is properly addressed as Sir Angus.

The Ogilvys have two children, James Robert Bruce, born in 1964 and now married to Julia Rawlinson, and Marina Victoria Alexandra, born in 1966 and now married to Paul Mowatt. Neither are titled and are not considered to be royal. Ogilvy once underscored the somewhat hybrid nature of his immediate family by referring to its members as “mini-royals”--on the fringe of the queen’s immediate family.

Alexandra’s many tours, duties and appearances--Houlton estimated that she has made 90 official foreign tours--entitle her to receive money from the Civil List, which is an allowance given to members of the Royal Family by Parliament to help pay for staff and expenses.

“Much of the public wrongly assumes that all royals are rich,” wrote Ralph Martin. “Princess Alexandra . . . had no money of her own. Neither did Angus Ogilvy, since his older brother inherited both the family title and the family fortune.”

Griffiths said he believes the princess was the first member of the Royal Family to routinely drive herself from place to place and ride on the London Underground, rather than be chauffeured. (In fact, in 1962, she crashed her Austin Mini into a truck on London’s Kensington High Street. She later admitted she had been driving a bit too fast.)

Alexandra does, however, have an extensive collection of jewels that have come to her through her royal relatives.

But the woman wearing the gems, so firmly rooted in royal tradition, apparently has little use for any pretense that might be attached to them. In the midst of the sometimes stifling pomp associated with royal appearances, she has shown a sense of good-humored proportion.

“Don’t forget,” she said of the Royal Family in the 1960s, “that nowadays we have to compete with Elizabeth Taylor and the Beatles.”

Times Staff Writer Patt Morrison contributed to this story.