Queen Mother Ingrid, Widow of Denmark’s King

Queen Mother Ingrid, the widow of King Frederik IX and mother of Denmark’s first female monarch in five centuries, died Tuesday, the royal palace said. She was 90.

The Swedish-born Ingrid, beloved in Denmark for her casual, forthright style, died at Fredensborg Castle north of the capital, Copenhagen, the palace said. Her three daughters--Queen Margrethe, Princess Benedikte and ex-Queen Anne-Marie of Greece--and 10 grandchildren were by her bedside.

“Denmark today has lost a wise queen and a great human being with a deep solicitude for our whole country,” Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen said.

Ingrid Victoria Sofia Louise Margaretha was born March 28, 1910, at the royal castle in Stockholm. She was the only daughter of Sweden’s King Gustaf VI Adolf, a great-granddaughter of England’s Queen Victoria and an aunt of Sweden’s current King Carl XVI Gustaf.

She married then-Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark at the age of 25 and entered Europe’s oldest royal house, putting her mark on the monarchy from her earliest years as crown princess.

Less than a year after their marriage, Ingrid won over the people of Denmark by delivering her first public speech in fluent Danish, a language grammatically close to her native Swedish but pronounced quite differently.

“From my very first day in Denmark I learned to understand the Danish mentality and love the country,” the Queen Mother once said. “It is hard to believe today that I once came to Denmark as a foreigner.”

Her husband became king in 1947. A referendum in 1953 established the possibility of female succession, partly prompted by the fact that all the royal couple’s children were girls.

Queen Margrethe II, the first woman to take over the monarchy since her namesake Queen Margrete I ruled from 1387 to 1412, became queen after her father’s death in 1972.

During the difficult period of Margrethe’s accession to the throne, Ingrid showed a quiet, unassuming directness.

“Mother was incredible. She put her own personal grief aside to help me with advice in my new role,” Queen Margrethe wrote in a book on her role as queen.

“But she always stressed that the final decision was mine: It is you who must decide on your own now,” she would say.

Elegant and graceful, Ingrid was sometimes referred to as the first Danish queen to take a professional approach to the job, insisting on system, order and accuracy in her undertakings.

Ingrid remained active into old age, though osteoporosis often forced her to use a wheelchair in recent years and she broke her hip bone in a fall in 1997. She was patron to about 40 social welfare and aid organizations and visited virtually every Danish social welfare and cultural institution.

The palace did not announce funeral arrangements, but Ingrid probably will be interred with her husband in a crypt at the Roskilde Cathedral--the resting place of 38 Danish kings and queens.