Michael was born in Rome to
Prince Christopher of Greece and Denmark (youngest son of King
George I of Greece) and his second wife,
Princess Françoise d'Orléans (daughter of the
Orleanist claimant to the defunct French throne,
Jean d'Orléans, Duke of Guise). His godparents were his two first cousins
Queen Helen, Queen Mother of Romania and
King George II of Greece (eldest children of his paternal uncle
King Constantine I). His father died in 1940, when Michael was a year old. His mother died in 1953, when Michael was 14, leaving him an orphan. About eight months before her father's death, Françoise was widowed by the death of Prince Christopher, following an abscess of the lung, in Athens in January. She took Michael to join her mother's household in Larache where her elder sister,
Princess Isabelle Murat and her family, had also taken refuge from Europe. Their brother,
Henri, Count of Paris, who succeeded his own father as head of the Orleanist monarchist movement, sent for his wife and children to come from their relatives in Brazil, and by the spring of 1941 they too were settled in Spanish Morocco (still being banned from the French sector), near
Casablanca, in a small house without electricity that was named
Oued Akreech in the town of
Rabat. By the time Michael's mother died in Paris in early 1953, France had repealed the law of banishment against its former ruling families (24 June 1950) and the Comte de Paris had taken up residence in the capital. When, in August 1953,
Monseigneur moved the Comtesse and their children to a new estate, the
Manoir du Cœur Volant in
Louveciennes, Michael joined the couple and their four eldest children in the main building, while the seven younger children and their governesses occupied an annex given the name
la maison de Blanche Neige ("Snow White's cottage"). Henceforth, Michael was given into the care of his uncle and raised with his Orléans cousins. == Activities ==