Sirikit, the former queen of Thailand and the widow of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, whose portraits appeared together for decades in houses and shops around the country, died on Friday night in a hospital in Bangkok, according to a statement from the royal palace. She was 93.
The palace statement gave the cause of death as complications from blood sepsis. The former queen had rarely appeared in public since she had a debilitating stroke in 2012.
King Bhumibol, the world’s longest-serving head of state, died in 2016, and was succeeded by the couple’s son, King Maha Vajiralongkorn.
In Thailand, Sirikit was known as Queen Mother. Born into royalty as the daughter of a prince, she met the young King Bhumibol as a teenager when she was living in France, where her father was the Thai ambassador. They married on April 28, 1950, when she was 18, a week before his coronation on May 5.
He was crowned as Rama IX of the Chakri Dynasty, and she received the royal title Somdet Phra Nang Chao Sirikit Phra Borommarachininat; she was widely believed to be the world’s longest-serving queen consort. Queen Sirikit had three daughters in addition to their son.
A glamorous young couple, the king and queen traveled often in the 1960s to the United States and dozens of countries in Europe and Asia, where she charmed both government leaders and the public with her elegance, vivaciousness and winning smile. In both Western dress and Thai silks, she topped the International Best-Dressed List — a prestigious annual ranking of the world’s most stylish figures — four times in the 1960s.
Queen Sirikit often accompanied her husband as he traveled around Thailand, too, visiting hundreds of development projects that he fostered. She made other trips on her own, promoting Thai handicrafts and establishing the Support Foundation to help rural women produce and market products like woven goods.
She also worked to support Buddhist groups and organizations in southern Thailand during a long-running Muslim separatist insurgency.
In the 1980s, Queen Sirikit was often ill, apparently from depression or a nervous disorder, and at one point she disappeared from public view for several months. Her daughter Princess Chulabhorn said in 1986 that her mother was an insomniac and suffered from exhaustion.
The queen offered her view of the role of Thai monarchy in a rare interview with the BBC in 1980.
“Kings and queens of Thailand have always been in close contact with the people,” she said, “and they usually regard the king as the father of the nation. That is why we do not have much private life, because we are considered father and mother of the nation.”
She said that she and the king reciprocated this adoration with their own devotion to duty.
“To give, not to take, only to give; to love, so that is the reason my husband and I can work, year after year, day after day,” she said in the BBC interview. “We have been ill. But we know that when it is time to die nobody can escape.”
Although Thailand’s constitutional monarchy has no direct political power, it wields enormous influence. As the years passed, Queen Sirikit became more politically active and acquired her own power base. Members of the queen’s guard hold powerful positions in the armed forces.
As the nation entered a period of violent divisions between the elite establishment and a largely rural underclass in the early 2000s, she expressed sympathy for royalist demonstrators by offering financial assistance to those injured in clashes with the police. In a highly symbolic gesture in 2008, she attended the funeral of someone killed in the protests.
Sirikit Kitiyakara was born on Aug. 12, 1932, the second child of Prince Nakkhatra Mangkala Kitiyakara and Mom Luang Bua Snidvongs, an actress and royal courtier.
She spent her teenage years in Britain and France, and met the young King Bhumibol while he was studying in Switzerland, just before he was returning to Thailand for his formal coronation.
He had become king in 1946 after the death of his older brother, Ananda Mahidol, but coronation ceremonies were postponed until 1950 so that he could complete his education.
In her interview with the BBC, Queen Sirikit seemed ebullient in describing their meeting.
“It was hate at first sight,” she said, “because he said he would arrive at four o’clock in the afternoon. He arrived at seven o’clock, kept me standing there, practicing curtsy and curtsy.”
The next time they met it was love. “I didn’t know that he loved me,” she said, “because at the time I was only 15 years old, and planned to be a concert pianist.”
She added: “I thought of being with the man I love only. Not of the duty, and the burden of queen.”
The catalyst for their romance was an auto accident in October 1948, when the king crashed his sports car into the back of a truck on a road outside Lausanne, Switzerland, leaving him with cuts on his face and losing most of his sight in one eye.
Sirikit visited him frequently at the hospital, then enrolled in a local academy to be near him.
They were secretly engaged in July 1949, followed by a formal announcement at her 17th birthday party the next month in London. After the wedding and coronation in Bangkok the next year, the couple traveled back to Switzerland to continue their studies, then returned to Bangkok in 1951 to take up their royal duties.
In addition to her son, Sirikit is survived by her three daughters and a sister, Busba Kitiyakara Sathanapong.
The eldest of her children is Princess Ubol Ratana, who graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, married an American, Peter Ladd Jensen, and spent many years with him, mostly in California. The couple separated and she resumed her royal duties in 2006.
The second daughter is Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, who never married and devoted herself to studying the arts and helping her father with his many projects.
The youngest, Princess Chulabhorn, has a degree in organic chemistry and is married to a Thai commoner.
Sirikit’s birthday is celebrated as Mother’s Day in Thailand, a national holiday.
Muktita Suhartono and Sui-Lee Wee contributed reporting.
Seth Mydans reported as a foreign and national correspondent for The New York Times and its sister publication, The International Herald Tribune, from 1983 to 2012. He continues to contribute to The Times.
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