Frida is making her way back to the mainstream now that ABBA are about to embark on their ABBA Voyage tour around the world. But the happiness and joy the band bring to millions are a stark contrast to the heartwrenching grief Frida has endured throughout her life.
She first got married in 1964 to salesman and fellow musician Ragnar Fredriksson. The couple had two children – Hans Ragnar and Ann Lise-Lotte – before they got divorced in 1970.
Frida enjoyed a brief marriage with a fellow member of ABBA, Benny Andersson, in 1978. But things were too complicated between them. They split up in 1981 – just three years later – however they remain in the band together to this day.
It wasn’t until 1992 that Frida seemed to finally meet her perfect match when she married Prince Heinrich Ruzzo Reuss of Plauen.
Prince Ruzzo (as he was known) was a Swiss-born Swedish landscape architect and a prince of the formerly sovereign House of Reuss. And this marriage granted Frida some incredible perks, including the title of Princess Reuss and Countess of Plauen.
However, in 1999, tragedy struck.
After months of battling cancer, Prince Ruzzo died of lymphoma on October 29, 1999, in Stockholm, Sweden.
Frida said in a new ABBA documentary, ABBA: The Missing 40 Years: “He was an absolutely amazing, wonderful, spiritual, funny human being and I loved him more than anything. So it was obviously a huge sorrow that this happened to us, that he got cancer at 49 years old.”
She also praised him for bringing his daughters into her life, her two stepdaughters. “Ruzzo changed my life enormously,” Frida added. “And he brought joy and love and two new children, my stepdaughters.”
It was a particularly difficult period for the ABBA singer considering her daughter had died a year earlier in unexpected and terrible circumstances.
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The year before, on January 13, 1998, Frida’s daughter Ann Lise-Lotte Fredriksson Casper died. The young woman, who was just 30-years-old at the time, lost her life after sustaining injuries in a catastrophic car accident in Livonia, New York – a town just 20 miles south of Rochester.
In 2014 the ABBA star opened up about this horrific period of her life. She told Norwegian journalist Fredrik Skavlan: “What I experienced might make that experience a great loneliness which gradually become natural to me.” (sic)
She also recently spoke candidly about dealing with the grief of losing her child in The Missing 40 Years.
Frida confessed: “It took a very long time. It took very many years and incomprehensible grief.”
After the death of her husband, Prince Ruzzo, she was left the title Dowager Princess and Countess.
At the moment, she currently resides in Genolier VD, Switzerland. She shares a home with her British partner Henry Smith who is the fifth Viscount Hambleden. Frida has been with the Viscount since 2007.
