Meghan Markle turned 45 on Tuesday with a burst of black-and-white birthday photos that showed her in a black one-piece swimsuit, holding a bushel of balloons and jumping in a pool. She wrote, “Thank you for the birthday love!”
The images gave her followers a polished, upbeat update at a moment when her public profile is still being measured as much by business as by celebrity. Meghan's As Ever lifestyle venture was eyeing international expansion, but Similarweb data suggested traffic to the brand's website had been declining steadily throughout 2026, even after her first product drops sold out in minutes.
The birthday post also arrives with her screen work under review. Meghan was days away from the movie-theater release of Cookie Queens, a documentary she executive-produced, while the second season of With Love, Meghan had already landed on Netflix in August and did not make the service's top 1,000 in its first six months. That is a harsher read than the one attached to her earlier rise, when she was among the most talked-about public figures in the world at 40, five months after the Oprah Winfrey interview.
Her current run has been more uneven. The Spotify partnership ended. Netflix renewed its agreement with Meghan Markle and Harry on less favorable terms than their original deal. In March, Netflix ended its investment partnership with As Ever, a step that left the brand with more attention than certainty even as Meghan kept pushing it in public.
She has kept showing up anyway. In October, she flew to France for Paris Fashion Week and attended the Balenciaga show. On October 14, she appeared at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit 2025 at Salamander Hotel in Washington, D.C., where she used the stage to promote As Ever. Earlier, in January 2026, she took Cookie Queens to the Sundance Film Festival, underscoring how closely her media work and business ambitions now travel together.
For now, the birthday photos are the cleanest headline. They show Meghan in control of the image, even as the numbers around As Ever, Netflix and her other projects have not always moved the same way. Cookie Queens is due to reach theaters in the coming days, and that release will offer the next real test of whether the attention around her still converts into momentum.
