Prince Charming is a stock character who appears in a number of fairy tales. He is the prince who comes to the rescue of the damsel in distress, and stereotypically, must engage in a quest to liberate her from an evil spell. This classification suits most heroes of a number of traditional folk tales, including Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, even if in the original story they were given another name, or no name at all.
These characters are often handsome and romantic, a foil to the heroine, and are seldom deeply characterized, or even distinguishable from other such men who marry the heroine.
In many variants, they can be viewed more as rewards for the heroine rather than characters.
"Prince Charming" is also used as a term to refer to the idealized man some people dream of as a future spouse.
Mail Online referred to Chris O'Neill, a New York financier whom Princess Madeleine of Sweden fell in love with, as "Millionaire Prince Charming".
Read more about Prince Charming: History of Term, Adaptations
Famous quotes containing the words prince and/or charming:
“On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose,
Tired of his dark dominion, swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,”
—George Meredith (1828–1909)
“A tattered copy of Johnson’s large Dictionary was a great delight to me, on account of the specimens of English versifications which I found in the Introduction. I learned them as if they were so many poems. I used to keep this old volume close to my pillow; and I amused myself when I awoke in the morning by reciting its jingling contrasts of iambic and trochaic and dactylic metre, and thinking what a charming occupation it must be to “make up” verses.”
—Lucy Larcom (1824–1893)