Kate Middleton’s ‘Adorable’ Dancing Moment Resurfaces

Kate Middleton has gone viral on TikTok again after fans shared adorable footage of the Princess of Wales dancing on a train station platform with a beloved children’s character in 2017.

Uploaded to TikTok by user @windsor.house_ on June 8, the video shows Kate being invited to dance by an actor dressed as the British children’s book character Paddington Bear while her husband, Prince William, watches their adorable moment. At one point in the viral video—which has been viewed over 100,000 times in 24 hours and garnered over 8,000 likes—Paddington even gives Kate a spin.

The princess participated in the short dance break during a royal engagement with Prince William and Prince Harry to mark a charity forum event. The royals were hosted at Paddington Station in central London, the namesake of children’s author Michael Bond’s most famous creation, Paddington Bear.

A number of TikTok users were full of praise for Kate’s (and Paddington’s) dancing skills.

“So adorable lucky Paddington,” wrote one commenter on the viral post.

“Beautiful moment for them both,” said another, with a further adding of Kate: “She is amazing.”

The bear made its first literary appearance in 1958 and since then has been depicted numerous times onscreen, including in the blockbuster Paddington movies, starring Ben Whishaw and Hugh Bonneville, in 2014 and 2017.

Dancing with Kate is not the only brush with royalty that Paddington has had in recent years. In 2022, Queen Elizabeth II marked her historic Platinum Jubilee by starring in a filmed skit at Windsor Castle with Wishaw’s version of the beloved children’s figure.

Screened during the jubilee concert, the 96-year-old queen was too ill to attend in person, however, her private tea with Paddington was shown to the surprise of her own family members sitting in the royal box.

Just three months later Elizabeth died after ruling for over 70 years, members of the public used Paddington as a way to pay tribute, leaving stuffed animal versions of the character outside the gates of the royal residences alongside his trademark snack, a marmalade sandwich.

Over 1,000 stuffed animal Paddingtons were left by the public, and at the suggestion of the new Queen Camilla, they were collected and professionally cleaned before being donated to the Children’s charity, Barnardo’s.

Prince William cemented Paddington’s association with Queen Elizabeth when in the days after her death he said that the character had become so heavily featured in her mourning that it had knocked her famous corgis “off the top spot.” He added: “The Corgis won’t take that very well.”

Speaking at another mourning engagement, he discussed the jubilee sketch in which the monarch pulled a marmalade sandwich from her famous black patent leather handbag.

“Do you like Paddington?” he asked a group of schoolchildren. “Did you see the skit with Paddington and my grandmother? It was good, wasn’t it? Did you all wonder what she’d have in her handbag? No one ever knows what’s in her handbag…but Paddington did!”

James Crawford-Smith is Newsweek’s royal reporter based in London. You can find him on Twitter at @jrcrawfordsmith and read his stories on Newsweek’s The Royals Facebook page.

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