Prince Harry's transformation: The kid's all right

Princess Diana's little boy the red-haired prince with the mischievous smile and his mother's wild streak is about to become a father.

The arrival any day now of Prince Harry's and American wife Meghan's first child will complete his public transformation into the admirable and modern family man who took his grandmother's crown last year as Britain's most popular royal.

Confidence, a sense of humour and a fun-loving personality are some of the qualities the public sees in Harry, according to a U.K. polling company's rolling online surveys.

Those old enough to remember his coming of age - watching him grow from a child swimming in palace trappings to a rebellious teen, from an army officer speaking up for rank-and-file soldiers to a ginger-bearded groom - can't help but take some pleasure in the expectant father's next milestone.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, the titles conferred on the prince and his bride by Harry's grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, have tried to keep plans for Baby Sussex's birth veiled in privacy.

Kensington Palace didn't give a due date, saying only that it would be in the spring.

The news cameras that chronicled every awkward moment and misstep of his difficult adolescence often captured Harry at his best when he was doing charity work that involved playing with or comforting children.

His natural ease with young ones invited obvious questions. The prince acknowledged in general terms that he looked forward to having children of his own.

It's clear from his quiet smile whenever Harry, 34, and Meghan, 37, are out together that he is treasuring the time now that he will.

His circle-of-life moment also closes a familiar cycle of ruin, rebirth and redemption for the exceptionally privileged and unremarkably flawed family he joined as His Royal Highness Prince Henry of Wales on Sept. 15, 1984.

Harry was the proverbial "spare" to older brother Prince William's heir-to-the-throne role as the firstborn child of Diana and Prince Charles, the queen's eldest.

By the time he was born, his parents' marriage was already in trouble. They separated when he was 8.

In the four bitter years before the divorce, Charles and Diana both acknowledged extramarital affairs.

Charles' was with a married woman he had had a relationship with before he married Diana, Camilla Parker-Bowles.

She has now been his second wife, and William and Harry's stepmother, since 2005. Diana's was with an army officer who was her horse riding instructor.

Harry suffered an almost unimaginable loss when Diana died in a Paris car crash in 1997. Millions around the world watched the funeral, and his pain.

The image is indelible: a 12-year-old Harry walking in the funeral procession behind his mother's casket, his face set in angry stone days after she died in a car crash while being pursued by paparazzi in Paris.

Harry has acknowledged that Diana's death and the aftermath set him on a destructive path.

"My mother had just died, and I had to walk a long way behind her coffin, surrounded by thousands of people watching me, while millions more did on television," Harry told Newsweek magazine as the 20th anniversary of that day was approaching.

"I don't think any child should be asked to do that, under any circumstances. I don't think it would happen today."