As we mark the anniversary of the Princess of Wales’s death, revisit the feature when Eilidh Hargreaves asks if it’s time to switch off from Diana drama
Princess Diana in Paris to commemorate Armistice Day in 1988. Photo: Getty
On August 31, 1997 – a Sunday – the coveted corner table at Le Caprice was empty but for one solitary candle. Maître d’ Jesus Adorno and his team were still in shock: Diana, Princess of Wales had died the night before in a car crash in Paris. “It was extremely hard to understand and very upsetting,” Adorno sighs to me 26 years later. This was their peaceful tribute to the princess: a loyal customer and friend. Inside, quiet. Outside, mass hysteria. As the former Tatler and Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown wrote in her book The Diana Chronicles, “She was the first great glamour icon to live and die in the age of round-the-world, round-the-clock multimedia. For 16 years, Britons had felt themselves to be not spectators of, but participants in, her evolution and her struggles.” Diana went from being the world’s most glamorous divorcée to a tragic figure whose death catapulted a nation into mourning.
Princess Diana was the litmus test for the fame-obsessed modern world – and the battle for her legacy was instantly underway. Kay Burley raced to the Sky News studio in the middle of the night to own the story; Tony Blair dubbed her “the People’s Princess”. Conspiracy theories roared: Was she pregnant when she died? Was she engaged? What was being covered up? Mohamed Al-Fayed stirred the pot, and Piers Morgan said Diana sold many more newspapers dead than she did alive. All theories were debunked by friends, such as Rosa Monckton, who appeared stone-faced and exasperated in a 2003 interview with Martyn Gregory. “[It’s] complete falsification,” she said. “She was such an extraordinary woman that people find it very difficult to believe that she could have died such an ordinary death.” Now, as the Prince of Wales calls for the cancellation of his mother’s notorious interview with Martin Bashir, and the King’s friends dub The Crown “trolling on a Hollywood budget”, the fight for Diana’s legacy has reached fever pitch.
Diana, Princess of Wales leaving the 1993 Headway Charity Lunch at the London Hilton on Park Lane, where she announced in a speech her retirement from public duties. Photo: Princess Diana Archive
Welcome, again, to Diana season, as producers continue to cash in on her demise. Elizabeth Debicki’s take is freshly immortalized in The Crown. As with every ‘Diana’ before her, she’s now a fashion starlet: whisked into shows and promoting the Lady Dior bag that the princess loved. The cast wailed that they “could not stop crying” as they shot the car chase, the crumpled Mercedes and Diana returning as… a ghost? Her biographer Andrew Marr has called it “piffle”; and you only have to read the first line of Hugo Vickers’ piece to see how vehemently he detests the whole thing.
Diana’s friends won’t watch it. “We all feel the same way,” says Mary Greenwell, her former make up artist and confidant. “I’m not interested in that kind of portrayal of someone who was globally recognized and loved. It’s a cheap way of revealing someone.”
