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Cultural Comment


“THE CROWN” PRESENTS THE LAST DAYS OF PRINCESS DIANA

The people’s princess remains irresistible in both fiction and memory.

By Rebecca Mead

November 15, 2023
Diana, played with uncanny verisimilitude by Elizabeth Debicki, is presented as
sad, knowing, regretful, even forgiving.Photograph courtesy Netflix

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In the sixth and final season of “The Crown,” Peter Morgan, the show’s writer
and creator, returns to where he began. That start is not the first season of
Morgan’s epic royal chronicle, which was released in November of 2016 and opened
with the then Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to Prince Philip, in 1947. The
origins of “The Crown” go back a decade earlier, to 2006, with the movie “The
Queen,” written by Morgan and directed by Stephen Frears, which starred Helen
Mirren as the monarch, and was set in the immediate aftermath of the death of
Diana, Princess of Wales, after a car crash during a stay in Paris, in late
August of 1997.

The movie dramatized the days—then still relatively fresh in the nation’s
memory—during which the streets around Buckingham Palace became a zone of
unprecedented public mourning. Floral tributes were piled densely against the
palace’s gate, forming a moat of cellophane and decomposing petals. Men and
women wept openly on the Mall. Meanwhile, the Queen and her immediate family
stayed at a distance, at Balmoral, in Scotland, to which they had removed
earlier in the summer for their traditional vacation of walking, stalking,
shooting, and picnicking in the frequently inclement Highland weather. At the
time, public dismay at the Queen’s lack of public display grew into hostility,
and even anger: “Show Us You Care!” brayed the headline in the Daily Express,
usually a reliably monarchist tabloid. Eventually, the Queen acceded to pressure
that she and the rest of the family should return to London from the privacy of
Scotland. She, too, walked among the bouquets and the pressing crowds, and, a
week after Diana’s death, delivered a televised special address to the
nation—for only the second time in her reign, the first being at the start of
the first Gulf War. Her message, if not exactly overflowing with empathy, paid
tribute to Diana as a mother and as “someone who made many, many people happy.”

Morgan’s innovation in 2006 was to tell the story from the point of view of the
Queen herself—or, at least, her imagined point of view, the actual Queen not
having given her own account of events. A counterpoint was provided by Tony
Blair, the innovating New Labour Prime Minister, played by Michael Sheen, who
served in the film as the Queen’s conduit to understanding how Diana was
cherished in death as in life as “the People’s Princess”—in Blair’s own apt
phrase. Morgan treated his version of the Queen with the empathy that the real
Queen had failed to demonstrate in the moment. The movie showed how apparent
heartlessness—the initial failure to fly a flag at half-staff over Buckingham
Palace, for example—was, in fact, an adherence to protocol from which it was, at
first, unthinkable for the Queen to deviate. Diana was no longer an H.R.H., but
was instead a private citizen. There was no precedent for how an ex-Queen-to-be
should be regarded—let alone mourned—by the Royal Family. In “The Queen,” Morgan
dramatized how the place of a monarch in a constitutional monarchy, like that in
the U.K., exists only as an elaborate confection of protocol and precedent: if
that framework is dispensed with, the whole structure may come tumbling down.
The opening scene of the film, which shows Elizabeth II discussing the
forthcoming general election with an artist who is painting her portrait, served
to remind viewers that the monarch does not vote, it being nominally her or his
government that is being elected. Monarchs cannot be ordinary citizens, as—over
in Paris—the decapitated ghost of Louis Capet might remind us.

In the new season of “The Crown,” Morgan has switched the perspective. The
events of August, 1997, are no longer seen primarily through the eyes of the
Queen. Instead, he has foregrounded the irresistible Diana as she spends what
turn out to be her final few weeks subject to a treacherous alchemy: being
transmuted from the future Queen into the novel form of a peculiarly rarefied
ordinary citizen. She holidays first with, and then without, her sons, William
and Harry, in the plutocrat’s playground of St. Tropez, aboard a yacht owned by
Mohamed Al-Fayed, the Egyptian-born owner of Harrods and the Ritz Paris. The
setting—glittering sea, brilliant sun, luxurious vessel, squealing water
fights—could hardly offer a greater contrast to the chilly environs of Balmoral,
with its dowdy, tweedy routine of heathland-stomping and fauna-murdering. And
Diana herself, who is played with uncanny verisimilitude by Elizabeth Debicki,
is, after the grim miseries of earlier seasons, at last comfortable in her own
skin—which, as a variety of elegant bathing suits reveal, is as gloriously,
uniformly, expensively golden as the crown that materializes in the show’s title
sequence.



Focussing on Diana in 2006, even if Morgan had tried to, would not have been
possible. As Mirren said in an interview at the time, “It’s a hot potato in
England—you cannot go anywhere near this subject without being under the most
intense kind of scrutiny.” Diana was the hottest potato of all; but times have
changed, and tubers have cooled, which means that Morgan can take his second run
at the subject from a different orientation. At the outset of the first season
of “The Crown,” in an interview in this magazine with Michael Schulman, Morgan
noted that the Queen herself was not the easiest of characters to animate.
“She’s not a natural choice for a writer, being a monosyllabic woman of limited
intelligence and imagination,” he said, surely aware that by undertaking the
entire project he had scotched any eventual hope of a knighthood and was
therefore free to be as candid, or even as downright rude, as he wished. Morgan
went on, “As a writer, I would naturally have preferred her to be a sort of Tony
Soprano figure, who’s sort of mood-changey and volatile.”




Morgan’s Tony Soprano finally showed up in Season 4, in the form of Lady Diana
Spencer—the virginal blueblood, twelve years Prince Charles’s junior, to whom
fell the unenviable fate of becoming the Princess of Wales. From the outset,
“The Crown” did not flinch from depicting Diana’s volatility. Early on in the
fourth season, the recently betrothed Lady Di, played by Emma Corrin, was seen
binge-eating her way through a palace fridge, then fleeing to a bathroom and
retching into a royal toilet. “The Crown” ’s eating-disorder episodes were
controversial, and graphic enough to warrant a trigger warning. But they showed
nothing that the Princess herself had not been admirably willing to uncover.
When asked directly about her struggles with bulimia in a BBC interview in 1995,
she replied that she had suffered from the condition for several years. “You
inflict it upon yourself because your self-esteem is at a low ebb, and you don’t
think you’re worthy or valuable,” she said.

Video From The New Yorker

The Royal Babies, Then and Now



By the show’s fifth season, the portrait of Diana, now played by Debicki, was
becoming more complicated. Diana’s disclosures of her private mental-health
struggles were, Morgan’s depiction suggested, undertaken as strategic moves in
yet another struggle—a battle for public-relations predominance over her
estranged husband Charles, and the larger Royal Family. In Season 5, the Diana
whom Morgan put on the screen was extraordinarily charismatic, and
extraordinarily like her original. (Richard Kay, a veteran royal reporter who
was close to Diana, wrote in the Daily Mail that Debicki “possesses the
Princess’s natural statuesque grace, mischievousness and beauty. She has both
her mannerisms and her voice. Indeed, closing my eyes I found myself imagining
that it was my friend Diana speaking.”) But the Diana of Season 5 was also
manipulative, and addicted to the attention and the drama that once had been so
undesirable to her. The famous BBC interview, conducted by the journalist Martin
Bashir—in which Diana delivered her “there were three of us in that marriage”
indictment of Charles and his then mistress, now Queen Camilla—was, as later
revealed, obtained by appallingly duplicitous means. “The Crown” depicted
Bashir’s duplicity; but it also suggested that Diana was not simply Bashir’s
victim. She was using the most powerful tools at her disposal to make her case
against the most powerful family in the land.



Some critics of Season 5 suggested that, in portraying Diana as vengeful, Morgan
had decided to throw his lot in with the establishment, presenting the man who
is now King Charles III as a beleaguered individual who had been put into an
impossible situation, and showing Diana taking the shape of that impossibility.
In Season 6, however, the onscreen Diana has evolved once more. The first four
episodes of the new season, which lead up to and include Diana’s death, present
her as sad, knowing, regretful, even forgiving. When Charles, played by Dominic
West, picks up William and Harry from Diana’s custody for what we know will be
the last time, he asks, affectionately, “Even though we weren’t brilliant at
being married, can we be brilliant at . . . all this?” “I think so,” Diana says
with damp eyes but reciprocal affection. She adds, sadly, “She didn’t get to
keep the man of her dreams, but the friend of her dreams.” It’s still not
exactly a divorce made in heaven—the two camps keep warring in the tabloids—but
it’s a suggestion that a more congenial accommodation might eventually be
possible.




It’s not, of course. Like a stag in “The Queen” that the monarch glimpses alone
on the mountainside, and mourns when it is shot by a paying guest on a
neighboring estate—or like a stag that, in this season of “The Crown,” Prince
William shoots dead and, it being his first kill, is daubed with the blood
of—Diana, named for a huntress, can only ever be the hunt’s victim. The
escalating frenzy of her final weeks is distressingly depicted in “The Crown.”
She is not just subject to the invasive stalking of paparazzi, she is betrayed
by those whom she has trusted to take care of her. Another apparent friend,
Mohamed Al-Fayed, ensnares her in his own dynastic drama: his pursuit of British
legitimacy through a marital alliance between his feckless eldest son, Dodi
Fayed, and the mother of a future king.

Thrown together by Al-Fayed and ensconced in his yacht, Diana and Dodi trade
stories of daddy issues: Dodi complains about his father’s “obsessive control,”
and Diana describes her own father’s emotional distance. “I wrote to him weekly
from boarding school; ironed his shirts; baked him cakes. I even married the
Prince of Wales. Anything to make him notice me,” she says, in Morgan’s
winningly imagined tête-à-tête. But the sense of privacy is an illusion. The
scenes that include Mohamed, brilliantly embodied in all his braggadocio and
humiliation by Salim Daw, and Dodi, his doe-eyed, dopey son, are among the
season’s most riveting. This is in part because their troubled dynamic has not
been rehashed and retold a thousand times already, and in part because
“Succession” has primed a television audience to appreciate a drama in which
paternal love has been curdled by misplaced ambition into poisonous contempt.
Morgan enriches the character of Dodi, who during his brief association with the
Princess was flattened by the press into a sometimes racially charged
caricature; he is played with touching sensitivity by Khalid Abdalla, and the
pathos of his predicament is one of this season’s subtler successes.

Critics who animadverted at the depictions of Diana’s bulimia in Season 4 will
be bracing themselves for unsubtlety when it comes to the car crash that caused
her death; but Morgan renders it as delicately as possible at the outset of the
first episode, as seen through the eyes—or, rather, heard through the ears—of a
Parisian dog-walker by the Pont de l’Alma, who is surprised by a fast-moving car
with paparazzi in pursuit. Although Morgan eschews the sight of tangled metal,
he depicts the events that followed more intimately than he did the first time
around, in 2006. On the day of Diana’s death, the Prince of Wales flew to Paris
to bring home her body. In “The Queen,” Charles is led into the presence of an
open casket at the hospital, and is seen, from a distance, through a glass door,
holding back tears. In “The Crown,” the moment is more wrenching: Charles enters
the cold sterility of the hospital mortuary. The camera shows only his
grief-stricken face, then cuts away to the doctors and nurses waiting outside,
who, like the viewers, can hear the howls of anguish from the heir to the
throne. If one of Diana’s legacies to the monarchy was to establish an
expectation of greater emotional openness, the fictional representation of
Charles has undergone a similar transformation. In 2006, Prince Charles could
not possibly wail. In 2023, how could he possibly not?




What, then, of Diana’s very last hours, those moments before she left by a rear
door at the Ritz and climbed into the back of a car? There are no survivors to
those final conversations between Diana and Dodi—no friends of the Princess to
whom she had time to whisper down the phone an account of what really went on
between her and the Harrods scion. Did he propose? (Mohamed Al-Fayed, who died
earlier this year, would insist that Dodi had bought Diana an engagement ring.
For a while, it was displayed in a memorial to the couple at Harrods.) If he
did, what did she say? For once, there is no one in a position to
authoritatively pronounce whether Morgan gets it right or wrong; and, without
giving too much away, it’s fair to say that Morgan’s storytelling is deft,
satisfying, and plausible, while also being neater than life usually turns out
to be. It is after Diana’s death that Morgan takes his most extravagant artistic
license, when he . . . well, viewers will have to see it for themselves, but
those critics of “The Crown” who have decried Morgan’s willingness to put
made-up words into the mouths of living people will have a whole other level of
conniption when they learn what he’s done with the mouths of the dead. Diana
died at 4 A.M., Paris time, on August 31, 1997; but Morgan, it turns out, could
not bear to leave her alone there and then. And neither could the British
public, who turned out in a crowd that numbered more than a million to watch her
hearse depart her home at Kensington Palace; and neither could the estimated two
billion people worldwide who tuned in to watch her funeral on television. And
neither, more than a quarter century and six seasons of “The Crown” later, can
we. ♦






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Yorker.

Rebecca Mead is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her most recent book is
“Home/Land.”

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