Account
With Diana’s Death, ‘The Crown’ Enters Its Most
Evocative Era
The final season of Netflix’s royal drama opens in
1997, on the cusp of one of the most analyzed periods in recent British
history.
Sarah Lyall
By Sarah
Lyall
Sarah Lyall
is a writer at large and former London correspondent who has covered the ups
and downs of the royal family since the mid-1990s
Nov. 13,
2023
The images
are joltingly familiar, even after all these years.
In one,
reproduced with eerie accuracy in the new season of “The Crown,” Diana, the
Princess of Wales sits on a diving board off the deck of a yacht, her long legs
dangling above the water. In another, she embraces her new boyfriend, Dodi
Fayed. And in a third, taken from a security camera, the couple rides in an
elevator at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, en route to their car late one August
night. We know too well what happened next.
The sixth
and final season of “The Crown” begins here, in 1997, on the cusp of one of the
strangest and most bewildering periods in recent British history. That is when
Diana (played here by Elizabeth Debicki) and Dodi (Khalid Abdalla), an unlikely
couple thrown together by circumstance, were killed in a crash in an underpass
as they drove across Paris, followed by a pack of photographers. Diana was just
36, and her death sent Britain into a paroxysm of grief at her loss and rage
against the royal family.
Over the
last five seasons, “The Crown” has been unspooling decade by decade, producing
an epic portrait of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, starting with her marriage
to Prince Philip in 1947. The earlier episodes could sometimes feel quaint and
far away, repackaged history from a semi-distant past.
But the new
season, which begins a year after Diana has divorced Prince Charles (Dominic
West) and ends with Charles’s wedding to his longtime girlfriend, Camilla
Parker Bowles (Olivia Williams) in 2005, eight years later, is a different
thing entirely.
The first
four episodes of the season (a second batch will arrive on Dec. 14) explore the
lead up to and fallout from the 1997 accident. By devoting so much attention to
this period, the production risks clashing not just with viewers’ own memories,
but also with countless earlier depictions of the same events — a seemingly
never-ending stream of books, dramas and documentaries. To name just two,
there’s “Diana,” the 2013 film about the princess’s final two years, starring
Naomi Watts, and “Diana and Dodi: The Princess and the Playboy,” a documentary
about the couple that was released earlier this year.
Peter
Morgan, the creator and writer of “The Crown,” is also competing with his own
2006 film, “The Queen,” which covers the same period. It starred Helen Mirren
as a bewildered, wrong-footed Queen Elizabeth grappling with the raw emotion
and almost feral anti-royal rage that erupted across Britain after Diana’s
death. With its intimate scenes of conversations between members of the royal
family and public figures like the then-Prime Minister, Tony Blair (Michael
Sheen), “The Queen” was a preview of Morgan’s approach in “The Crown” — a blend
of history and fiction, a muddying of the line between the public and the
private.
The new
season of “The Crown” can’t help but revisit the themes of the 2006 movie. It
shows Elizabeth (Imelda Staunton, deftly channeling the sound and cadence of
Elizabeth’s voice) fretting about whether to stay in Scotland with her
grandsons after Diana’s death, as she would prefer, or to travel to London and
address the nation, as the tabloids and the prime minister are urging (and
which she ends up doing).
But the
show gives time, too, to the story of Mohamed al-Fayed (Salim Daw), Dodi’s
father, a once-impoverished and now wildly rich and ambitious Egyptian
businessman whose holdings included not just the Ritz in Paris but also Harrods
department store, a symbol of upper-crust opulence, in London.
In scenes
that have already caused some chatter online and in the British tabloids,
Dodi’s ghost returns to talk to his father after his death, while Diana’s ghost
briefly appears in conversations with Charles and Queen Elizabeth.
How
accurate are the non-ghostly scenes in this latest depiction of the Dodi-Diana
romance? Annie Sulzberger, the head of research for the show — she is also the
sister of The Times’s publisher, A.G. Sulzberger — said that the research team
was mindful of the delicacy around resurrecting a story in which so many
participants are still alive.
“People who
lived through Diana’s death feel a sense of ownership over that history, a
sense of participation, which can color their perception of it,” she said in an
interview. “With recent history, you’re constantly battling with people’s
intimate and personal perspectives.”
Sulzberger
said that the research team turned to multiple sources to depict the events of
1997, including memoirs, documentaries and the official government inquest into
the couple’s deaths in the car along with a third victim, Henri Paul, the
driver.
“If there’s
a documentary, we watched it; if there’s an article, we read it; if there’s a
book, we have it,” she said.
One
particularly valuable source of information was a far-reaching police inquiry
known as Operation Paget, which investigated claims by an increasingly unhinged
Mohamed al-Fayed that Diana was pregnant with Dodi’s baby and that the couple
had been murdered by the British security services at the behest of Prince
Philip, among others. (Diana was not pregnant, the report found, and the deaths
were an accident.)
The
inquiry’s final report included testimony from friends and employees of the
couple, revealing how Diana described their romance to the vast circle of
confidants she spoke to by telephone from France.
Lady
Annabel Goldsmith, a friend of Diana’s, told the inquiry that they had talked
on Aug. 29, two days before the princess’s death. Goldsmith testified that when
she asked Diana whether she was considering marrying Dodi, Diana said:
“Annabel, I need marriage like a rash on my face.”
Richard
Kay, a longtime royal reporter for The Daily Mail and a close friend of Diana
who spoke to her the day she died, said that nobody could say for sure what
happened between Dodi and Diana in those final hours.
“This is in
the realm of fantasy,” Kay said in an interview. “It’s just — what can I say? —
it’s speculation,” he said of the program’s depiction of a last conversation
between Dodi and Diana.
While he
agreed that it was unlikely that Diana was considering marrying Dodi, Kay said
that Diana was “clearly very taken with him,” in part because Dodi was the
first man she could date openly since her separation from Charles, several
years before their divorce.
“Dodi was a
quite gentle, sweet sort of man, and I suspect he was very attentive,” Kay
said. “It wasn’t just the trappings that made him attractive — the jets and the
yachts — but Diana quite liked the ordinariness of the family life al-Fayed had
with his second wife and younger children.”
As always
in “The Crown,” there is an underlying tension not only between what might be
real and what might be imagined, but also how that could color the public’s
perception of the truth. Last year, after a wave of criticism from real-life
participants of made-up scenes, the series added a disclaimer. It was, it said
for the first time, a “fictional dramatization” that was “inspired by real
events.”
That gives
the production high cover and protection from potential lawsuits from aggrieved
public figures. But still, “entire generations are getting their understanding
of the modern British monarchy from the drama,” the broadcaster and political
commentator Andrew Marr wrote recently in The Times of London, comparing the
phenomenon to the way Shakespeare’s dramas have shaped public interpretations
of history ever since.
There are
many ways “The Crown” could have portrayed Diana’s state of mind in those last
weeks, and it chose a particularly gentle interpretation of her relationships
with both her former husband and her new lover.
More than
25 years later, it is hard to say definitively whether Diana had indeed found a
measure of emotional peace after so much turmoil. Morgan’s is just the latest
in a long line of interpretations. But as “The Crown” moves past the Diana era,
perhaps it’s the one that brings the most comfort.
Sarah Lyall
is a writer at large, working for a variety of desks including Sports, Culture,
Media and International. Previously she was a correspondent in the London
bureau, and a reporter for the Culture and Metro desks. More about Sarah
Lyall
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