The Crown finally gets Princess Diana right – why did
it take so long?
For someone with the most cinematic life
imaginable, Princess Diana has been like kryptonite to film and television,
writes Adam White
1 day ago
Princess
Diana was cinema. Rebellious, compassionate, tragic, she seemed to exist in
widescreen. There was never any subtlety to her, from her fashion to her
frankness to the public spectacle of her death. Yet despite living such a
cinematic life, Diana’s story has never worked on screen. Netflix’s The Crown,
which this season introduces Diana as played by actor Emma Corrin, is the
latest to try. Early reviews have been kind, Corrin in particular drawing
strong notices, but it is some miracle, with Diana’s chequered on-screen
history suggesting hers is a story very easy to get wrong.
Corrin
follows in the footsteps of Naomi Watts in the maligned 2013 biopic Diana, and
precedes Kristen Stewart in an untitled Princess of Wales film to be released
next year. After that, Elizabeth Debicki will take over from Corrin for the
final two seasons of The Crown, which will launch sometime in 2022. Over the
past few decades, there have also been a variety of treacly television movies,
ones that consistently airbrushed her spikiness. Every portrayal, bar Corrin’s,
has been a different shade of ghastly.
Few have
ever got the balance right. Diana (2013) was too saccharine, The Crown meets
Mills & Boon, with Watts huffing and puffing her way through hospital
corridors and country houses. The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana (1982) was
too soon, released a year after their wedding and built on the lie that they
were at all compatible. 1998’s Channel 5 rush job A Tribute to the People’s
Princess was too plainly terrible, shot on what looked like soap opera sets and
featuring a script so risible that a computer programme may as well have
written it. “The press are driving me potty!” Amy Seccombe’s Diana yelps at one
point.
All
reflected the idea that no dramatisation of Diana could live up to our own
personal standards. Diana became as celebrated as she was because she had a
unique humanity to her, with a personality that was unusually malleable. Some
admired her for her beauty and grace, others for her defiance in the face of
ill-treatment. Even the most die-hard of republicans remember her with
begrudging respect, unable to deny the good she did for mental health and Aids
in the public eye. And that she seemed to loathe the royals almost as much as
they do.
Younger
millennials, meanwhile, tend to embrace her oddly ageless street-style and
existence as a kind of proto-Gone Girl. She was the wronged woman who
flourished, outsmarting the powerful figures who thought they knew better, and
looking incredible while doing it. “Good for her,” they say, while retweeting
that same image of her 1994 “revenge dress” – or the off-the-shoulder number
she wore to a gala the same night Charles tried and failed to win back the
public’s affection with a televised interview. @LadyDiRevengeLooks is an
Instagram account with more than 60,000 followers.
Diana, both
then and now, is a woman of endlessly rotating parts. It feels as if things are
missing if one is more focused on than the others. It’s also why the best
dramatisations of Diana so far have depicted her in abstract. The Queen (2006),
set in the immediate aftermath of Diana’s death, treated the late Princess as
if she were the San Andreas Fault, capable of sending almighty shockwaves through
tradition and legacy. Diana & Me (1997), a cute Toni Collette romcom
shelved after Diana died, was driven by the idea of the Princess as an
aspirational idea. It’s essentially Muriel’s Wedding with a tiara, and only
available on German DVD.
They were
also successful because they didn’t treat the Diana story as one that was
necessarily over. Diana may have died in that Paris car crash, but she
continues to loom over much of the Royal Family, the media, and culture at
large. British royalty will never again embrace stiff self-isolation, their
very survival dependent on the same empathy and openness that Diana
masterminded as a public figure and parent.
She is also
invoked whenever we speak of press intrusion, her dying breaths trailed by
flashbulbs. Similarly, it’s not hard to see Diana’s personal life as a
blueprint for our understanding of infidelity and trauma. Our collective
understanding of affairs became more complex in the wake of Charles and Diana
and the mutual betrayals of their marriage vows. Likewise the idea of “winning”
a divorce – who looks better, who earns greater sympathy, who keeps the friends
and the power. Mental illness became less shameful, Aids became a story of
human tragedy rather than one discussed at a cold and painful remove.
The
Princess Diana myth is far more than a dozen or so incredibly dramatic moments
in Royal history spread over the course of two decades – it is about how we’ve
existed for 40 years. With that in mind, it’s no real surprise that The Crown
is reportedly the first to pull off telling her story, the show’s format
(entire decades, give-or-take, being dramatised every series, and actors being
swapped out as their characters age) allowing for greater psychological insight
and more room to breathe. Considering how long it has been since Diana’s death,
and how often film and television have got her wrong, it’s about time.
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