The Death of Princess Diana: Elizabeth Angell on What to Watch for in ‘The Crown’

The longtime journalist, who reported from Paris in the summer of 1997, on what really happened and what we might see depicted in the Netflix show.

(Photo by Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images)

What we are about to watch in Part 1 of Season 6 of The Crown — the death of Princess Diana — is a story that has been told countless times in the last 26 years. It’s among the most-covered global news events in recent history, a swirling mix of official investigations, journalistic deep dives, and conspiracy theories attempting to explain that tragic night in Paris. 

A friend of mine was part of that research effort. Elizabeth Angell, who is now editor in chief at Romper, was an intern in Time magazine’s Paris bureau that summer. It was an intense on-the-ground introduction into royal reporting, which Elizabeth would revisit years later as executive digital director at Town & Country. That’s when our paths crossed and Elizabeth quickly became one of the people I respect and admire most on royal topics. She is the person I want to talk to when Windsor news breaks.

Feeling anxious ahead of The Crown’s final season, I turned to Elizabeth to ask what she was thinking about. What happened in Paris? What will The Crown show in these episodes? What questions do you have? Below she has written an explainer, looking at Diana’s relationship with Dodi Fayed (including the timeline she made of every day of Diana’s life that summer), what caused the car accident, and how Charles carried himself in the days after.

💭 How are you feeling before watching The Crown? What questions do you have about what we will see? Please share in the comments of this newsletter.

ICYMI: Elizabeth also wrote an incredible coronation essay for SMT — Elizabeth Angell on the Moment ‘the Royal Family Presents Itself Officially to Us’

👑 Stay Tuned…

It’s Crown week here at So Many Thoughts.

• READ: My take on the star-studded premiere of The Crown here.  

• LISTEN: The first installment of my watch-with-me podcast is here. No spoilers! It’s a primer meant to refresh your memory on Season 5 and preview this season. (Click on the Instagram post below for a preview.) More coming Thursday!

• DISCUSS: I’ll send out a discussion thread on Thursday, too, for the first half of Part 1, with a second thread coming for the second half. (I want us to be able to discuss as we go without spoilers.)

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Princess Diana’s Death: What to Think About When Watching ‘The Crown’

A portrait of Princess Diana in a Harrods’ store window in London, September 1997. (Photo by Francois LOCHON/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

By Elizabeth Angell

I was in Paris on August 31, 1997. A friend and I were staying together in a hostel, and had made plans that day to see the only person we knew in the city. Paris is hot and empty in late August when everyone heads out of town on “les vacances.” The tourist sites are still reliably crowded but lots of shops are closed and the residential streets have a slightly eerie, abandoned feeling. We didn’t yet have cell phones, so to confirm the details with our friend, we had to find a payphone. 

“Have you heard?” he asked when he picked up the phone. “La Princesse est morte.” The Princess is dead. (He talked like that, in a mix of English and French.) 

In that moment, the only princesses that bubbled to mind were medieval or from Disney depictions of fairy tales. “What princess?” I blurted.

“Lady Di!” he exclaimed.

Except it sounded like “La Dee Dee.”

That moment is the first trickle of what became an avalanche of information about the inconceivable death of Diana, Princess of Wales. I was in Paris that summer because I had just graduated from college and talked my way into an unpaid internship at Time magazine’s bureau there. By the second week of September, that had morphed into a job as a research assistant on a book about Diana’s death by the magazine’s two Paris-based correspondents. (Death of a Princess; An Investigation by Thomas Sancton and Scott MacLeod came out in January 1998, which happened to the same week the Monica Lewinsky story broke. But that’s a whole different story.)

In the 26 years since, I have read books and countless articles detailing Diana’s final months and hours; I’ve written and reported on it myself. And in just a week, we’ll get to see how the Princess’s death is depicted in the final season of The Crown.

The show’s first few seasons were full of discovery. We were learning about events we may only have known in the broadest historical sense; a lot of the characters were new to us. The last two seasons touched on stories and people that many of us think we know something about. Maybe, while watching, we came to understand events from a new angle or quibbled with their fictionalization.

But Season 6 will tackle a subject about which most of us not only have thoughts, but big, complicated feelings: Diana’s death. In portraying it, the show’s creator, Peter Morgan, has to grapple with his audience’s preconceived notions about who is a villain and who is a victim. He will make choices that will represent what happened as either an inexorable tragedy or a stupid, avoidable accident. Ultimately he will leave us with a sense of whether Diana was on her way to an entirely new life, full of radical possibility, or if she was to be inextricably and painfully bound to the Windsors forever, a perpetual reminder of the failures of two institutions, marriage and monarchy. 

It’s a lot to do in just a few episodes. Here’s what I’ll be watching for:

What caused the accident?

Morgan has said that he will not show the crash itself, but I will be paying close attention to how he conveys the hours that led up to it. Diana was in Paris on Saturday August 30 with her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed. They woke up that morning on the Fayed family yacht off the coast of Sardinia, and flew to Paris on a private jet that belonged to Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al Fayed. Their first stop that day was the house in the Bois de Boulogne where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (aka Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson) had spent their final years. (Mohamed Al Fayed had leased it from the city of Paris, lovingly restored it, and re-christened it Villa Windsor.) Dodi and Diana continued on to the Ritz Hotel, also owned by Mohamed, and then to Dodi’s apartment. They had intended to have dinner that night at a trendy bistro, but on their way there they changed plans and returned to the Ritz, where they ate privately in the Imperial suite.

From the minute they touched down in Paris, the couple had been followed by photographers and paparazzi on motorcycles and in cars. They had lots of security with them that day. Diana had declined protection from Royal Protection officers, whom she reportedly thought were spying on her for the Palace, but the Fayed family employed a phalanx of bodyguards, chauffeurs, and hotel security. When the pair finally left the Ritz hotel just after midnight  to return to Dodi’s 10-room apartment near the Arc De Triomphe, they were driven by a man named Henri Paul, the assistant head of security for the Ritz.

Next came the famous chase—Paul driving Diana, Dodi, and a bodyguard through the streets of Paris pursued by photographers. It was inside the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, an underpass that the car should have moved through in a minute or two, that the car swerved out of control and crashed into a concrete support pillar. Paul and Dodi were killed instantly; the bodyguard and Diana were still alive when the first witnesses approached the wreck.

Diana’s son Prince Harry has long—and quite vocally—blamed the press for his mother’s death. They followed her everywhere, made her last years deeply unpleasant, and on her final day, trailed her relentlessly all over Paris. In the tunnel, they photographed the accident, by some accounts pointing their cameras into the car while she struggled to breathe. Seven photojournalists were arrested that night on charges of “involuntary homicide and non-assistance of persons in danger.” Ten were eventually investigated but charges against all of them were dropped.

The photographers weren’t the only ones acting recklessly. Henri Paul was dangerously intoxicated when he got behind the wheel of that car—his blood alcohol was more than three times France’s legal limit. The final coroner’s report also showed traces of prescription drugs in his system. Despite the many different people working that day to ferry Diana and Dodi from one place to the next and protect their privacy and safety, no one had stepped in to make sure their driver was sober.

Diana is often described as “hunted” toward the end of her life and it can seem now that she was prey who was systematically stalked and ultimately, inevitably killed. But that’s just a metaphor. I’m curious to see if The Crown renders her final hours as a frantic hunt or if we also get a glimpse of the many terrible mistakes that were made along the way. What if Henri Paul had never been summoned from the bar where he spent that afternoon? Or what if he had felt comfortable saying, “No, I shouldn't do this tonight”? What if he hadn’t driven as fast? Different decisions could have resulted in a quiet dinner at Dodi’s apartment, perhaps, and then a flight home to London for Diana the next day to see her boys before their school term started. 

What was really the nature of Dodi and Diana’s relationship?

My job on the book project was to gather everything we knew about Diana’s last few months and to help fact check information about the royal family. To keep things straight, I made a timeline of every day of Diana’s life that summer, which I could do because she was so obsessively covered by the press and because the book’s authors had excellent sources in the Fayed family, which kept meticulous security records of Dodi’s whereabouts. 

Diana’s first vacation of the summer was to the south of France with William and Harry aboard Mohamed Al Fayed’s yacht. Dodi, whom Diana had met casually a few times before, joined them on Bastille day, July 14, four days into the family cruise. They spent five days together before Diana flew back to London. (Dodi’s girlfriend at the time, an American model, was also in St. Tropez, though never on the yacht with Diana.) Dodi and Diana then spent a weekend together in Paris at the end of July. A week later, they left for a six-day cruise in the Mediterranean. (It was after this trip that pictures of the couple first surfaced and the tabloids caught on.) Dodi and Diana spent a few more days together in London before leaving together for a final Mediterranean cruise on August 20. It was, by many accounts, a glamorous and intense romance, and Dodi bought Diana a ring sometime during that last trip. There were reports from friends of Diana’s that she was very happy and in love, and there were rumors, fueled in no small part by Mohamed Al Fayed himself in the months after his son’s death, that Diana and Dodi planned to get married, have children, and live in the Villa Windsor in Paris. 

Will The Crown give us this version of the love affair? Will Peter Morgan’s Diana be the heedless romantic or is she someone more measured and cautious about her future?

In total, Diana and Dodi only spent about three weeks together that summer. In the seven weeks between Bastille Day and her death, Diana also traveled to Milan for Gianni Versace’s funeral, to Sarajevo as part of her campaign against landmines, and to Greece for a vacation with a friend. What’s more, her divorce had only been finalized a year before, and Dodi was going through a messy public breakup from the American model. Diana had also reportedly been advised by several friends that Dodi was not a suitable romantic partner, advice that may have been fueled by snobbery, racism, and genuine concern about Dodi’s playboy history. Was their affair an exciting diversion that might eventually have fizzled under pressure from the palace?

I’ve heard Diana’s relationship with Dodi compared to Jacqueline Kennedy’s marriage to Ari Onassis. Had the Princess met someone rich enough to offer her privacy and security in a world that was growing increasingly terrifying? Might Dodi’s money have also fueled her ambitious plans for humanitarian work (not to mention all the other things it could buy)? Despite all the many details we can gather about Diana’s final summer, I don’t think anyone truly knows what she thought of her last romance and what kind of life she might have carved for herself as she entered her 40s.

And it’s precisely all the trappings of wealth—and the veneer of security—that put Diana in such a dangerous position on August 30.

What will we see of Charles’s trip to Paris to bring Diana home?

Diana lived for some time after the accident, which happened at about 12:25 a.m. on August 31. She was taken to the hospital in an ambulance and doctors worked on her for a while before pronouncing her dead at around 4 a.m. Her body spent the next few hours in a hospital room. She was changed into a dress by her valet, Paul Burrell, and visited by several people, reportedly including clergy and chaplains, undertakers, Bernadette Chirac, the wife of the French President, and Mohamad Al Fayed. 

Charles, who had been in Balmoral, Scotland with his sons, flew to Paris almost immediately with Princess Diana’s sisters to bring home his ex-wife’s body, arriving on the afternoon of August 31. There was a brief flurry of planning for this unusual moment of French and British official activity. French President Jacques Chirac and his wife were to meet Charles at the hospital, but how would Princess Diana travel to the airport? Would Charles want to see or spend time with the body before they departed? It would all, by necessity, take place in a busy city hospital.

Charles did spend time with Diana’s body in the hospital, first with her sisters and then for a few moments alone. He reportedly exited the room with visibly red eyes. When Diana’s body finally did leave the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, crowds had already started to form, a taste of the unprecedented public mourning that was to come outside Kensington Palace and at her funeral. 

I’ve always been curious about what Charles felt that awful day. What grief did he feel for this beautiful woman whom he had married so disastrously? How brokenhearted was he for his sons, who had suffered a sudden and unfathomable loss? Could he imagine what this all meant for his future? Peter Morgan told Queen Elizabeth’s version of this story in his film The Queen, but there’s another version to tell in Charles’s experience of it.

How did the Palace really feel about Diana’s relationship?

After the crash that killed his son and Princess Diana, Mohamed Al Fayed repeatedly insinuated that they had been murdered by “people who did not want Diana and Dodi to be together.” Conspiracy theories circulated widely in Egypt, where Al Fayed was from, and on the message boards of the nascent internet, speculating that there was no way the Windsors would allow the mother of the future King of England to marry a Muslim man. There is no evidence to support any of the various theories, and no member of the British Royal Family has, to my knowledge, ever publicly spoken about Dodi’s relationship with Diana. Whatever Morgan depicts in The Crown will be a window into how he thinks the Palace might have truly felt about Dodi and more importantly, how they might have viewed Diana’s future outside the family.

In the last years of her marriage and then during her separation, Diana hadn’t hidden her anguish from her family and friends. We got a taste of that at the funeral when her brother, Charles Spencer, delivered a eulogy that many believed was a scathing critique of both the press and the royal family. In his speech, which was broadcast to millions, he says that the princess was “looking for a new direction in her life” and “she talked endlessly of getting away from England, mainly because of the treatment that she received at the hands of the newspapers.” To William and Harry, he said “I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative and loving way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition, but can sing openly as you planned.”

It will be fascinating to see how Morgan shows the family navigating that extraordinary moment and if any of them have regrets—even genuine remorse—over Diana’s last years as a royal.

I’ll soon have my answers to some of these questions. And yet part of me wishes Peter Morgan had made different choices entirely, had spent his precious last episodes on something his viewing public isn’t so familiar with, so emotionally invested in. I’ve always thought The Crown was at its best when it let us discover something new and feel we were seeing the well-hidden humanity of these iconic, yet removed figures. It’s why The Queen, his film about the way Queen Elizabeth responded to Diana’s death, was so successful. We knew nothing about that week in Balmoral and he spun out a perfectly pitched hypothetical.

But for me, Diana does not need humanizing. In comparison to the Windsors, she was always so vividly alive, her obvious need for connection such a stark contrast to their chilly remoteness. Her very presence begged a question that I don’t think the Firm has ever answered to my satisfaction: Do things really have to be done this way? Just because they’ve always been? 

Diana may have been in love with Dodi, ready to leap confidently into a new life. Or she may have been indulging in a summer fling, a love affair that she could, as a divorced woman, conduct publicly for the first time. The question for me isn’t so much which scenario is true but whether Peter Morgan—deft, clever and insightful as he is—can bring something new to my sense of Diana’s wild beauty and her early, senseless death. The truth of those things is already immortal.

My thanks to Elizabeth. You can follow her on Instagram at @ElizabethAngell_. Make sure to also check out Romper, it’s an incredible resource for parents (my favorite recent pieces include “Meet the Gentle Parenting Dropouts” and a package on kids and weight.)