Diana’s death was the most disturbing time of our young lives, writes ANGELA MOLLARD. Even now, I can’t bear to be transported back to all that anger and emotion by The Crown. And I know I’m not the only one
I love De Kroon. I love everything.
The polished gallop through royal history, the inspired casting – Vanessa Kirby as Princess Margaret and Matt Smith as Prince Philip – and the audacity of creator Peter Morgan to take a living, breathing family and package them as characters in a sublime and gripping soap opera.
When I interviewed Claire Foy a few years ago, I couldn’t resist asking a series of questions about what it was like playing The Queen, even though the purpose of the chat was to publicize another film .
Floral tributes and balloons laid in the gardens of Kensington Palace following the death of Princess Diana, Princess of Wales. The final series of The Crown won’t show the car crash, but Angela Mollard says the tragedy remains too disturbing to watch
Princess Diana leaves Sardinia with Dodi Fayed en route to Paris in August 1997
The wreckage of the car after the crash in the Pont de L’Alma tunnel that killed Diana and driver Henri Paul. Bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones was seriously injured
The only annoyance in five glorious seasons over six impatient years was when my two teenage daughters interrupted me to ask, “Did that really happen?” or ‘Did the Queen’s husband – what’s his name again – really have an affair?’
And yet here we are on the eve of the sixth and final season of the award-winning series and I can’t watch it.
It’s not because a historian writing for this publication called it a “cruel, farcical and sick joke,” or because sources close to King Charles have reportedly called it “trolling on a Hollywood budget.”
I don’t care if Judi Dench, John Major or Tony Blair think it’s sensational drivel with no basis in the truth.
No, I can’t watch The Crown because I can’t bear to relive Diana’s death 26 years later.
The car crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales, won’t be shown, according to Morgan, but the days leading up to her death and those that followed are too disturbing to revisit in dramatized form even 26 years later .
Normally my curiosity would outweigh the emotion, but I don’t want to be taken back to the most horrible and disturbing week of my career. I expect many others will feel the same.
I was 29 years old and working for the Daily Mail. After being informed of the Princess’s death by my brother, who lived in Japan, in the early hours of August 31, 1997, I found myself sitting in the newsroom at dawn.
“The silence that day was like nothing I had ever known,” writes Angela Mollard. ‘How do you capture the death of an icon with paper and ink?’
Newspapers are noisy, busy places, populated by people shocked by little and amused by much.
Yet the silence that day was like nothing I had ever known. How do you capture the death of an icon with paper and ink?
Which of the thousands of photos of her would illustrate the front page? And throughout that long, strange day, over and over again, an unspoken refrain: “Did this really happen?”
For seven awful days, as the royal family reeled, the Blair government advised and the public cut open a hitherto unexposed vein of unchecked emotion, we news people had to turn words into stories that made sense. And yet nothing happened.
How could someone so luminous die in something so prosaic and so avoidable as a car accident caused by a drunk driver?
Why was the queen acting so strange? Why didn’t she say anything?
Prince Charles and sons William and Harry look at the sea of floral tributes left in memory of their mother at Kensington Palace
The Daily Mail’s dramatic front page summed up the mood in the country a week after Diana’s death
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth addresses the nation on the day before Diana’s funeral
The Queen faced calls to break protocol and fly the flag at half-mast over Buckingham Palace
Angela Mollard believes The Crown’s Elizabeth Debicki is the only actress to truly capture Princess Diana
Even those who had previously portrayed Diana as an unhinged, media-manipulating menace were stupid.
Elizabeth Debicki is the only actress who really captures Diana, but even with her compelling skills I can’t watch The Crown.
Time may have softened the anger and healed the rawness in those days between Diana’s accident in a Paris underpass and her coffin being buried on an island in Althorp, but nothing can erase the deep sadness.
It is still there on the Mother’s Day cards that George, Charlotte and Louis make for their father in memory of a grandmother they never knew.
It is palpable in the Sunken Garden of Kensington Palace, where a stiff gray statue, no matter how carefully considered, could never capture her energy and magnetism.
But most of all, it’s in the heartbreaking rift between her two sons, a rift that would never have widened if she were still alive.
Most families are deformed, bruised, or dysfunctional in some way, but the grief that came from the tragedy of Diana’s death never seems to be reconciled. Prince Harry is a broken man.
We know this because he tells us so on almost every page of his memoir, Spare. He is torn by anger and while we may question his choices, the loss of his mother has left him with deep sadness and distrust.
He will be 40 next year, four years older than his mother was when she died. Will he ever run out of trouble?
Prince Harry and Prince William were together at the unveiling of their mother’s statue in 2021. But it looked like they could barely look at each other
Prince Harry at his mother’s funeral, with his uncle Charles Spencer, left, brother and father. ‘The loss of Diana has left him with deep sadness and distrust’
Angela Mollard is a big fan of The Crown. But there’s one part she won’t watch
A poster advertising the sixth and final series of The Crown, which starts this week
The last month of Diana’s life was crazy weird. She wanted to be photographed and yet she didn’t.
She wanted to build a new life, but she was living a life that was clearly not her. Dodi Fayed was an affair, a solution to a heart broken by the man she truly loved. Diana died unfinished, in her work, in love, in her life.
As Dominic West, who plays Prince Charles, says in a moving scene in the trailer for the final season of The Crown, “This is going to be the biggest thing any of us have ever seen.” All these years later I don’t have to see it anymore.