princess diana yacht 1997

What Really Happened During Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed’s Vacation?

The Crown depicts her jaunts on Mohamed Al-Fayed’s yacht, the Jonikal, where her romance with Dodi kicked off.

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Diana was invited by Mohamed, a friend and businessman, to vacation in Saint-Tropez with her sons in July 1997. The Harrods owner would also goad his own son to join, too. The invitation came at a good time, after a few rough blows for Diana: Prince Charles was throwing a lavish birthday party for Camilla Parker Bowles at Highgrove, the house he and Diana once shared. And she had just broken up with surgeon Hasnat Khan, due to the media frenzy around their relationship. It was the month before William and Harry would be at Balmoral with their father and the rest of the royals, who no longer accepted her. So off she went, straight to the $20 million yacht that Fayed bought just before the trip to impress her—Tina Brown writes in The Diana Chronicles .

Prince Harry has looked back fondly at that trip, mostly because of the quality time they spent with their mom. “Actually, we’d been with Mummy weeks earlier when she first met him [Dodi], in St. Tropez,” he writes in her memoir Spare , per Today . “We were having a grand time, just the three of us, staying at some old gent’s villa.

“There was much laughter, horseplay, the norm whenever Mummy and Willy and I were together, though even more so on that holiday. Everything about that trip to St. Tropez was heaven. The weather was sublime, the food was tasty, Mummy was smiling.”

But the cameras followed her, like they always did. The Crown depicts photographers sailing out toward the Jonikal to snap images of the princess sunbathing and swimming in her one-piece. It also shows her approaching the boats filled with paparazzi to forge a deal: She’ll pose for them for a few shots if they’ll leave her and her kids alone.

Part of this is true. The New York Times reported in 1997 that Diana was quite cooperative with the press, at least during the first trip in July: “Three times, on separate occasions, she went out to the sea front and jumped off a small pier into the water, with photographers around her. Then, after leaving for 10 days with Mr. Fayed on the boat trip during which the photographs of the embracing couple were taken, she returned.”

“It was clear enough to all of us that she wanted to show the British establishment she was free,” Frederic Garcia, who photographed Diana on the trip, told the paper at the time. But her and the Al-Fayeds’ exasperation with the media grew after helicopters flew over the boat, according to the NYT .

Perhaps her openness to being photographed was her response to Camilla’s birthday party. “She just wanted to make the people at Balmoral as angry as possible,” her friend, art collector Lord Palumbo, told Brown. Now it wasn’t just a revenge dress; it was a revenge photo shoot with revenge swimsuits on a revenge vacation.

Brown even writes that the biggest photos from the trip, of the princess kissing a shirtless Dodi on the boat, “were the direct result of tips from Diana herself.” After they were published, she called photographer Jason Fraser, who “was in cahoots” with Mario Brenna, who shot the images, to ask why the pictures were so grainy. But she wasn’t the only one working with the press. Mohamed also had a publicist tip gossip columns on her and Dodi’s whereabouts and frame their getaway as a sensational romance, according to Brown.

Meanwhile, Dodi was juggling this burgeoning love story with another one. He was already engaged when he first joined Diana on the boat at his father’s behest in July. His fiancée was Kelly Fisher , an American actress and model, and their wedding was scheduled for the following month, on August 9, 1997. He had even left Fisher in Paris to board the Jonikal in St. Tropez. She joined later but, just as it’s shown in The Crown , she was relegated to a different Al-Fayed boat, where Dodi would visit her at night, Brown writes. Fisher soon caught on. In August, she sued Dodi for breach of contract, and was represented by high-profile lawyer Gloria Allred. But she withdrew the suit after his death.

In Spare , Harry remembered thinking Dodi was “cheeky” but overall was content with the relationship: “As long as Mummy’s happy, I told Willy, who said, he felt the same.” But Brown reported in her 2007 book that Prince William grew concerned. He told friends it was weird that they were on vacation with what seemed like a “substitute family.” When photos of Diana and Dodi on the boat were published, William complained to her that the boys at school would mock him for it.

After doing significant charity work in Bosnia with land mine victims, Diana reconvened with Dodi on the Jonikal in August. “The fact that she came back for a second visit so soon really shows her loneliness more than it does a passion for Dodi,” Dominick Dunne reported for Vanity Fair in 2008. But the privacy—or whatever amount of it that they had—might have appealed to her. “A splendid yacht. A helicopter. A private plane. Guards to keep the paparazzi at bay. She probably knew that she was being used by a social climber for his and his son’s advancement in London society, but in high society it was a fair deal. Each benefited.”

Dodi and Diana’s romance would be short-lived, but he showered her with gifts during their six-week relationship, including a pearl bracelet and diamond wristwatch, according to Vanity Fair . With him, the princess felt “so taken care of,” her confidant Lady Elsa Bowker told Brown. And on top of that, he was a “sympathetic, unthreatening listener,” wrote Tom Bower, author of Mohamed Al-Fayed’s unauthorized biography.

But their relationship probably wasn’t going to be a lasting one. According to Brown, Diana suspected Dodi might propose to her, but told a friend that the ring would go “firmly on the fourth finger of my right hand,” meaning she would not have accepted. Her sister Sarah McCorquodale later testified, “I just did not think the relationship had much longer to go.”

It’s been believed that the romance was even orchestrated by Mohamed himself. According to Bower, the older Al-Fayed would check in on Dodi and Diana during the trip (which is also portrayed in The Crown this season). McCorquodale also told the court that Diana “thought the boat was being bugged by Mr Al-Fayed Senior.”

On that second trip in August, Diana and Dodi were photographed together in the South of France and Sardinia, before heading to Paris for their tragic final days. There, they would be chased by cameras again for the last time.

Erica Gonzales is the Senior Culture Editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage on TV, movies, music, books, and more. She was previously an editor at HarpersBAZAAR.com. There is a 75 percent chance she's listening to Lorde right now. 

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Inside the Superyacht Princess Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed Spent Their Final Vacation On

A look at the vessel that saw the beloved royal’s last vacation.

It was hot gossip, this adventure that the princess took abroad after having finalized her divorce from then Prince Charles less than a year before—something that was hinted at at the end of season 5 of The Crown as Queen Elizabeth is pressed to endorse a vacation a-sea with Fayed and her grandchildren, Prince Harry and Prince William. Diana was famously photographed sitting on the passerelle of this boat. Years later, in real life, Harry described the trip in his memoir, Spare , with fond recollection. “Everything about that trip to St. Tropez was heaven,” he wrote.

While the series was filmed on a lookalike super yacht in Mallorca , the real boat was equally lavish. The 208-foot ship was commissioned by Dodi’s father, former Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed, who brought on naval architect Vincenzo Ruggiero to design it in the late 1980s. It was built by Italian shipyard Codecasa and launched in 1990. The steel and aluminum super yacht boasted nine staterooms that altogether accommodate up to 18 people, in addition to a crew of 26. Amenities included a Jacuzzi, swim platform, sun deck, formal dining room, a bar, and office space. Mohamed had named the yacht Jonikal (it has subsequently been called Sokar and is currently called Bash ) .

Shortly after Diana’s and Dodi’s deaths, Mohamed gave the interior a redesign by H2 Yacht Design and a refit that included extending the hull. He attempted to sell the yacht on a number of occasions, ultimately parting with it in 2014 to an anonymous buyer. The new owner carried out further work, including machinery upgrades, a repaint, and fresh teak decks. In 2021, the yacht came into the hands of Bassim Haidar , the founder of Intercomm and GMT, who gave it a further $9.7 million refit after a reported bridge deck fire—and its current name Bash . It’s now back to turn-key condition after an 18-month remodel completed in April 2023 by marine engineering and management company Capax and boat interior company Bobic Yacht Interiors . It features a beauty salon, massage area, high-tech gym, and a spacious main salon.

In May, Robb Report reported that Bash is available for charter in the Mediterranean starting at $278,000 per week, plus expenses. In June, Haidar listed Bash for $16.8 million, according to Boat International .

There was a second motor yacht named Cujo, which Diana and Fayed also took earlier that summer. It was built in Italy in 1972 for John von Neumann, who commissioned the Italian Baglietto shipyard to build the world's fastest motor yacht. She was given two 18-cylinder engines that allowed it to go as fast as 42 knots. Fayed had bought the boat from his cousin, Saudi businessman and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. In August, the Mediterranean Sea reclaimed Cujo, as the 62-foot artifact of Diana’s life hit an unidentified object off Beaulieu-sur-Mer on July 29 and sprang a leak, Vanity Fair reported. The seven people on board were rescued by teams from Antibes and safely returned to shore.

An imitation of Jonikal will feature in The Crown season 6, a set that was intended to visually illuminate the tension between Diana and the royal family. “Diana’s south of France adventure was bright and lovely pastel colors, and her world even in Kensington Palace is optimistic and warm, compared to the queen’s residence at Balmoral, which is very static, with gloomy light and drab colors,” set decorator Alison Harvey tells ELLE DECOR.

Filming on the yacht off the island of Mallorca (a St. Tropez stand-in) required many moving parts with few do-overs. “We brought in the drapes, the artwork, many furnishings,” Harvey explains. “Everything was set in the early ’90s, so we thought hard about the colors and textures that we brought in.” Harvey’s team had just half a day to dress the yacht, and then it was off to sea. “There was no getting on or off after that,” Harvey says, adding that they were “subsumed by the logistics of what we had to achieve and the time we had to do it.”

However painstaking the process, the yacht scenes will offer an intriguing context—though largely fictitious—for the iconic photographs that exist of those final weeks leading up to Diana’s death.

Rachel Silva, the Assistant Digital Editor at ELLE DECOR, covers design, architecture, trends, and anything to do with haute couture. She has previously written for Time, The Wall Street Journal, and Citywire.

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Yacht that Princess Diana spent last summer on with Dodi Al-Fayed sinks to bottom of Mediterranean

Cujo, which made front-page news around the world back in the summer of 1997 when Diana was entertained on board a year after her divorce from Prince Charles, went down in 2500m (8200ft) of water.

Thursday 3 August 2023 17:00, UK

A motor yacht used by Princess Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Al-Fayed on their final summer holiday in the South of France before they died in a Paris car crash has sunk.

The 19m (62ft) Cujo went down 21 miles (35km) off Beaulieu-sur-Mer after sending out a mayday call last Saturday.

The seven people on board the luxury vessel, which was taking on water, were rescued by teams from Antibes before it sank to the bottom of the Mediterranean at a depth of 2500m (8200ft).

They were safely returned to shore.

The area was monitored for pollution as the boat sank with 7,000 litres of diesel in its tanks.

Cujo made front page news around the world back in the summer of 1997 when Al-Fayed entertained Diana onboard, a year after her divorce from Prince Charles, which was finalised in August 1996.

That summer, Diana was also photographed on Sokar, the yacht then owned by al Fayed's billionaire father Mohamed.

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It had previously been named Jonikal.

Cujo was built in Italy in 1972 for businessman John von Neumann who told the Italian Baglietto shipyard that he wanted the world's fastest motor yacht.

She was fitted with two 18-cylinder engines giving her a top speed of 42 knots.

Van Neumann then sold the boat to the son of Saudi businessman and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and he sold her on to his cousin, al Fayed.

Cujo was frequently moored off St Tropez, a famous celebrity hangout on the French Riviera, with guests including Clint Eastwood, Tony Curtis and Bruce Willis.

Following the death of Diana and Al-Fayed in central Paris on 31 August 1997, Cujo fell into disrepair.

She was decommissioned in 1999, and spent years in storage, before being restored by new owners.

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The Harrowing Symbolism Behind the Famous Diving Board Photo of Princess Diana

On October 9, Netflix announced the first half of the sixth season of The Crown on Twitter by sharing a single image: Elizabeth Debicki, sitting on a diving board in a turquoise swimsuit, with her back to the camera as she stares out into the sea. With over 2.6 million views, it’s a visual that resonated with many—and not just because of the Netflix marketing department’s graphic design skills.

There are tens of thousands of photos of Princess Diana in existence. A handful of them, including the royal in front of the Taj Mahal and wearing the little black “revenge dress,” are considered iconic. There is, however, perhaps only one of those legendary images that could be considered harrowing.

On August 24, 1997—a week before her tragic death in Paris—paparazzi captured Princess Diana sitting on the diving board upon Mohamed Al Fayed’s private yacht “Jonikal” off the coast of Portofino. What was intended to be a private vacation quickly turned into a media circus after the British tabloids published her kissing Fayed’s son, Dodi, on board. Bids for those photos went up to £500,000. Although Diana always had a de-facto bounty on her head, it was now at an eye-watering and dangerous sum—especially as rumors that the Princess was pregnant, or engaged, began to swirl.

As a result, paparazzi swarmed her the entire trip, desperate to capture the Princess and her new love interest. One of those photos? Diana, solo, on a diving board. Even far off shore, she could be tracked down by a camera lens—and, therefore, never alone.

The Crown's Elizabeth Debicki in the poster for the show’s final season. 

Once she arrived in Paris, an accessible and busy metropolis, this clamor to take her photograph reached a fever pitch. On August 31, while being chased by paparazzi on motorbikes, the car Diana was being driven in by an intoxicated driver crashed in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. According to witness testimony, paparazzi continued to take photos as the couple lay dying.

Over two decades after her death, the haunting photo of her on the diving board is still seared into our consciousness: a symbol of  Diana’s glamor, her isolation, and the relentless pursuit of her likeliness. It was used for the 2013 poster of the biopic Diana, starring Naomi Watts, and inspired SZA’s cover art for her album SOS. “I just loved how isolated she felt, and that was what I wanted to convey the most,” the musician told Hot 97 . Now, Peter Morgan and The Crown are just the latest to have harnessed its emotional power.

While it’s unclear how much the photo will play a role in the upcoming season, the show will cover Diana’s final days—bringing the tragic story of the final weeks of Diana’s life front and center once again.

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See Inside the Superyacht Princess Diana Shared With Dodi Fayed

Since her untimely death in August of 1997, Princess Diana’s last summer spent with Dodi Al-Fayed has been described in various ways: a passionate love affair, a fake publicity stunt, a temporary fling, a rouse to infuriate another suiter, or the beginning of a lifelong commitment. Although the stories change, the setting remains: a summer tour through the Mediterranean aboard a multi-million dollar superyacht. Later this year, nearly 25 years to the day, the 208-foot vessel will launch for sale again. 

The yacht is full of glossy and dark wood paneling. 

Originally named Jonikal , then Sokar , and most recently Bash , the luxury vessel was first owned by Mohamed Al-Fayed, former owner of Harrods and father of Dodi Al-Fayed. During the fateful summer, Al-Fayed hosted Princess Di and her two sons aboard the Jonikal . After the couple’s tragic death, Mohamed Al-Fayed attempted to sell the yacht numerous times before it was finally bought in 2014. It was most recently purchased by Bassim Haidar in June of 2021, who is selling it just over a year later as he reportedly has plans to upgrade to a larger vessel. “She is in the yard being refitted, and will be launched for sale in September,” said John Wood, director at Seawood Yachts. 

Coffered ceilings add a dramatic, yet timeless feel. 

Bash , as the yacht is currently named, was designed by navel architect Vincenzo Ruggiero in the 1980s and built by the superyacht building firm Codecasa before launching in 1990. The vessel can hold up to 18 people across nine staterooms in addition to rooms for 26 crew members. Among many notable features, Bash includes a jacuzzi, swim platform, sun deck, a formal dining room, main saloon, a bar, and office space. Full of dark wood paneling and coffered ceilings, the interiors are reminiscent of the Arts and Crafts style of the early 1900s. 

The vessel includes nine staterooms in addition to plenty of space for the crew. 

Powered by Wärtsilä engines, the yacht has a cruising speed of 15 knots and top speeds of 20 knots. Even though an exact price hasn’t been advertised just yet, the last time the boat was sold, it was listed for $10,000,000. 

The Famous Superyacht on Which Dodi Fayed Courted Princess Diana in the Summer of 1997 Sinks to the Bottom of the Mediterranean Sea

If you were around that summer 26 years ago, you remember this vessel well from the hordes of photos taken of it with the Princess of Wales aboard.

Last August 31 was the 25-year anniversary of the deaths of Princess Diana , Dodi Fayed, and Henri Paul, who passed away as a result of a Parisian car accident in the early morning hours of that day in 1997. (Diana’s bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones was severely injured but survived the crash.) The summer of 1997 will come to the forefront once more in the forthcoming season six of Netflix’s The Crown , due to debut later this year, and we will no doubt see scenes of Diana and Dodi from their final summer together aboard the superyacht Cujo—a vessel that has made headlines this week.

The Cujo sinking on July 29, 2023

In an unexpected twist to the story, 26 years after Diana and Dodi enjoyed its comforts, Cujo sunk to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea on July 29, with seven passengers aboard. (All seven are safe and unharmed, thankfully.) People reports that the yacht—of which thousands upon thousands of paparazzi photos were taken in the summer of 1997, as the press tried to figure out the relationship between Diana and Dodi—was “sinking due to a leak” after it allegedly hit an unidentified object on the French Riviera, according to an officer. “The skipper of the Cujo issued a Mayday,” an officer said, per The Independent . “Rescue boats were sent from Antibes and, after making sure everyone was safe, gendarmes detected a significant water leak at the level of the starboard front hull. Her owner had activated the pumps and kept the engines running, but this didn’t stop the boat sinking.”

Gendarmerie des Alpes-Maritimes, a branch of the French military, released a statement addressing the incident on its Facebook page, where it was disclosed that the Antibes Nautical Brigade first responded to a distress call at 12:30 p.m. local time for a yacht located 35 kilometers off the coast of Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France, People reports. “When they arrived at the scene 45 minutes later, the ship was already sinking, and the cabins had begun to flood,” the outlet writes. “The seven passengers were already transferred to a life raft and examined for injuries before being taken back to shore.”

Princess Diana that final summer aboard Fayed's boat

After first meeting at a polo match in 1986—in which Dodi was playing against Diana’s then-husband, Prince Charles —Diana and Dodi reconnected romantically over a decade later after Dodi’s father, Mohamed al Fayed, invited the princess and her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry , to vacation at their villa in St. Tropez, France. Diana and Dodi developed a connection aboard the 20-meter superyacht, as the world watched and wondered through paparazzi photos taken of them at the time. Dodi himself owned the Cujo and had spent around £1 million refitting the boat “and wooed Diana on board, as the world’s media looked on,” The Independent reports.

Princess Diana and Prince Harry on the Fayed boat

Princess Diana waves at bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, who would be the sole survivor in the crash that took her life not long after this photo was taken

We’ll never know what would have come from the seemingly budding romance, as the two were killed riding side by side together through a tunnel in Paris—Dodi instantly in the tunnel, and Diana later at the hospital. The car in which they were riding was traveling at 121 mph in order to escape the aforementioned paparazzi chasing them on motorcycles—trailing them this time on land rather than, as they had all summer, at sea. The chase, plus driver Paul’s intoxication, led to the triple fatal crash and the end to any happiness Diana and Dodi might have shared together—the beginnings of which are now resting at the bottom of the Mediterranean.

Cujo—frequently moored off St. Tropez—saw other celebrity guests including Clint Eastwood and Bruce Willis. After Dodi’s death, Cujo fell into disrepair and was decommissioned two years later in 1999. It spent years in storage before being restored by new owners.

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Rachel Burchfield is a writer, editor, and podcaster whose primary interests are fashion and beauty, society and culture, and, most especially, the British Royal Family and other royal families around the world. She serves as Marie Claire’s Senior Celebrity and Royals Editor and has also contributed to publications like Allure, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, InStyle, People, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and W, among others. Before taking on her current role with Marie Claire, Rachel served as its Weekend Editor and later Royals Editor. She is the cohost of  Podcast Royal , a show that was named a top five royal podcast by The New York Times. A voracious reader and lover of books, Rachel also hosts  I’d Rather Be Reading , which spotlights the best current nonfiction books hitting the market and interviews the authors of them. Rachel frequently appears as a media commentator, and she or her work has appeared on outlets like NBC’s Today Show, ABC’s Good Morning America, CNN, and more. 

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Party Yacht Where Princess Diana Spent Her Final Vacation Sinks in France

One more artifact from the late Princess Diana’s life is no more: The Cujo , the superyacht where she and boyfriend Dodi Fayed spent many sunny days, including their final summer vacation before they both died in a car crash in August 1997, has sunk in the French Riviera, according to French authorities .

Seven passengers were rescued from the boat on the afternoon of July 29 after it struck an unidentified object off Beaulieu-sur-Mer and struck a leak that would prove to be the end of its voyages. By the time the Antibes Nautical Brigade, part of the French military’s Gendarmerie des Alpes-Maritimes, responded to the distress call about 45 minutes later, all seven passengers had been evacuated to a life raft and the ship had started sinking.

The yacht was 20 meters long, and originally launched in 1972. According to BOAT International , Austrian Jon von Neumann, who introduced the Porsche brand to the United States, originally commissioned the boat and asked that it be built to break speed records.

After Neumann, the Cujo was owned by the family of Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi , before coming into Fayed’s care, according to the New York Post . In addition to Diana, Fayed hosted celebrities like Brooke Shields, Bruce Willis , and Clint Eastwood on the yacht in the late ‘90s. According to the Robb Report, later owner Simon Kidston sold the boat to “a young member of a prominent Italian business family” in 2021.

Paparazzi swarmed Diana and Fayed’s summer 1997 adventures onboard the Cujo and the Jonikal , another yacht on which the couple spent time sailing in St. Tropez, including just days before their death. They were hot gossip, with Diana having finalized her divorce from then-prince Charles less than a year before. At the tail end of season five of The Crown on Netflix, Diana is invited to vacation asea with Fayed with her children, Prince Harry and Prince William , a trip that did happen in real life.

Harry recounted the July 1997 jaunt in his memoir, Spare . “Everything about that trip to St. Tropez was heaven,” he wrote. 

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How The Crown Recreated the Iconic Princess Diana Diving Board Photo

Spoiler alert: It wasn't actually a diving board she was sitting on.

"It's the platform you [use to] get on and off the yacht," reveals Alison Harvey, The Crown 's series set director. Or the passerelle, as it is more commonly known in the boating world.

Nevertheless, it was that haunting image, which would later send shockwaves around the world following Diana's passing, that was poignantly chosen as the main poster of the sixth and final season of The Crown . And according to the show's production team, recreating the photo took a village.

"We were very lucky to go to a real superyacht. I think if we tried to do it from scratch we would have never made that," Harvey says of remaking Mohamed Al Fayed 's 208-ft yacht, Jonikal, for the series. "We had the bones of the set that we then enhanced with more period details to make it feel more like the Fayed's world."

The result: the interior of the yacht featured a blue and yellow motif with Egyptian art, paintings, fabrics and patterns from the '90s. "Everything [was] stylized to fit the Fayed world to counteract with The Queen's world, which is a much more dreary environment," continues Harvey. "It was that old money, new money [kind of thing]."

Getting Elizabeth Debicki , who plays Diana in the series, to look exactly like the Princess of Wales in that moment also required some reimagining. "There were some restrictions in term of copyright and what we could show, what we couldn't show, and how the picture was taken," explains Harvey, "so it was slightly adapted for our purposes."

For starters, the hair and makeup department were tasked with making a wig that looked like Diana's hair post-swim. "The challenge was really this thing of realizing that iconic Diana but without being able to fall back on her very manufactured hair and makeup that we're used to seeing in the media," Cate Hall, hair & makeup designer of The Crown , explains. "Obviously [Elizabeth's wearing] a wig, but it's about if you look at the shading, the color, the tone and the way it's sitting. Most of our efforts go into any which way we can into making [wigs] look natural and I think it does look natural and lived in."

Then the costume department had to recreate the turquoise bathing suit to look identical to the one Diana wore in real life. "We didn't get the [actual] designer to do it," says Sidonie Roberts, The Crown 's co-costume designer, "so it was our version of it."

While "it was relatively simple" to do so, "the question with us with Elizabeth was what does she feel comfortable in? Because '90s to 2000s swimwear is pretty high on the thigh," says Roberts. "That I think was our first fitting with her, so it was getting a balance between the actual shape and also what Elizabeth, as an actress would feel comfortable, being quite exposed, in this scene. But in terms of color, we just went similarly as the other one because it is a moment in itself and we wanted to keep that iconic moment as it was."

In the days that followed that photo, Princess Diana and Dodi traveled to Paris, where they died in car crash on August 31 . Diana was 36 and Dodi 42. The first part of The Crown, which is available to stream on Netflix now , follows the weeks leading up to and after their death. The rest of the season is set to hit the streaming platform Thursday, December 14.

Sophie Dweck is the associate shopping editor for Town & Country, where she covers beauty, fashion, home and décor, and more. 

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Here Are The Real Photos Of Diana On Vacation That Inspired Those Scenes In The Crown

The Princess of Wales did indeed have a little chat with paparazzi on a boat.

The sixth and final season of The Crown got off to an emotional start by depicting Princess Diana’s final weeks before her death in August 1997. At the time, Princess Diana was newly dating Dodi Fayed, son of Harrod’s owner Mohamed Al-Fayed and famously spent time on Al-Fayed’s yacht in the south of France that summer with 12-year-old Prince Harry and 15-year-old Prince William. She was being constantly followed by the paparazzi, and is seen confronting photographers in The Crown in an effort to get them to leave her sons alone so they could enjoy their holiday. Which, according to photos taken of the princess at the time, appears to be at least somewhat based on a real event.

Season 6, Part 1 of The Crown saw Princess Diana (played by Elizabeth Debicki) vacationing off the coast of Saint-Tropez with her sons, Prince Harry and Prince William (played by Fflyn Edwards and Rufus Kampa, respectively), on Al-Fayed’s yacht. If The Crown is to be believed, Prince William in particular was struggling to have a good time on his holiday because of the constant presence of the paparazzi. And so, Princess Diana decided to throw on a swimsuit and jet over to the photographers to pose for some shots in an effort to get them to leave.

The Crown’s version...

“Enjoying your holiday?” a member of the paparazzi asks Princess Diana in The Crown when she is seen approaching them on a boat, and she replies. “Yes, we’re having a lovely time, apart from one little thing, you lot. Seriously, how long are we going to have the pleasure of your company? The attention is starting to freak out the boys.”

She offered the paparazzi a “surprise” if they would leave her sons alone as they snapped photos of her. And while we don’t know if the real Princess Diana offered them a surprise, she absolutely did confront them that summer.

How it looked in real life...

A year after Princess Diana’s death in a car crash in Paris, journalist and biographer Sally Bedell Smith wrote about the royal’s relationship with the paparazzi for Vanity Fair — in particular, that fateful summer in the south of France. “On a holiday in July 1997 with her boyfriend Dodi Fayed and his family in Saint-Tropez,” Bedell Smith wrote at the time, “she first eluded paparazzi by crawling along a balcony and hiding behind a towel, then surprised a contingent of British tabloid reporters and photographers ... by addressing them from her motorboat in a fetching leopard-print bathing suit. ‘You will have a big surprise coming soon, the next thing I do,’ she teased, and implied that she was thinking of living abroad.”

This wasn’t the only moment that the Netflix series recreated from Princess Diana’s holiday that last summer. Princess Diana was also seen in a super colorful swim suit, hanging out on the beach with her sons. A scene The Crown pulled off perfectly.

In real life, most of the photos from that moment were taken with Princess Diana spending time with her sons on the yacht, even wrapping her son Prince Harry up in a big hug while wearing the iconic swimsuit.

Princess Diana was also photographed sitting on the diving board of Al-Fayed’s yacht, all alone in a bright blue bathing suit. Looking, some might say, quite lonely.

Like the series showed, Princess Diana in 1997 was also seen wearing a bright blue one-piece swimsuit, staring off into space.

While The Crown has certainly done an impeccable job of recreating real-life photos of moments from the lives of royals, it’s important to remember that these are dramatized and fictionalized versions of real events. No matter how spot-on they might look to us.

This article was originally published on November 20, 2023

• Entertainment

How One Photo Immortalized Princess Diana’s Loneliness

O f the many photos of Diana, Princess of Wales , one image has become iconic for capturing the unnerving loneliness she experienced during her life. The photo shows Diana in a candid moment alone, sitting on the end of a diving board.

It's a picture that helped define the essence of the People's Princess—a glamorous outsider, the patron saint of isolation, a public figure who struggled to protect her personal life. It should come as no surprise that when Netflix announced Season 6 of The Crown , the first installment of which debuted on Nov. 16, the streamer shared the news by recreating the famed image of the princess, reimagining it with actor Elizabeth Debicki: Her back is to the camera, her chin protectively tucked into her shoulder in Diana's signature habit, her loneliness in full view even as so much as her is obscured.

Read more: 25 Years After Princess Diana's Death, She's Still Shaping the Royal Family

The Crown is hardly the first to pay homage to the photo—from the promotional poster for the 2013 Naomi Watts-fronted film Diana to the invitation to the Off-White Spring/Summer 2018 fashion show , which was inspired by Princess Diana, the diving board photo has been reproduced, reappropriated, and referenced, looming large in the collective imagination, a tangible visual for the melancholy of Diana's life. Most recently, the musical artist SZA recreated the photo for the album artwork for her album, SOS , a decision she said she was drawn to because of "isolated" the princess appeared.

More From TIME

"Originally I was supposed to be on top of a shipping barge, but in the references that I pulled for that, I pulled the Diana reference,” SZA said in an interview with Hot 97 . “Because I just loved how isolated she felt, and that was what I wanted to convey the most.”

SZA confirms theory that Princess Diana inspired her ‘SOS’ album cover. pic.twitter.com/61biLn7JXm — Pop Base (@PopBase) December 7, 2022

The image would be striking for its composition alone. Diana, clad in a turquoise one-piece bathing suit, perches, almost precariously, on the edge of the diving board of Mohamed al-Fayed 's private yacht, with seemingly nothing but sea surrounding her. That the photo is a long shot taken by a paparazzo, six days ahead of her death, in the throes of a media maelstrom that had erupted after tabloid pictures were published of her kissing al-Fayed's son, Dodi, reads in retrospect like ominous foreshadowing.

Read more : How Princess Diana Changed Lives by Discussing Her Mental Health

And while there's no shortage of photos that illustrate how alone the princess often felt in royal life— her awkward Balmoral engagement photo with an aloof Charles , the shot of her wearing her black sheep sweater to a polo match , the infamous picture of her solo visit to the Taj Mahal —the image of Diana sitting solo on the diving board has become one of the most iconic images because it highlights the bittersweet isolation of Diana's life—a woman who could never be alone, but was no stranger to being lonely.

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Yacht used by Princess Diana and lover Dodi Fayed on final summer holiday sinks

Seven people on board were rescued following the accident off the coast of france, article bookmarked.

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The world-famous celebrity yacht used by Princess Diana on her final summer holiday in France has sunk to the bottom of the sea.

Cujo, once also a favourite of Hollywood superstars, disappeared below the Mediterranean waves after hitting an unidentified object off Beaulieu-sur-Mer, on the French Riviera, on Saturday.

Seven people on board were rescued following the accident, but the boat ended up at a depth of almost 2500m around 18 nautical miles off the coast.

“The skipper of the Cujo issued a Mayday,” said one officer. “His ship was sinking due to a leak.

“Rescue boats were sent from Antibes, and, after making sure everyone was safe, gendarmes detected a significant water leak at the level of the starboard front hull.

“Her owner had activated the pumps and kept the engines running, but this didn’t stop the boat sinking.”

All of those on board, including the Cujo‘s Italian owner, were placed in a rescue boat, and taken back to shore uninjured.

Reports about Cujo - an Indian word that means ‘Unstoppable Force’ - dominated the media in August 1997, when it was owned by Diana’s boyfriend, Dodi Al-Fayed.

The multi-millionaire film producer had spent some £1m refitting the boat, and wooed Diana on board, as the world’s media looked on.

This was shortly before the couple died in a car crash in central Paris caused by their drunk driver.

That summer, Diana was also photographed on Sokar, the yacht then owned by Al-Fayed’s father, retail billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed.

Cujo was built in Italy in 1972 for businessman John von Neumann after he told Italy’s Baglietto shipyard that he wanted the world’s fastest motor yacht.

She was fitted with two 18-cylinder engines that ensured she had a top speed of 42 knots.

Van Neumann then sold the boat to the son of Adnan Khashoggi, the world’s richest arms dealer, and he sold her on to his cousin, Dodi Al-Fayed.

Cujo was frequently moored off St Tropez, the most famous celebrity hotspot on the Riviera, with celebrity guests including Clint Eastwood, Tony Curtis and Bruce Willis on board.

Following the death of Princess Diana and Mr Al-Fayed, Cujo fell into disrepair.

She was decommissioned in 1999, and spent years in storage, before being restored by new owners.

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Luxury Yacht Used By Princess Diana In 1997 To Go Up For Sale

The 63 metre superyacht is now about to go up for sale again.

Image Credit: Getty Images

The luxury yacht that Princess Diana spent her final holiday in 1997 on is about to go up for sale. At the time Diana holidayed in St Tropez on it, the superyacht was named  Jonikal . It has since been bought and sold a few times and is currently known as  Bash . Its most recent owner bought it in June last year, but now reportedly wants to upgrade to a bigger boat.

The yacht was owned by Mohamed Al-Fayed, who tried to sell the superyacht various times after his son Dodi (Diana’s partner at the time) and the Princess of Wales were killed in a car accident in Paris in 1997.

Al-Fayed, who used to own Fulham FC and Harrods, eventually sold the 63-metre vessel in 2014. It has changed hands a couple of times since then, going by such names as Sokar and Bash .

The yacht was most recently owned by a rich businessman called Bassim Haidar, who purchased the superyacht last year and now reportedly wants to trade it in for a bigger vessel.

House & Garden UK reports that the boat is currently being refitted “with plans to launch it for sale next month.” The luxury yacht was designed by navel architect Vincenzo Ruggiero in the 1980s, and was first launched in 1990. It reportedly has nine staterooms capable of accommodating up to 18 guests and 26 crew.

The yacht also has a jacuzzi, a swim platform, a sun deck, a formal dining room, a bar, and office space. Though there is no official asking price yet for this September’s imminent sale, it was previously listed for $10,000,000 (and it last sold for around $14 million).

RELATED: What It Costs To Moor A Superyacht At The Monaco Grand Prix

The yacht will be listed for sale through  Seawood Yachts  next month, with director John Wood telling House & Garden : “She is in the yard being refitted, and will be launched for sale in September.”

Princess Diana holidayed on the yacht in July 1997 in St Tropez, cruising in the Mediterranean for about four weeks. It was during this time the iconic shot of her sitting on a diving board was taken. Prince William and Prince Harry joined Princess Diana for part of the trip – before she continued on to Paris with her partner at the time Dodi Al-Fayed.

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Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed's iconic love boat is now at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea

• The yacht on which Princess Diana holidayed with Dodi Fayed is now at the bottom of the sea, per The Times .
• The boat, named Cujo, sank after it collided with an unidentified object off the French Riviera.
• Cujo has changed hands multiple times in recent years and was most recently owned by a wealthy Italian family.

The yacht where Princess Diana spent part of her last summer with Dodi Fayed has sunk to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.

The boat, named Cujo, sank on July 29 after colliding with an unidentified object off Beaulieu-sur-Mer on the French Riviera, The Times reported.

The Gendarmerie des Alpes-Maritimes uploaded a statement onto their Facebook page confirming that they responded to a distress call from a boat that was in trouble about 35 kilometers, or 22 miles, off the coast.

By the time the coast guards arrived at the scene, the yacht was already partially submerged.

"The distressed yacht is already starting to sink from the front and the 7 shipwrecked are just next to it in a life raft," the statement said. "The cabins of the yacht are already flooded, only a few suitcases located in the kitchen and on the deck can be retrieved."

The Gendarmerie des Alpes-Maritimes added that they would remain in the area to monitor pollution because the yacht sank with almost 7,000 liters of diesel in its tanks.

Related stories

When Insider reached out to the Gendarmerie des Alpes-Maritimes for direct confirmation of the boat's identity, the organization told Insider "to search via Google."

Cujo made international headlines in 1997 when Princess Diana was photographed onboard with its then-owner Fayed, per Robb Report .

That summer, Princess Diana was also photographed onboard another yacht owned by Fayed's father, the Jonikal — which was subsequently renamed Sokar, per The Times.

Mere weeks later, the two of them died in a car crash in Paris while trying to escape the paparazzi.

Following their deaths, Cujo fell into disrepair and was decommissioned in 1999, per Robb Report. After a few years in storage, Fayed's cousin, Moody Al-Fayed, spent over $1 million restoring the boat before he sold it to a British car collector Simon Kidston for €160,000, or $175,400.

Kidston subsequently sold the boat to its current owner in 2021, he told Robb Report.

"A young member of a prominent Italian business family—he's 30 years old—had seen Cujoin Lavagna, fallen in love with her and asked if she was for sale," Kidston told Robb Report.

Watch: The rise and fall of the cruise industry

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DEATH OF THE PRINCESS -- COLLISION COURSE: A special report.

Diana and the Paparazzi: A Morality Tale

By Roger Cohen

• Sept. 6, 1997

Throughout the summer, Diana, Princess of Wales, and the photographers who pursued her were bound in a dance of attraction and repulsion that reached the deadly limit of its contradictions on the last day of her life.

From St.-Tropez to Sardinia to the last fatal visit to Paris -- the predictable summer haunts of the rich and famous -- the dance had gone on, ever more tense and confused. By the time Diana reached a Paris apartment of her companion Dodi Fayed last Saturday, and found the paparazzi awaiting her there, the couple had clearly had enough.

Yet just a few weeks earlier -- after the lavish 50th birthday party offered by her former husband, Prince Charles, for his girlfriend Camilla Parker Bowles on July 18 -- Diana had not been averse to using photographers to carry the message that she, too, had put a loveless marriage behind her.

''It was clear enough to all of us that she wanted to show the British establishment she was free,'' said Frederic Garcia, a photographer for the Angeli agency who spent the summer Diana-watching in St.-Tropez. ''She knew we were there, and she did not avoid us. We were the means she chose to make her union with Dodi official.''

The resulting photographs -- of Diana swimming, of the couple strolling in St.-Tropez, of Mr. Fayed's hand on Diana's backside as they embrace aboard a boat -- amounted, for Paris Match, to ''the image of the summer of 1997.'' The magazine declared in mid-August, ''The most photographed woman in the world is in love, and Dodi may soon slip a diamond as big as the Ritz on her finger.''

Mr. Fayed did indeed give Diana a $205,400 diamond solitaire ring, and he did so at the Ritz Hotel just hours before they were killed in a car crash early Sunday. But by then, with Mr. Fayed's anger mounting, the relationship between the photographers and the couple that had seemed at times to exist in July had degenerated.

''What that ring meant, we shall probably never know,'' Michael Cole, a Fayed family spokesman, said today. Nor, perhaps, will the exact circumstances of Diana's death ever be known, so clouded is it in contradictory accounts and nascent myth.

What is clear is that the Princess's death is a modern morality tale. For countless magazines, she was the consummate image of a highly saleable fantasy of romance and royalty and rebellion. Some believe that it was the paparazzi recklessly pursuing that image who drove Diana to her death.

Others have a more banal conviction: that she and Mr. Fayed, flying too close to the sun, belatedly flailing against the photographers who had announced their romance to the world just weeks earlier, were taken to their deaths in a Paris tunnel by a hopelessly drunken driver.

The Last Day

Growing Annoyance With Photographers

It was far from Paris, on a yacht anchored off the coast of Sardinia, that the couple's last day began. From beginning to end, their exasperation -- particularly that of Mr. Fayed -- with the photographers was clearly mounting.

Swimming beside the boat that morning, at the end of a weeklong vacation, the couple were photographed. There was, according to the Fayed family, an altercation with Italian photographers who approached on a speedboat and asked them to pose.

Then, on arriving later at Le Bourget airport near Paris at 3:20 P.M. aboard a private jet from Olbia, Sardinia, they found more photographers waiting for them. On motorbikes, the photographers pursued them into town. A spokesman for the Fayed family said today that Diana had expressed concern that one of the bikers might get killed, so recklessly were they driving.

''It's remarkable that in Paris, they were photographed all day,'' said Bernard Dartevelle, a lawyer for the Fayed family. ''From pictures confiscated by the police, you can see that they were followed constantly, that security guards had to intervene, that Diana was trying to avoid the camera, and that Dodi was annoyed.''

One of the first Paris photographs shows the couple disembarking from the plane and Henri Paul, the assistant chief of security at the Ritz, awaiting them. He drove them to Mr. Fayed's apartment in the Rue Arsene Houssaye, less than a block from the Arc de Triomphe. Outside the apartment, shortly after 4 P.M., were several paparazzi.

The photographers' lenses amounted to a reminder of what, for Diana, had been a particularly hectic summer. She had posed for the cover of the July issue of Vanity Fair. The accompanying article drew an elaborate parallel between her decision to sell much of her royal wardrobe at Christie's on June 25 and the decision to embark on a new and far less fettered life.

Then, on July 22, there she was in the Cathedral in Milan, comforting arm thrown around a tearful Elton John, at the memorial service for the slain Italian fashion designer, her friend Gianni Versace.

A month later, on Aug. 27, the image was again of Diana-as-comforter, but this time it was a child in her arms, a cancer-ridden Pakistani child, used by the French daily Le Monde to illustrate what turned out to be the last interview she gave.

The interview was essentially about images -- the use of them in the modern world -- and Diana had chosen this photograph from February 1996 as a favorite. In the photograph, the child's blind upward gaze, the Princess's hand clasping his hand and Diana's expression of intense compassion are fused in a fresco of charity and comfort.

''Being permanently in the public eye gives me a special responsibility,'' Diana said. ''Notably that of using the impact of photographs to get a message across, a message about an important cause or certain values. If I had to define my role, I would say that I was a messenger.''

A Strained Bond

Finally Avoiding The Paparazzi

So, it seems, the Diana who found herself in Dodi Fayed's apartment off the Champs-Elysees on the last day of her life was a woman linked by her own design and desire to the photographers able to get her message across. The bond was often strained, occasionally violent, but it seems it was essential to Diana's role as she conceived it.

As relayed through photographs in recent months, Diana's role had been a seductive mixture of charitable envoy to the world's underprivileged and sick, member of the world's fashion elite, estranged but reborn escapee from an insufferably formal British monarchy, and, finally, woman-in-love on the Cote d'Azur.

In the delivery of this last ''message,'' however, the relationship between Diana, Mr. Fayed and the paparazzi had gradually grown more frayed. Mr. Garcia, the photographer who was sent to the Fayed villa near St.-Tropez in mid-July, said Diana had initially been quite happy to oblige photographers.

Three times, on separate occasions, she went out to the sea front and jumped off a small pier into the water, with photographers around her. Then, after leaving for 10 days with Mr. Fayed on the boat trip during which the photographs of the embracing couple were taken, she returned. Again, Mr. Garcia said, she seemed to have no objection to being photographed. ''Look,'' he said, ''she chose St.-Tropez, hardly a place to hide in the summer. She even came back there after the boat trip. She wanted us to take those photographs. And everyone wanted them because the fact is that magazines knew a photo of Diana sold better than one of Algerian massacres.''

But once the photographs of the romance appeared in the British press on Aug. 10, the situation appears to have changed. Initially, Mr. Fayed's father, Mohamed al-Fayed, an Egyptian-born businessman who owns Harrods and has been angered by Britain's refusal to grant him British nationality, seemed pleased enough, flashing a victory sign to photographers as he approached his property by boat.

On Aug. 13 Mr. Dartevelle, the Paris lawyer for the Fayed family, said he sent formal warning to several magazines about the publications of intrusive photographs.

French privacy laws are among the strictest in Europe, prohibiting newspapers from ''intruding on the private life of any person,'' publishing unauthorized photographs or ''publicizing the real or imaginary liaisons of anybody.''

On Aug. 23, after two helicopters had flown over the Fayed villa and yacht in St.-Tropez, Dodi al-Fayed complained to the local authorities through his lawyer. He was, Mr. Dartevelle said, worried by the flights skimming just above the villa. The police said the flights were illegal, and on Aug. 26, four days before the couple's visit to Paris, Mr. Dartevelle filed a formal complaint.

''Dodi was getting very worried because he found that the photographers were becoming very aggressive,'' Mr. Dartevelle said.

The Last Evening

Going Back To the Ritz

It was in this mood, it seems, that the couple arrived in Paris: Diana, about to return to her children and determined to avoid the paparazzi, and an increasingly irascible Mr. Fayed perhaps ready to confront them.

The couple initially spent about an hour at the apartment near the Arc de Triomphe. Here, Mr. Fayed's father, Mohamed, later found a pair of cuff links that belonged to Diana's late father and a gold cigar clipper with a tag inscribed ''With love from Diana,'' the Fayed family said today.

Michael Cole, a spokesman for the elder Mr. Fayed, said the cuff links were ''the last gift Diana received from her late father.'' He added that Diana had given them to Mr. Fayed because she knew it would give her father special joy to know they were ''in such safe and special hands.'' It was not clear how Mr. Cole was aware of this sentiment.

In the late afternoon, the couple went shopping on the Champs-Elysees, where they were followed by photographers and chaperoned by Mr. Paul. ''They were being harassed all the time,'' Mr. Cole said.

Then, at about 6:30 P.M., they went to the Ritz Hotel, where the Imperial Suite was made available to them.

An hour later, at 7:30 P.M., they left the Ritz, apparently with no intention of returning there that evening. It was at this time that Mr. Paul was allowed to leave and told that his day was over, officials close to the hotel said.

The couple's intention, Mr. Dartevelle said, had been to go to the fashionable Paris bistro Chez Benoit. But such was the crowd surrounding them when they left the Ritz that this quickly appeared impractical.

After returning to the apartment, they decided instead to go back to the Ritz for dinner. According to film from security cameras at the hotel, released today by the Fayed family, they entered the hotel at 9:52 P.M.

It is clear that the couple spent all or part of their time at the Ritz in privacy, though it is not clear whether they did so in the Imperial Suite or a salon. It is at this time that Mr. Fayed offered the predicted ''diamond as big as the Ritz'' to Diana. It had been bought at the Respossi Jewelers, on the Place Vendome, opposite the Ritz.

The Car Crash

Was Drunkenness Or a Chase to Blame?

With photographers gathered outside the hotel, and the couple inside, the hotel management decided to call back Mr. Paul, who had worked at the hotel for 11 years. A former captain in the French Army, he appears to have been viewed by some in the hotel as a pillar of reliability and by others as a swaggering tough guy with a weakness for alcohol and a Rambo-like machismo.

''If Mr. Paul had ever betrayed a taste for drink, he would have been summarily fired,'' Mr. Cole said. ''He was dependable.''

It is not clear whether Mr. Paul was at his apartment -- a fifth-floor walk-up on the Rue des Petits Champs -- or was reached on a cellular phone. He was not, according to a waitress, at the Bar de Bourgogne next to his home, where he often ate but only rarely took a drink. What is clear is that he would have spent more than two hours of a Saturday evening convinced that his work was over, before returning to the Ritz shortly after 10.

If he was indeed extremely drunk at the time of the crash that killed Diana and Mr. Fayed -- and the French police have put the alcohol in his blood at a level that equates roughly to the consumption of a bottle-and-a-half of wine -- then it appears that he must have begun drinking during those two hours.

The Fayed family insists that Mr. Paul showed no signs of drunkenness on his return and spent the next two hours without drinking in the company of British and French security agents. Today the film released by the family showed him talking to other security agents.

Mr. Fayed himself made the decision to leave from the back of the Ritz with Mr. Paul so as to avoid the dozens of photographers gathered in front, Mr. Cole said. Film released today shows the couple waiting at the back entrance for a car to arrive. Mr. Fayed has an arm around Diana.

The film -- jumpy and hazy -- then shows the couple leaving from the back door of the Ritz in the Rue Cambon, making their way toward a waiting Mercedes S-280 sedan, and driving off. Mr. Paul, the driver, accompanies them, as does a security agent, Trevor Rees-Jones, who take the seat beside Mr. Paul in the front. The time was 12.20 A.M. Sunday.

In the film, there do not appear to be any paparazzi at the back entrance. But a commentator said a Ritz guard had seen somebody nearby with a portable telephone who may have tipped off the photographers.

In any event, it is clear that by the time the car reached the nearby Place de la Concorde, several photographers had caught up with the couple. Among them was Romuald Rat of the Gamma agency, who was on a motorbike driven by a colleague, Stephane Darmon.

Mr. Rat said that before a traffic light at the southwest corner of the square turned green, Mr. Paul gunned the car and it veered westward into the straight, four-lane Cours la Reine, running alongside the River Seine. ''We decided not to try to catch up with them,'' Mr. Rat said. ''It was impossible.''

What was happening inside the speeding car is not known. The French police today declined to say if autopsies were performed on Mr. Fayed and Diana. It is therefore impossible to know if either of them had been drinking.

In what some British coroners have described as an unusual procedure, Mr. Fayed's body was immediately taken back to London for burial after the crash, without any post-mortem in Britain.

Mr. Rat's account is, in essence, that of all the photographers, seven of whom were arrested by the police in the aftermath of the accident and three of whom later turned themselves in: The Mercedes roared away ahead of them and was alone as it entered the tunnel under the intersection at the Alma bridge.

''Are we the guilty one, or is the Ritz?'' Nikola Arsov of the Sipa photographic agency asked today. ''How could they let a driver who was drunk get behind the wheel of a car carrying the Princess, or anybody else?'' Like Mr. Rat, Mr. Arsov was detained by the police.

Another, radically different account -- that of the Fayed family and some witnesses who have talked to the police -- holds that at least one photographer on a motorbike was next to the car as it entered the tunnel, and so forced Mr. Paul into a maneuver that proved fatal. In this way, the family contends, the paparazzi almost literally killed the Princess and her companion.

Mr. Dartevelle, the lawyer, said today that he had several witnesses for this version of events. One of the them, Francois Levy, a unemployed maritime pilot from Rouen, said he had been driving through the tunnel ahead of the Mercedes at a speed of about 140 kilometers per hour, or 84 miles per hour.

''I was halfway though when I saw a convoy enter and was on the way up out of the tunnel when I saw the motorcycle to the left of the Mercedes accelerate,'' he said. ''It made a fishtail maneuver across the front of the Mercedes, and at that point it looked as if a flashbulb went off. Then I saw the Mercedes veer to the left, to the right, and to the left again, and I heard a big noise.''

Whatever the truth, it was in the tunnel, just after the road dips and veers left, that the car crashed into the 13th of a line of columns dividing the two sides of the highway, spun around and hit the opposite wall.

Mr. Paul and Mr. Fayed were killed. Diana died later in a hospital. Mr. Rees-Jones, severely hurt, survived, but has not yet been able to talk; he was, the police said, the only one wearing a seat belt.

Mr. Rat said he reached the scene about a minute after the accident. He heard what he thought was a siren -- Mr. Paul's body slumped against the car horn. The impact had pushed the motor and the steering column back into the passenger compartment.

The photographer ran to the car, took some pictures and tried to help, he said. He opened the right rear door, on Diana's side, and tried to see if she was alive. ''I said in English to stay calm, that I was there, that help would arrive,'' he said.

Police officers, firemen, a doctor and other onlookers arrived very soon afterward. Diana was rushed to a hospital, but it was too late to save her; she was suffering from heavy internal bleeding. At the crash site, photographers said, the situation seemed ''normal'' for some time -- the police keeping order, firemen cutting the victims loose, ambulances taking them away, and photographers, behind a makeshift barrier, taking pictures.

Several photographers left before the mood turned uglier and the police detained seven photographers, later formally placing them under investigation for being criminally responsible for provoking the crash and failing to provide assistance at the scene of an accident.

Photographers and their lawyers have vehemently rejected those charges. Today, the Fayed family suggested that the police might have been wrong in finding that Mr. Paul had a blood alcohol level between 1.75 and 1.87 grams per liter -- more than three times the French legal limit -- at the time of the accident.

The blood samples might have been tainted if Mr. Paul's stomach had ruptured and the samples were taken from the wrong place, doctors close to the Fayed family said. Mr. Paul's scheduled burial Saturday has been delayed, apparently to allow for more blood tests.

Mr. Paul's parents have declared themselves plaintiffs in one of the several judicial cases now surrounding the accident. So, too, have Diana's kin. The cases may drag on for years. The fog around the death of ''the people's princess'' is thickening, image and reality ever more difficult to disentangle.

''Nobody can dictate my behavior,'' Diana said in her last interview with Le Monde. ''I work through instinct, and instinct is my best counselor.''

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A crew member describes the royal's days aboard a yacht in the Mediterranean just before her tragic death on August 31, 1997.

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By the summer of 1997, Princess Diana was embracing a new phase of her life. In the wake of her divorce from Prince Charles the previous year, the 36-year-old royal began the season by selling off 79 gowns from her famed wardrobe with a high-profile auction at Christie’s in Manhattan, with the proceeds benefiting several charities important to her, including the AIDS Crisis Trust. That moment of transition illustrated a metamorphosis from “Shy Di” of the Eighties to that of a self-assured woman embracing an identity outside The Firm.

Comfort level aside, Diana was acutely aware of her star power throughout her public life. The princess used her world-famous image for photo ops both championing philanthropic causes and tacitly addressing personal matters (think: the little black “Revenge” dress by Christina Stambolian she wore at the moment the Prince of Wales publicly admitted marital infidelity with Camilla Parker Bowles). By July of her last summer, Diana was dating Egyptian playboy Dodi Al Fayed — son of Harrods’ then-owner, the controversial Mohamed Al Fayed — causing tabloid photographers to swarm the couple at every opportunity, including a seaside holiday in St. Tropez with her young sons, Princes William and Harry.

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A summer of charitable visits to places like Bosnia and Angola in support of land mine victims and New York City to meet with Mother Teresa was punctuated by leisurely weeks in the Mediterranean Sea with Al Fayed. All of that came to a tragic end on August 31 when the couple’s chauffeur-driven Mercedes fatally collided with a pillar in a Parisian tunnel while being chased by a swarm of paparazzi.

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In the weeks leading up to the tragedy, Diana enjoyed days of rare seclusion aboard Mohamed Al-Fayed’s 200-foot yacht, Jonikal. Joined only by staff members, Diana and Dodi cruised through the Mediterranean along the Italian Riviera undetected by scrutinizing photographers until the paparazzi finally discovered Diana on the waning days of her holiday.

Now a charter broker with Ocean Independence, Debbie Gribble was at the time a young stewardess tending to the princess on the Jonikal and she recalls the excitement that came with providing an exclusive getaway for one of the most famous women in the world.

“I felt very privileged to be in this secret environment,” explains the New Zealand native by phone from her Auckland office. “We anchored in beautiful secluded bays of Sardinia where the water is so turquoise and clear. Anytime Diana was in view in public the media was there. In this case, when she was not in view [to the public], there was no media.”

In private, Diana’s activities were purposely limited. According to Gribble, there were “barbecues on the beach, walks ashore and dinner,” but the princess largely enjoyed swimming in the sparkling waters around the mega-yacht and sunning herself in a number of one-piece swimsuits. “She was incredibly casual and traveled light,” Gribble continues. “She had only a small amount of baggage and everything was very compact — there were bathing suits everyday. She was obviously very experienced at traveling and would literally come to breakfast in her bathing suit ready for the day to just swim. There was not one dress [in her luggage].”

Instead, Diana brought aboard the nine-cabin vessel a modest collection of shorts, Capri pants, silk tops and “sport skirts” in a range of understated tones from beige and pastels to black and white. “She actually told me she didn’t like shopping,” recounts Gribble of a conversation with the style icon. “[Diana and Dodi] had come back [to the ship] after a walk around the shops in Sardinia with a pile of cashmere sweaters that Dodi had bought for her. She wasn’t interested in shopping on her holiday, that’s for sure. All she wanted to do was enjoy the boat and go swimming and sunbathing.”

As she enjoyed those rare moments of complete privacy, Gribble describes Diana’s demeanor aboard the Jonikal as “relaxed, fun and light,” noting her shift when faced with re-entering the public eye. “She was a totally different person [in public and private],” she adds. “I didn’t get the sense that she was on edge at any time. I got the sense she was just enjoying this freedom, being in the moment and actually living.”

The now 47-year-old adds, “There were jet skis and things like that, but she was more interested in just jumping off the side [of the yacht], swimming around the boat, sunbathing and not doing a lot else.”

Aboard the custom-built Italian yacht, Diana was relishing in the opportunity to dress casually throughout the day, emerging each morning from her cabin with “flat and straight” hair and “just a little bit of lip gloss and mascara — never with full makeup.”

Chef-prepared meals were met with the same level of refined informality. Each morning Diana would bypass a pyramid of fresh fruit arranged by staffers and instead have simply a cup of black coffee. Lunches, usually served on an upper deck, were “light salads and Mediterranean style pastas and fish.” For most of their time on the yacht, Diana and Dodi dined alone, although friends of Al Fayed’s joined the couple a few times on board toward the end of the summer.

“They would have a three-course meal for dinner and there was always lots of caviar and Champagne,” says Gribble. “I know it sounds cliché, but it was actually caviar and Champagne. They had beautiful white wines and the main course was always something like lobster-stuffed pasta and lots of seafood.”

Photographers would eventually disrupt Diana’s idyll, closing in on the princess by boat and helicopter. Images of her on holiday — among the last taken of her — were splashed across newsstands throughout the world. “When those famous photos of her on the yacht came out in the papers everything changed,” notes Gribble. “That feeling of freedom was gone and suddenly she was back in a gilded floating cage. You could see the magic was just dwindling day by day.”

As it became apparent the days of quiet relaxation had passed, Diana expressed eagerness about returning to a normalized schedule in London, which included reuniting with Harry and William — then aged 12 and 15, respectively — and resuming her workout routine. “She mentioned looking forward to getting back,” says Gribble. “She wanted to see her boys and she liked to go to the gym — that was a big thing she mentioned a few times to me. She also missed eating at more of a British time, which is at 6 or 7 o’clock as opposed to 10 o’clock in the Mediterranean. She really was living a totally different lifestyle than what she was used to.”

Diana was already planning for several upcoming events that fall with scheduled fittings for evening dresses she would never have the opportunity to wear in public.

“Her style had changed,” Valentino told WWD just after her death. The designer was working with Diana at the time on a “pale green dress” for an AIDS event with the Red Cross that was scheduled for September. “She was more aware of herself as a woman — and she was a beautiful woman with a beautiful body. She had escaped the rules of the princess and the clothes a princess was supposed to wear and wanted clothes that were right for the new woman she had become.”

Giorgio Armani had also been working with the princess on a gown for an upcoming engagement, noting her streamlined, pared-down approach to dress that was reflective of the changes in her life. “She seemed to have found that style of her own, strictly controlling any temptation to overdo things, and favoring clean, modern lines that set off her great face and figure in a very up-to-date way.”

The designer added, “That’s what I was trying to emphasize with the dress I just did for her. It’s worth noting that she chose the design herself, the simplest one in the group of sketches I sent her.”

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This Old Photo of Princess Diana Is Going Viral—and the Reason Is Particularly Poignant

It's sort of staggering to realize we're approaching the 25th anniversary of Princess Diana's death on August 31, 1997. That may be the reason it caught us off guard when our social media feeds were suddenly populated with a striking—and poignant—image of Diana, snapped exactly one week before she passed away, following a car crash in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris.

The image shows Diana, sitting on a diving board attached to the edge of Mohamed Al Fayed's private yacht called the 'Jonikal' while on vacation with her new beau, Dodi Al Fayed, in the South of France.

Her feet are dangling over the edge as a lone seagull swoops overhead—the only sign of life around the Princess of Wales as she sits solo, taking in the view.

For royal watchers, many compared the image to another iconic shot where Diana was pictured looking contemplative and seated alone. In 1992, mere months before she and Prince Charles were to formally announce their separation, the pair traveled to India on a royal tour. But while Charles was away at another meeting, Diana appeared in front of the Taj Mahal—an eternal monument of a husband's love—all by herself.

Back to the Jonikal: What stands out about that shot, beyond the context of what was to come in a week's time, is Diana's serenity. She appears to have a look of inner calm. In those final days, had Diana, a woman tortured by the tabloids and pictured here in a rare moment of solitude—ironically, caught by a camera—found her bliss?

A picture is worth a thousand words, of course, and we'll never know what Diana was thinking out there on the diving board. What we do know is that she was fresh off a visit from her two sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, and approaching the one-year anniversary of her divorce from Prince Charles.

But that's what makes one of the final photos of the Princess of Wales so breathtaking and, ultimately, haunting. A brand-new future was before her and we—the royal voyeurs—can't help but feel contemplative as we stare at this shot. "What could have been?," we will forever wonder.

For more about the royals,  listen to the Royally Obsessed podcast  with co-hosts Rachel Bowie and Roberta Fiorito. Subscribe now or follow us on Instagram  @royallyobsessedpodcast .

The Trailer for HBO's "The Princess," a Doc About Princess Diana's Public Life, Just Dropped (& It's Giving Us Chills)

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What Happens to Princess Diana in The Crown Season 6? A Look at the Real-Life Events

The first episodes of The Crown season 6 depict Princess Diana in the months leading up to her fatal car crash

Stephanie Kaloi is a contributing writer at PEOPLE. She has been working at PEOPLE since 2022. She has also written about entertainment news for a number of outlets, including Entertainment Weekly, Parade and LittleThings.

Tim Graham Photo Library/Getty ; Des Willie/Netflix

While The Crown has depicted the personal and political turmoils of the royal family throughout decades of history, part 1 of the final season largely focuses on one member in particular: Princess Diana .

The first episodes of season 6 — which dropped on Nov. 16 — chronicle the final year of the princess’s life before her tragic death on Aug. 31, 1997. 

The magnitude of Diana’s loss is difficult to understand all these decades later, particularly as the nature of celebrity has changed. At the time, Diana was on the brink of stepping into her own life for the first time since she had joined the royal family, something that was evident when she was interviewed by Vanity Fair that June. Her friend Rosa Monckton told the magazine, “She's living her life as she wants to live it. And she's free of the restrictions that she had before. Certainly, in the way she looks, you can see that.”

Season 5’s Elizabeth Debicki returns to portray Diana in the aftermath of her divorce from Prince Charles (Dominic West). The new season follows the princess as she tries to navigate her place in both the public eye and the royal family amid her ex's rekindled relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles (Olivia Williams). Meanwhile, Diana is also in a burgeoning romance of her own with Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla), the son of her friend and Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed (Salim Daw).

Though part 1 of the season ultimately ends in tragedy, it also features some of the happier moments of the princess’s life during her last months, including her humanitarian work and her close relationship with her sons, Prince William (Rufus Kampa) and Prince Harry (Fflyn Edwards).

From her trailblazing walk through an active landmine to her final days in Paris, here’s what happens to Princess Diana in season 6 of The Crown — along with the actual events that took place in 1997.

Princess Diana navigates her life beyond the royal family — including a potential ambassador role

Antony Jones/UK Press/Getty

During the first episode, “Persona Non Grata,” Prime Minister Tony Blair (Bertie Carvel) and his wife are visited by Diana and her older son, Prince William. Blair then recounts the visit to Queen Elizabeth (Imelda Staunton), telling the monarch that her former daughter-in-law hopes to become an ambassador of some kind to the United Kingdom or to hold an official position in the government. 

The prime minister also praises Diana’s philanthropic efforts, particularly her recent work with victims of landmines and AIDS patients , saying pointedly, “When Diana talks, the world listens.” 

However, Queen Elizabeth insists that Diana cannot be “in and out” of the royal family.

In reality, Princess Diana had accepted a position as a special ambassador for Britain not long before she died. One month after her death, Blair spoke to BBC interviewer David Frost about the role he and the princess had discussed. 

“She had a tremendous ability, as we saw over the landmines issue … to enter into an area that could have been one of controversy and suddenly just clarify for people what was clearly the right thing to do,” he said, per The Los Angeles Times .

“I felt there were all sorts of ways that could have been harnessed and used for the good of people,” he added.

Princess Diana vacations in St. Tropez with Prince William and Prince Harry in July 1997

Anwar Hussein/WireImage ; Netflix

Episode 1 also sees Princess Diana pack up her sons to vacation in St. Tropez at the same time their father is preparing to celebrate the 50th birthday of his then-girlfriend, Camilla Parker-Bowles. The trio are guests of Mohamed Al-Fayed , and Diana is introduced to Mohamed’s son, Dodi , while on board the family’s yacht.

Paparazzi follow the yacht closely — so much so that Diana asks them to back off so her children can enjoy the trip. While on board, Mohamed strongly encourages his son to pursue a relationship with Diana, despite the fact that he is engaged to another woman and set to marry her within weeks.

The trip with the Al-Fayed family really happened, and Diana was famously photographed in a leopard-print swimsuit on July 17 — Camilla’s 50th birthday. Per Newsweek , the photos ran in the Daily Mirror on July 18, the day of Charles’ party for his girlfriend, with the headline: “Dear Camilla, This will keep you off the front page. Happy Birthday & Breast Wishes love Diana.”

Paparazzi capture Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed kissing onboard the Jonikal yacht

 API/Gamma-Rapho/Getty

Diana left the yacht to return her children to their father, but within days, she traveled alone back to Dodi to spend more time on board the Jonkial . In the episode “Two Photographs,” Diana is also planning a trip to Bosnia, where she walks through a landmine field to raise awareness. At the covert instruction of Mohamed, who told photographers about the couple’s trip, she and Dodi are photographed kissing on board the yacht without either of them knowing.

In the series, the photos of their kiss are published while Diana is in Bosnia. While speaking at a press conference about her walk, the princess is peppered with endless questions about her relationship with Dodi, overshadowing her landmark tour.

In reality, Diana’s famous landmine walk happened in January 1997 in Angola . Though it’s true that she visited Bosnia for the same issue during her last summer, The Crown takes creative liberties and combines the two trips into one.

The episode concludes when Dodi gives Diana a present along with a note that reads: “Paris next week?”

Dodi Fayed buys Princess Diana a diamond ring

In the third episode, “Dis-Moi Oui,” Diana and Dodi stop for ice cream in Monte Carlo one evening where they’re spotted by onlookers. The pair end up running away and taking refuge in a jewelry store. 

Diana is on the verge of tears, and Dodi lightens the moment by asking if there is anything she likes in the shop. Despite explaining that she doesn’t “need anything,” Dodi reiterates that he is asking what she likes, prompting Diana to motion towards an impressive diamond ring before the two are spirited out a back door.

The following day, Diana tells Dodi that she plans to get on a British Airways flight to see her sons. He offers his family’s jet with the provision that they stop in Paris first — though she doesn’t know it, Dodi plans to visit a jewelry store that has the very ring Diana admired in the shop. Diana agrees, thus delaying her return to London by one night, a decision that ultimately proves to have disastrous consequences. 

According to Diana’s former driver Colin Tebbut, at least part of this account is fabricated. He told the Daily Mail in 2021 that Diana delayed returning to England due to criticism she received from some politicians following her work related to landmines.

However, what is true is that Dodi purchased a $14,000 ring while in Monte Carlo, and he seemed to be planning a special night for Diana in Paris. His butler, Rene Delorm, said that Dodi asked him to have “the champagne on ice when they returned to the apartment” that evening, as Lord Justice Scott Baker said in the official inquest into the couple's death ,

At the time of Diana and Dodi’s death, Daily Mail reporter Richard Kay said the Princess of Wales was “as happy as I have ever known her” and that she might have considered marrying Dodi. He later recanted that statement. 

Princess Diana flies to Paris with Dodi Fayed on Aug. 30, 1997

Mark Cuthbert/UK Press/Getty

In The Crown , the pair fly to Paris the next day. Diana is frustrated by both the paparazzi that chase them through the city and by Dodi’s father, who insists she and Dodi stop by his home in Paris first. Diana, who is hoping to make a planned phone call with her sons, is visibly bothered by Mohamed’s overriding of their plans to go to Dodi’s home.

Diana is able to connect with her sons for a brief phone call in which they both make it clear they aren’t Dodi’s biggest fans. Prince William asks Diana if she and Dodi are getting married, something she flatly denies.

While the exact details of what did or didn’t happen on Diana’s final day have not been shared to the detail they are reenacted in the series, Prince William and Prince Harry admitted in a 2017 documentary that their last phone call with their mother was rushed. In Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy , William said, “If I’d known now what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have been so blasé about it. But that phone call sticks in my mind quite heavily.”

Harry added, “Looking back on it now, it’s incredibly hard. I’ll have to sort of deal with that for the rest of my life. How differently that conversation could have panned out if I’d had even the slightest inkling her life was going to be taken that night.”

Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed die in a car crash

While The Crown does not show the exact moment that the accident takes place, the car chase that preceded the wreck is shown. In episode 3, Diana and Dodi decide to eat dinner at The Ritz instead of their planned meal at Chez Benoit. Dodi proposes in their room and Diana turns him down, and the two make plans to travel together back to his apartment in the city. 

The truth is that there is no hard evidence Dodi ever proposed to Diana . In The Crown , Diana tells Dodi that she plans to spend more time with her children. Sadly, she didn’t get the opportunity.

Though it wasn't depicted in the series, Dodi was killed instantly at the site of the crash, along with the driver of the car, Henri Paul. Diana initially survived the accident, though her injuries were extensive. She was transported to a hospital, and despite doctors attempting to restart her heart for hours, they ultimately were unable to save her life. She was pronounced dead around 4 a.m. on Aug. 31, 1997.

The royal family mourns the death of Princess Diana at her funeral

JEFF J MITCHELL/AFP/Getty

Much has been made of the royal family’s response to Princess Diana’s death, especially in the days that immediately followed. In “Aftermath,” the fourth and final episode for part 1 of season 6, Prince Charles is immediately distraught upon hearing news of Diana’s death and insists they use a family plane to bring her body home from Paris. This was mirrored in real life when Charles was joined on the trip by Princess Diana’s sisters , Lady Sarah McCorquodale and Lady Jane Fellowes.

While the nation mourned, the family remained holed up in Scotland at Balmoral. This is depicted in The Crown similarly. At the same time, the public was absolutely devastated by Diana’s loss. Thousands of people lined up outside Buckingham Palace each day, patiently waiting for a turn to leave flowers or gifts in her honor. 

In both the show and real life, the royals returned to Britain after several days and greeted the public. Prince William and Prince Harry walked behind their mother’s coffin , with a letter addressed to “Mummy” sitting on top. They were joined by Prince Philip , Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer , and Prince Charles, who wore a blue suit that was Diana’s favorite instead of a black one — a detail that The Crown left out.

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How Elizabeth Debicki Tackled Playing Princess Diana, the Role That 'Scared the Hell' Out of Her

W henever Elizabeth Debicki talks about playing Princess Diana in Netflix's "The Crown," she inevitably circles back to something that the series' creator, Peter Morgan, has said: If she had not been interested in the part, he would have had to write the show differently, with the People's Princess taking up significantly less screen time. "I've heard him say this a few times at panels and things, and I always think, Is that true?" she said. "It's the complete opposite to me. I think, How did you know that I could do that? How did you trust me so much with such a huge part?"

The spark of royal magnetism that Morgan sensed in Debicki proved perspicacious. Debicki took over the role from Emma Corrin and debuted her interpretation of the princess in Season 5, which dramatizes the breakdown of the royal marriage to Prince Charles in the early 1990s, and was showered with praise for how uncannily she captured Diana. The soft voice and aristocratic diction, the diffident head tilt and habit of gazing upward through her lashes, the elegance and warmth -- it was all there in an indelible performance that earned Debicki her first Emmy nomination, for supporting actress in a drama series, in 2023. It also won her a SAG Award earlier this year.

Her turn in Season 6, which chronicles the last months of Diana's life before she died in a car crash in Paris in 1997, was just as warmly received. Many reviews even singled it out as the best part of the entire final season. (It's not by chance that her face has dominated Netflix promotional posters for the past year.) Naturally, the performance earned Debicki another Emmy nomination -- one of 18 that "The Crown" racked up for its final chapter.

"The amount of people who've been recognized this year from the show just feels really lovely," the actress said during a Zoom call a few days after the nominations were announced in July. (She was calling from Maine, where she was vacationing, and had just come in from a morning swim in the Atlantic.) "It's been a long run of six seasons, and it feels like a nice wrapping up of a huge chapter for people and for myself, certainly. It's a lovely feeling -- a peaceful feeling, if that makes sense."

Debicki's nomination puts a triumphant end point to a role that occupied several years of her life and was in many ways the hardest of her career, which took off with a flourish in 2013 when she played Jordan Baker in Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby." Twenty-seven years after the Princess of Wales died while trying to escape an army of paparazzi, she remains a beloved figure, prominent in the minds of people who never knew her personally and those who did, including, of course, her sons Prince William and Prince Harry.

"It sounds like I'm exaggerating, but it did feel a little bit impossible for a while," Debicki, 33, said. "She's one of the most famous people that ever lived, and she's so important to so many people still. So it felt like, how can I do this justice, really? I'm Australian and I was seven when Princess Diana passed away so I didn't even have the lived memory of it."

During our two conversations -- the first happened a few weeks before the nominations -- Debicki gave long, thoughtful answers that reflect just how seriously she took the responsibility of portraying Princess Diana. "I always feel like I ramble so much when I talk about ['The Crown'] because it's so unusual, what we did," she said. "It's always been difficult to know: How do you express your creative experience of this and be as respectful as humanly possible to the fact that this was a real person who experienced unbelievable tragedy? The trauma of all of this is still so alive for people. It's not an easy thing to talk about, and you can't just breeze through it. We certainly didn't breeze through it when we were making it.

"This job has been a huge, huge privilege to me," she added. "What would I have done for the last three years if it hadn't been this?"

Debicki's almost spookily accurate portrayal of Diana Spencer could only come from someone whose ears were finely tuned to the idiosyncrasies of human speech from birth. Born in Paris to a Polish father and an Australian mother, both of them ballet dancers, she spent her formative years speaking two languages (French in school, English at home) and absorbing a variety of accents and dialects. When she was 5, the family moved to a Melbourne suburb where she had to adjust to life in English full-time. "I can't imagine what I sounded like," she said with a laugh. "With my little French accent, I was a bit of an odd feature for some time [at school]. But there was a sweet little bunch of freckly Australian kids who came over and they were like, 'Do you want to play with us?'"

She remembers a childhood steeped in creativity and imagination: "I would do recitals and concerts and tap dance with little sparkly things on, do "The Nutcracker" or what have you. The joy that used to bring me was so intense. I just felt profoundly alive." She acted in school plays and community theater ("I could not pay you enough to watch our 1997 rendition of "Oklahoma!" but I was I into it!"), and after high school, she enrolled in the drama program at Melbourne University. She had barely graduated when Luhrmann saw her screen test and cast her in his fizzy take on F. Scott Fitzgerald's most famous novel.

The movie opened up a multitude of doors for Debicki who, at 6 foot 3, stood out from the crowd of perennial fresh faces. She shared the stage with Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert in a production of Jean Genet's "The Maids" that went from Sydney to New York, played a glamorous villain in "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." and in 2016 earned stellar reviews for her turn as an enigmatic American running from her past in AMC's limited series "The Night Manager," starring Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston. A supporting turn as a gold-skinned alien priestess in "Guardians of the Galaxy 2" followed. When Steve McQueen's "Widows" came on her radar, she was "desperate" to land the part of a survivor of domestic violence who plans a heist with Viola Davis and Michelle Rodriguez.

"I sent Steve a tape and then I went to L.A. and auditioned for it. He's such a fascinating and compassionate human being. He actually called me to give me the part about 45 minutes after I left because he knew that I would be in purgatory," she said. Making "Widows" was vital to her growth as an actor: "When I think about making that film, I was much, much younger and less trusting in myself. It was so fundamental to me that somebody I so deeply respected stood in front of me and told me that they really felt like I was good at my job."

It was around this time that Debicki auditioned for a part in the second season of "The Crown" (she won't say which part). She didn't get it, but Morgan sent word to her agents that he'd like to discuss her playing Princess Diana in future seasons. Debicki filed the possibility away, never thinking it would actually come to pass. She'd built up a solid body of work by then -- and would soon appear in Christopher Nolan's "Tenet" -- but she was not yet a big name. Surely there were other actors -- British actors -- who would be better suited to the part?

Not for Morgan. "Diana, Princess of Wales, was a unique, irreplaceable figure. Truly one of a kind," he said via email. "It was not just the beauty but the 'one-of-a- kindness' of her that made the prospect of casting her so challenging. And one thing one can truly say about Elizabeth Debicki is how unique she is. There is no one else like her. I think the rare quality of 'individuality' that Elizabeth possesses is what contributed so significantly to her astonishing portrayal. She is unlike anybody else."

By 2020, Debicki had thrown herself into the mountain of research materials that the production team had sent to her in Australia, where she was riding out the pandemic. The role terrified her. "I had all my little different books and all my little binders and Post-it notes. And I approached it in a very compartmental- ized, technical way in the beginning," she said. "And it was about balancing the fear I had of getting something right versus creating something. So that was a bit of a tightrope to walk in the beginning."

Working with three dialect coaches, she listened over and over to speeches Diana gave, lasering in on the patrician elocution associated with the "Sloane Rangers," a term used in the 1980s for the denizens of the poshest London neighborhoods. "I realized very quickly that the melody of the voice is very much like learning a piece of music -- the cadence, the tone, the way that certain things were emphasized," Debicki said. "It's like playing an instrument. If you want to learn how to play the flute, you have to blow into that thing. Even if you sound terrible, you have to keep doing that. So I just locked myself away in my little study and we'd work on Zoom."

Debicki looked to Corrin's acclaimed Season 4 performance of twentysomething Diana as a "blueprint" for building her own version of the character. "I always knew what I wanted to do with this part. I knew what I needed to give the audience -- and that felt kind of meta," Debicki said. "It felt like a deep offering of all the things that we collectively knew she was, needed her to be for us, all the things you love about her. These snatches of joy and playfulness -- and that golden, luminous light that seemed to always come off her and how much she loved the people in her life.

"And then I had the feeling going into Season 6 as if I'd gotten away with it and I got to try it again, with more confidence in myself and with a really beautiful and steady scene partner."

That would be Khalid Abdalla, the British actor known for "The Kite Runner" and "The Square" who plays Dodi Fayed, the son of a billionaire who became Diana's boyfriend in the last months of her life. In the first three episodes of the final season, we follow the princess and her sons (played by Rufus Kampa and Fflyn Edwards) as they vacation on Dodi's father's yacht, spraying each other with water guns as they jump into the Mediterranean and giggling as they watch "Jumanji." These moments are soaked in a gorgeous, sun-drenched contentment that is overshadowed by what we all know is coming as Diana and Dodi make one decision after another that lead them to their tragic end in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel.

Pushing aside the weight of that dread while shooting was a challenge for Debicki. "As an actor, playing the scenes, I was just playing very, very real time, moment to moment," she said. "I may have done that even more than I've ever done before because it was so important to me that you never get a sense that the characters understand where they're going. The wave of grief always hit us post-making the scene. The character never experienced it."

Particularly taxing was re-creating the now iconic security camera footage of the couple waiting in the service corridor of the Ritz Hotel before entering the car that would crash moments later. "We had to lift ourselves so above the impending story beat and give them a bliss of lack of awareness," Debicki said. "So that was really difficult because you can't totally shut out your knowledge of the thing.

"Khalid and I played that scene for a few hours. We were staying in a country hotel somewhere in England on location, and we ended up having this quiet dinner in an empty hotel. That gave us time to feel things we couldn't feel when we're making the scene. We always had each other to help through the wobble that would inevitably come after."

After shooting wrapped, it took Debicki months to let go of Diana, both emotionally and physically. During our conversations, she spoke in her natural Australian accent and, in her chic black eyeglasses, blond hair flowing over her shoulders, she looked nothing like the Princess of Wales. Yet still today, a trace of Diana was holding on. Just recently, the actress had seen a massage therapist to help her work out some lingering musculoskeletal pain caused from changing her posture for the role. "If you play the character for two years, it does become quite ingrained in the body," she said.

Professionally, she's been venturing in the opposite direction of the seriousness of "The Crown," feeling drawn to projects infused with dark humor, like the recent release "MaXXXine," Ti West's bonkers psychosexual thriller in which she plays a Teflon-tough director of horror films. And for now, she's focusing on finding purely fictional characters to play. "After doing something that's so crystallinely real but not real, which is what 'The Crown' was, I need to do work where the characters are created, they're just completely imaginative and fictional and I can take a lot of license with them. That feels like the right antithesis."

She has already signed on to star in Brazilian filmmaker Iuli Gerbase's sci-fi drama "This Blue Is Mine," in which she'll play a peculiar woman who disrupts a family's tropical resort vacation. She has other potential projects cooking, including a return to the theater. Reflecting on "The Crown" now, she knows the experience has boosted her nerve. "When you can't wriggle out of something that scares the hell out of you, when there's nowhere to go but back to work, you really learn how to do your job," she said. "Because I did something that scared me so much, that's probably made me braver. It's really uncomfortable. And also the greatest thing that can happen."

This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Drama series issue of TheWrap's awards magazine.

Read more from the Down to the Wire Drama series issue here .

The post How Elizabeth Debicki Tackled Playing Princess Diana, the Role That 'Scared the Hell' Out of Her appeared first on TheWrap .

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories

30 times Diana, Princess of Wales was the ultimate summer beauty muse

Princess Diana has always been a fashion and beauty inspiration.

Her penchant for electric blue eyeliner and sun-kissed highlights suggests Diana, Princess of Wales loved summer just as much as the rest of us. Just as her holiday ensembles became iconic – the animal print swimsuit she was photographed wearing as she dove off a yacht remains unforgettable – Lady Diana also continues to serve as major inspiration in the warm-weather beauty department.

Lady Diana, a beauty icon through summer and winter

Immaculately highlighted hair, which often set off a rich, golden tan, was one of her go-to summer (and winter) looks, and she also knew the easy-breezy wonders of a natural nude lip, subtle brown eyeliner and fresh skin. Then there was the softer hair texture she wore at more relaxed events and on holiday – effortless yet chic, it was a precursor to today’s ever-desirable “beach hair”. Her approach was low-maintenance but radiant, luminous and classic – we could all take a couple of beauty lessons from Princess Diana . Below, 30 times she was the ultimate summer muse.

This article was first published on Vogue UK

More on Vogue.fr:

In Antibes, Bella Hadid revives this Y2k swimsuit trend 27 fashionable pieces to take to the beach The key takeaways from the Gucci Cruise 2025 show in London

More from Vogue France on Youtube:

November, 1984

In East London.

April, 1983

In Auckland, New Zealand.

In North West London.

In Cairo, Egypt.

January, 1997

In Luanda, Angola.

March, 1983

In Sydney, Australia.

In New Zealand.

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How Elizabeth Debicki Tackled Playing Princess Diana, the Role That ‘Scared the Hell’ Out of Her

Whenever Elizabeth Debicki talks about playing Princess Diana in Netflix’s “The Crown,” she inevitably circles back to something that the series’ creator, Peter Morgan, has said: If she had not been interested in the part, he would have had to write the show differently, with the People’s Princess taking up significantly less screen time. “I’ve heard him say this a few times at panels and things, and I always think, Is that true?” she said. “It’s the complete opposite to me. I think, How did you know that I could do that? How did you trust me so much with such a huge part?”

The spark of royal magnetism that Morgan sensed in Debicki proved perspicacious. Debicki took over the role from Emma Corrin and debuted her interpretation of the princess in Season 5, which dramatizes the breakdown of the royal marriage to Prince Charles in the early 1990s, and was showered with praise for how uncannily she captured Diana. The soft voice and aristocratic diction, the diffident head tilt and habit of gazing upward through her lashes, the elegance and warmth — it was all there in an indelible performance that earned Debicki her first Emmy nomination, for supporting actress in a drama series, in 2023. It also won her a SAG Award earlier this year.

Her turn in Season 6, which chronicles the last months of Diana’s life before she died in a car crash in Paris in 1997, was just as warmly received. Many reviews even singled it out as the best part of the entire final season. (It’s not by chance that her face has dominated Netflix promotional posters for the past year.) Naturally, the performance earned Debicki another Emmy nomination — one of 18 that “The Crown” racked up for its final chapter.

“The amount of people who’ve been recognized this year from the show just feels really lovely,” the actress said during a Zoom call a few days after the nominations were announced in July. (She was calling from Maine, where she was vacationing, and had just come in from a morning swim in the Atlantic.) “It’s been a long run of six seasons, and it feels like a nice wrapping up of a huge chapter for people and for myself, certainly. It’s a lovely feeling — a peaceful feeling, if that makes sense.”

Debicki’s nomination puts a triumphant end point to a role that occupied several years of her life and was in many ways the hardest of her career, which took off with a flourish in 2013 when she played Jordan Baker in Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby.” Twenty-seven years after the Princess of Wales died while trying to escape an army of paparazzi, she remains a beloved figure, prominent in the minds of people who never knew her personally and those who did, including, of course, her sons Prince William and Prince Harry.

“It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but it did feel a little bit impossible for a while,” Debicki, 33, said. “She’s one of the most famous people that ever lived, and she’s so important to so many people still. So it felt like, how can I do this justice, really? I’m Australian and I was seven when Princess Diana passed away so I didn’t even have the lived memory of it.”

During our two conversations — the first happened a few weeks before the nominations — Debicki gave long, thoughtful answers that reflect just how seriously she took the responsibility of portraying Princess Diana. “I always feel like I ramble so much when I talk about [‘The Crown’] because it’s so unusual, what we did,” she said. “It’s always been difficult to know: How do you express your creative experience of this and be as respectful as humanly possible to the fact that this was a real person who experienced unbelievable tragedy? The trauma of all of this is still so alive for people. It’s not an easy thing to talk about, and you can’t just breeze through it. We certainly didn’t breeze through it when we were making it.

“This job has been a huge, huge privilege to me,” she added. “What would I have done for the last three years if it hadn’t been this?”

Debicki’s almost spookily accurate portrayal of Diana Spencer could only come from someone whose ears were finely tuned to the idiosyncrasies of human speech from birth. Born in Paris to a Polish father and an Australian mother, both of them ballet dancers, she spent her formative years speaking two languages (French in school, English at home) and absorbing a variety of accents and dialects. When she was 5, the family moved to a Melbourne suburb where she had to adjust to life in English full-time. “I can’t imagine what I sounded like,” she said with a laugh. “With my little French accent, I was a bit of an odd feature for some time [at school]. But there was a sweet little bunch of freckly Australian kids who came over and they were like, ‘Do you want to play with us?’”

She remembers a childhood steeped in creativity and imagination: “I would do recitals and concerts and tap dance with little sparkly things on, do “The Nutcracker” or what have you. The joy that used to bring me was so intense. I just felt profoundly alive.” She acted in school plays and community theater (“I could not pay you enough to watch our 1997 rendition of “Oklahoma!” but I was I into it!”), and after high school, she enrolled in the drama program at Melbourne University. She had barely graduated when Luhrmann saw her screen test and cast her in his fizzy take on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous novel.

The movie opened up a multitude of doors for Debicki who, at 6 foot 3, stood out from the crowd of perennial fresh faces. She shared the stage with Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert in a production of Jean Genet’s “The Maids” that went from Sydney to New York, played a glamorous villain in “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” and in 2016 earned stellar reviews for her turn as an enigmatic American running from her past in AMC’s limited series “The Night Manager,” starring Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston. A supporting turn as a gold-skinned alien priestess in “Guardians of the Galaxy 2” followed. When Steve McQueen’s “Widows” came on her radar, she was “desperate” to land the part of a survivor of domestic violence who plans a heist with Viola Davis and Michelle Rodriguez.

“I sent Steve a tape and then I went to L.A. and auditioned for it. He’s such a fascinating and compassionate human being. He actually called me to give me the part about 45 minutes after I left because he knew that I would be in purgatory,” she said. Making “Widows” was vital to her growth as an actor: “When I think about making that film, I was much, much younger and less trusting in myself. It was so fundamental to me that somebody I so deeply respected stood in front of me and told me that they really felt like I was good at my job.”

It was around this time that Debicki auditioned for a part in the second season of “The Crown” (she won’t say which part). She didn’t get it, but Morgan sent word to her agents that he’d like to discuss her playing Princess Diana in future seasons. Debicki filed the possibility away, never thinking it would actually come to pass. She’d built up a solid body of work by then — and would soon appear in Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” — but she was not yet a big name. Surely there were other actors — British actors — who would be better suited to the part?

Not for Morgan. “Diana, Princess of Wales, was a unique, irreplaceable figure. Truly one of a kind,” he said via email. “It was not just the beauty but the ‘one-of-a- kindness’ of her that made the prospect of casting her so challenging. And one thing one can truly say about Elizabeth Debicki is how unique she is. There is no one else like her. I think the rare quality of ‘individuality’ that Elizabeth possesses is what contributed so significantly to her astonishing portrayal. She is unlike anybody else.”

By 2020, Debicki had thrown herself into the mountain of research materials that the production team had sent to her in Australia, where she was riding out the pandemic. The role terrified her. “I had all my little different books and all my little binders and Post-it notes. And I approached it in a very compartmental- ized, technical way in the beginning,” she said. “And it was about balancing the fear I had of getting something right versus creating something. So that was a bit of a tightrope to walk in the beginning.”

Working with three dialect coaches, she listened over and over to speeches Diana gave, lasering in on the patrician elocution associated with the “Sloane Rangers,” a term used in the 1980s for the denizens of the poshest London neighborhoods. “I realized very quickly that the melody of the voice is very much like learning a piece of music — the cadence, the tone, the way that certain things were emphasized,” Debicki said. “It’s like playing an instrument. If you want to learn how to play the flute, you have to blow into that thing. Even if you sound terrible, you have to keep doing that. So I just locked myself away in my little study and we’d work on Zoom.”

Debicki looked to Corrin’s acclaimed Season 4 performance of twentysomething Diana as a “blueprint” for building her own version of the character. “I always knew what I wanted to do with this part. I knew what I needed to give the audience — and that felt kind of meta,” Debicki said. “It felt like a deep offering of all the things that we collectively knew she was, needed her to be for us, all the things you love about her. These snatches of joy and playfulness — and that golden, luminous light that seemed to always come off her and how much she loved the people in her life.

“And then I had the feeling going into Season 6 as if I’d gotten away with it and I got to try it again, with more confidence in myself and with a really beautiful and steady scene partner.”

That would be Khalid Abdalla, the British actor known for “The Kite Runner” and “The Square” who plays Dodi Fayed, the son of a billionaire who became Diana’s boyfriend in the last months of her life. In the first three episodes of the final season, we follow the princess and her sons (played by Rufus Kampa and Fflyn Edwards) as they vacation on Dodi’s father’s yacht, spraying each other with water guns as they jump into the Mediterranean and giggling as they watch “Jumanji.” These moments are soaked in a gorgeous, sun-drenched contentment that is overshadowed by what we all know is coming as Diana and Dodi make one decision after another that lead them to their tragic end in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel.

Pushing aside the weight of that dread while shooting was a challenge for Debicki. “As an actor, playing the scenes, I was just playing very, very real time, moment to moment,” she said. “I may have done that even more than I’ve ever done before because it was so important to me that you never get a sense that the characters understand where they’re going. The wave of grief always hit us post-making the scene. The character never experienced it.”

Particularly taxing was re-creating the now iconic security camera footage of the couple waiting in the service corridor of the Ritz Hotel before entering the car that would crash moments later. “We had to lift ourselves so above the impending story beat and give them a bliss of lack of awareness,” Debicki said. “So that was really difficult because you can’t totally shut out your knowledge of the thing.

“Khalid and I played that scene for a few hours. We were staying in a country hotel somewhere in England on location, and we ended up having this quiet dinner in an empty hotel. That gave us time to feel things we couldn’t feel when we’re making the scene. We always had each other to help through the wobble that would inevitably come after.”

After shooting wrapped, it took Debicki months to let go of Diana, both emotionally and physically. During our conversations, she spoke in her natural Australian accent and, in her chic black eyeglasses, blond hair flowing over her shoulders, she looked nothing like the Princess of Wales. Yet still today, a trace of Diana was holding on. Just recently, the actress had seen a massage therapist to help her work out some lingering musculoskeletal pain caused from changing her posture for the role. “If you play the character for two years, it does become quite ingrained in the body,” she said.

Professionally, she’s been venturing in the opposite direction of the seriousness of “The Crown,” feeling drawn to projects infused with dark humor, like the recent release “MaXXXine,” Ti West’s bonkers psychosexual thriller in which she plays a Teflon-tough director of horror films. And for now, she’s focusing on finding purely fictional characters to play. “After doing something that’s so crystallinely real but not real, which is what ‘The Crown’ was, I need to do work where the characters are created, they’re just completely imaginative and fictional and I can take a lot of license with them. That feels like the right antithesis.”

She has already signed on to star in Brazilian filmmaker Iuli Gerbase’s sci-fi drama “This Blue Is Mine,” in which she’ll play a peculiar woman who disrupts a family’s tropical resort vacation. She has other potential projects cooking, including a return to the theater. Reflecting on “The Crown” now, she knows the experience has boosted her nerve. “When you can’t wriggle out of something that scares the hell out of you, when there’s nowhere to go but back to work, you really learn how to do your job,” she said. “Because I did something that scared me so much, that’s probably made me braver. It’s really uncomfortable. And also the greatest thing that can happen.”

This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Drama series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.

Read more from the Down to the Wire Drama series issue here .

The post How Elizabeth Debicki Tackled Playing Princess Diana, the Role That ‘Scared the Hell’ Out of Her appeared first on TheWrap .

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