princess diana dodi yacht kiss

The true story behind Princess Diana's iconic yacht photo

All you need to know about the iconic photo of the late princess of wales that went around the globe.

Princess Diana was always a fashion icon , we can never forget her legendary 'revenge' dress , but one of her best-known looks was snapped when she holidayed on the Jonikal yacht with the al-Fayed family, scenes which were immortalised in the fifth and sixth seasons of The Crown .

The holiday that Diana enjoyed, alongside sons Prince William and Prince Harry , would be her last before she was tragically killed in a car accident in 1997. One of the most memorable photos saw the late Princess of Wales sat on the yacht's diving board looking out over the sea.

Even though the photo of Diana in the teal swimsuit is now one of the most poignant photos of the late royal, how much do you know of the story behind it? Read on to find out all you need to know…

Why was Diana on the yacht?

Princess Diana had become friends with the businessman Mohamed al-Fayed, with the pair reportedly meeting a polo match before becoming friends. Following her divorce from the then Prince Charles and the ending of her relationship with heart surgeon Dr. Hasnat Khan, Mohamed invited Diana to join him and his family on a trip to St Tropez, in southern France.

Ahead of the trip, Diana had been in Milan to attend the funeral of fashion designer and friend Gianna Versace, who had been murdered by Andrew Cunanan. The late royal later travelled to Sarajevo, in Bosnia, to highlight the issue of landmines in the country. During her time in the city, she met with people who had been injured by the mines.

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The trip would end up being Diana's first time meeting Dodi al-Fayed, and the filmmaker's then-girlfriend, Kelly Fisher, was allegedly on the trip.

Who took the photo?

On 10 August, paparazzi photos were published in the Sunday Mirror showing Princess Diana and Dodi sharing a kiss, which intensified media presence around the couple and their holiday. Paparazzi photographers began renting dinghies to try and get new photos of the royal, with some even going for prices up to £1million.

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It's ultimately unknown which photographer grabbed the photo of Diana on the side of the yacht, which was published on 24 August, a week before Diana died. The snap saw the Princess in her teal swimsuit sat at the end of the yacht's diving board, with a life ring floating in the water beneath her.

See below for more images of Diana on the Jonikal…

Diana and Dodi

Diana and Dodi grew close on the trip, and in this photo the pair shared an intimate moment as they relaxed in the sun together.

Diana with the al-Fayed family

The late Princess of Wales had been invited on the trip by Mohamed al-Fayed, and she enjoyed the businessman's company during her time onboard.

Diana in blue

Diana favoured the teal swimsuit during her time in St Tropez.

Diana's paparazzi moment

The royal was aware of the media presence, and she light-heartedly teased photographers in this photo, mimicking a pair of binoculars with her hands.

Diana stretches

The mum-of-two also brought this stunning green and blue one-piece with her on the trip, and in this photo she enjoyed some morning stretches on the yacht's deck.

Diana's family moment

Diana didn't go on the holiday alone, and she also enjoyed time with her sons Prince William and Prince Harry, and a young Harry can be seen here with his mum while she spoke to someone on the phone.

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The True Story of Princess Diana's Vacation on Mohamed Al Fayed's Yacht in Saint Tropez

The trip features in the final season of The Crown .

Season five of The Crown ends with Princess Diana packing for vacation, after Mohamed Al Fayed and his wife, Heini Wathen-Fayed, invited her and her sons on their yacht in Saint-Tropez. On that trip, Diana would meet Fayed's son, Dodi Al Fayed , who would go on to become her last boyfriend, and their relationship, as well as the second trip Diana took with him on the Fayed yacht, then named the Jonikal , play an integral role in The Crown season six.

"Everything about that trip to St. Tropez was heaven," Prince Harry shared about the vacation he and Prince William joined his mother for aboard the vessel in his memoir, Spare . Here, some of the most memorable photos of Princess Diana with her sons and the Fayeds on the Jonikal in July 1997.

Princess Diana on board the Jonikal yacht, where she first got to know Dodi better.

Princess Diana was friendly with Mohamed Al Fayed, who had been in royal-adjacent circles for some time due to his ownership of Harrods department store.

Diana brought her two sons, Prince William (head down, center) and Prince Harry (right), on vacation with her.

"We'd been with Mummy weeks earlier when she first met him, in St. Tropez," Harry writes in Spare —the 'him' refers to Dodi. "We were having a grand time, just the three of us, staying at some old gent's villa."

At the time, Diana had recently broken up with British Pakistani heart surgeon Dr. Hasnat Khan, who could not handle the media attention surrounding their relationship. Her friends later shared that they believed her fling with Dodi was to make Hasnat jealous.

Diana pictured with her bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, who would later be the sole survivor of the crash that killed Princess Diana and Dodi.

Princess Diana waved to Trevor ashore in Saint-Tropez.

The Princess looked happy to be spending time with her sons.

Harry writes, "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."

Paparazzi snapped Diana giving her youngest, Prince Harry, a big hug.

Diana, ever the style icon, had some great swimwear moments on this vacation, including this neon set.

She also rocked a leopard-print one piece.

Princess Diana was beginning to navigate her not-quite-royal, but definitely not normal, life post her divorce from Prince Charles .

At the time, Dodi was reportedly dating American model Kelly Fisher —and she said that she was actually on the yacht in Saint Tropez with the Fayeds and Princess Diana.

Princess Diana made sure the vacation was fun for her sons; here, she rode on a jet ski with Prince Harry.

"Best of all," Harry remembers in Spare, "there were jet skis. Whose were they? Don't know. But I vividly remember Willy and me riding them out to the deepest part of the channel, circling while waiting for the big ferries to come. We used their massive wakes as ramps to get airborne. I'm not sure how we weren't killed"

Wearing life jackets, the royal mother-son duo zoomed around in the water together.

Princess Diana smiled as she swam in the sea off the coast of France.

Emily Burack (she/her) is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma , a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram .

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'The Crown' season 6 recreates famous photographs of Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed, and King Charles. Here is how they compare to the real photos.

• "The Crown" season six recreates the first public photos of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed kissing.
• It also recreates snaps from King Charles' photo shoot with his sons, Princes William and Harry.
• Here is how the drama's recreations compare to the real photos.

"The Crown" is back for a sixth and final season.

The first four episodes focus on the final months of Princess Diana's life as she begins dating Dodi Fayed, with whom she died in a tragic car crash in Paris in August 1997.

The second episode of season six, "Two Photographs," contrasts two key moments that took place in the summer of 1997.

The first is the media frenzy that ensued when the UK's Sunday Mirror newspaper published the first photos of Diana and Dodi kissing on a yacht in Sardinia.

The second is a photo shoot depicting Prince Charles and his sons, Princes William and Harry , having a much more subdued vacation at Balmoral Castle in Scotland.

Here's how "The Crown" depicts the moments — and what they looked like in real life.

On August 10, 1997, the UK's Sunday Mirror published the very first photograph of Diana and Dodi kissing on its front page. The headline? "The Kiss."

The photographs of Diana and Dodi were taken by Italian photographer Mario Brenna.

The Sunday Mirror published a 10-page spread of Brenna's photos, which it called "the most sensational pictures ever."

Under the headline was the text: "Now Dodi flies off to buy an engagement ring for Diana."

Here's how the front page was faithfully recreated in "The Crown."

In the show, a teenage Prince William (Rufus Kampa) is shown covertly reading the newspaper in his room, which causes him to grow concerned about his mother's relationship with Dodi.

Viewers also see the moment Diana and Dodi share the kiss, not realizing that a photographer is nearby.

After the explosive Diana photos were published, King Charles took part in a photo shoot with Princes William and Harry at Balmoral on August 12, 1997.

In "The Crown," the photo shoot is depicted as a response to the photos of Diana and Dodi in an effort to show Charles in a more sympathetic light to the British public.

Here's how the photo shoot is recreated in the show.

In "The Crown," Charles' aides hire the mild-mannered Scottish photographer Duncan Muir to take the photos. However, it appears that the character was invented for the purposes of the series.

In truth, the photo shoot, which took place during the royals' annual vacation to Balmoral, was attended by a number of Fleet Street photographers, per The Telegraph .

Princes William and Harry did indeed skip stones across the water, as shown in "The Crown."

And here they are with their pet dog.

"The Crown" takes some creative license when it comes to depicting how British newspapers ran these photos.

Charles' jaunt with his two sons is shown dominating the front pages of British newspapers — but this never happened.

In the show, the photo of the princes appears on the front page of The Mirror the day after they're released as a "royal world picture exclusive."

In reality, the photos didn't make such a splash that day. Instead, a story about Diana took the prime spot.

"Di and Dodi fly to psychic Rita," the front page of The Mirror read on August 13, 1997.

The pictures of the princes were featured in the newspaper but on pages eight and nine , showing that the tame photoshoot was no match for the public's appetite for updates about Dodi and Diana's romance.

Likewise, The Daily Record didn't feature the photos on the front page. Its coverage also noted how "embarrassed" William and Harry looked.

The Daily Record ran the photos on page five, instead choosing to dedicate the front page to a story that interested readers more: dustmen who had gone on strike to support a colleague accused of hitting a love rival with a wheelie bin.

The newspaper also commented on how William and Harry looked in the photos, with a subheading that read: "Young princes look embarrassed by dad's Harry Lauder image," per the British Newspaper Archive.

Disclosure: Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Business Insider's parent company, Axel Springer, is a Netflix board member.

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‘The Crown’: Behind the Photo of an Embrace That Changed Princess Diana’s Life

In the show, Mohamed al-Fayed sends the photographer Mario Brenna to capture shots of Diana and al-Fayed’s son, Dodi, on vacation. The portrayal is inaccurate, Brenna says.

By Alex Marshall

Reporting from London

It’s summer 1997, and Princess Diana is flirting with Dodi Fayed, a globe-trotting playboy, on the Jonikal, a yacht floating on sparkling Mediterranean waters.

Diana, teasingly, says that she likes men who have lips that are “just the right temperature.”

“Are mine the right temperature?” Dodi replies.

“I don’t know,” Diana says: “Need to check.” Then, the couple kiss, blissfully unaware that just a few meters away, Mario Brenna, a slick Italian photographer, is on a boat, with a long-lens camera trained on the couple.

A few days later, Brenna’s shots of the princess and her new beau are on the front pages of newspapers worldwide.

This is a central scene in the sixth and final season of Netflix’s royal drama “The Crown” — the first batch of episodes premiered on Thursday — and a moment that signaled the start of a tabloid frenzy around the couple that many blame for their deaths on Aug. 31, 1997, in a car crash in Paris as they were chased by photographers.

Yet the depiction is far from accurate, according to Brenna, speaking in what he said was his first interview with an English-language newspaper.

For a start, “The Crown” has Mohamed al-Fayed — Dodi’s father, and a retail and hotel tycoon who died this year — appearing to hire Brenna to take the shots, in an effort to push Diana and Dodi’s relationship into the public eye, and cajole the pair to marry.

In an email, Annie Sulzberger, the head of research for the show — she is also the sister of The Times’s publisher, A.G. Sulzberger — said that “there are a few theories about how Brenna managed to find the Jonikal moored somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea,” but the one the team found most credible was that one of al-Fayed’s employees leaked the boat’s location to Brenna.

But Brenna said the idea that al-Fayed hired him was “absurd and completely invented,” and that no one leaked information about the yacht’s whereabouts to him. Every summer at that time, he was in Sardinia so he could take paparazzi shots of famous people, he said, and coming across Diana and Dodi was simply a “great stroke of luck.”

On Aug. 1, 1997, Brenna said he approached Diana’s yacht on a fast moving inflatable boat after mistaking a blonde woman making a telephone call on its upper deck for an old acquaintance. As he got closer, he was stunned to realize it was the princess.

Bruno Malka, Brenna’s agent at the time who helped sell the images to Paris Match magazine, said in an email that he thought Brenna was familiar with the yacht, “without knowing it was Diana and Dodi” onboard that day. Brenna was successful, Malka added, because he had spent so many years working in the region.

After spotting the couple, Brenna said he spent the next few days stalking the boat, including climbing a cliff to get a better view. From that elevated position, about 400 meters away from Diana, he took several photos of Diana and Dodi in an embrace. The shots were almost blurred, Brenna said, because the heat haze meant he struggled to get the pair in focus.

Still, he knew immediately he’d secured “a historic photo.” He’d also captured an image that “solved my personal and family problems,” he said, at a time when he had recently divorced and so “was not swimming in wealth.”

He unloaded the rolls of film from the camera, then buried them to make sure they didn’t get exposed to the sun as he tried to take more images, and also as he feared a competitor might have seen him at work and try to steal his camera and so obtain the images every other photographer in the Mediterranean had been hoping to get first.

On Aug. 10, the Sunday Mirror, a British tabloid, splashed Brenna’s image on its front page . “The Kiss,” the headline read. Soon, Brenna said, he was selling the pictures worldwide. In the following six-to-eight months, he said, he made about 1.7 million pounds, or $2.1 million, from his photos of the couple.

Brenna’s pictures — and the prices news outlets paid for them — sparked a frenzy. In 2013, Jason Fraser, a British photographer who helped Brenna sell his images, told The Daily Mail that after they were published, over 2,000 photographers arrived in the Mediterranean hoping to get their own snaps of Diana and Dodi. “I felt the whole thing was spinning out of control,” Fraser said. Weeks later, the couple died.

In “The Crown,” Brenna (portrayed by Enzo Cilenti) explains his methods to camera. To capture celebrities misbehaving, the fictional Brenna says, you have to take risks. Paparazzi also have to act like “hunters … killers.”

Brenna said in the email interview that he did not share this opinion of his work (“I do not identify with the term ‘killer,’”) and that he was never contacted by anyone from “The Crown” to learn about his experiences (Netflix did not respond to a request for comment).

After Diana and Dodi’s death, al-Fayed sued Fraser, the British photographer, for taking photos of Diana and Dodi on a boat, saying it was an invasion of privacy. Brenna said he did not face any such action, adding his images were legal as they “were taken outdoors, in a public place.” And he regretted the privacy crackdown that happened since, with governments and stars trying to stop the paparazzi from taking photos: “There is still the right to report,” he said.

Today, Brenna lives near Lake Como, in Italy, where he said he’s photographed celebrities including George Clooney, Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé, even as the dawn of social media had impacted his profession significantly, including its financial rewards.

Brenna said he and his family enjoyed the success of the photos throughout August 1997. But then, Diana died. When he heard the news, Brenna said, he “couldn’t believe it” and cried, not least because he had two children himself and so could understand what her death would mean for Diana’s boys. He made a decision “not to speak or disclose anything about the incident until William and Harry reached adulthood.”

The mere thought that his images “could have contributed to fueling the hunt for Diana and Dodi obviously saddens me,” Brenna said. But he did not think his work added significantly to the furor around the princess.

“If it hadn’t been me,” he added, “someone else would certainly have captured those images.”

Alex Marshall is a European culture reporter, based in London. More about Alex Marshall

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

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Inside the £13m 208ft ‘love boat’ yacht where Princess Diana & Dodi Fayed had their romantic fling which is on The Crown

• Becky Pemberton
• Published : 12:36, 16 Nov 2023
• Updated : 12:36, 16 Nov 2023

THE famous £13million superyacht where Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed enjoyed their romantic fling is featured on the new season of The Crown.

The glamorous royal and her wealthy boyfriend were famously pictured kissing on the luxury “love boat” Jonikal, which is now called Bash, before their tragic deaths in 1997.

Photos of the couple’s Mediterranean getaway circulated around the world, with The Sunday Mirror paying £250,000 for first rights to the collection.

The fall out of the photos was depicted on the sixth and final season of Netflix’s The Crown, with the Queen , played by Imelda Staunton , seen viewing the multi-page spread back home.

The stunning 208ft yacht can hold up to 18 people across nine staterooms, along with 26 crew members.

It also offers a range of impressive amenities including a jacuzzi, swim platform, sun deck, formal dining room, a bar, and office space.

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The yacht belonged to Dodi’s multi-millionaire father Mohamed Al-Fayed .

The billionaire former Harrods owner amassed his astonishing fortune running several high-profile business ventures and a Premier League football club prior to the announcement of his death in August 2023.

The ship was first launched in 1990, and has had a number of owners over the years.

According to Boat International, it was sold earlier this year, and although the sum hasn’t been disclosed, the asking price was €15,500,000 (£13million).

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Diana’s final month included two cruises on The Jonikal.

The holidays sparked unfounded rumours that Diana was pregnant and about to announce plans to marry Dodi .

Dodi died aged 42 in a Paris car crash with Diana 26 years ago.

The pair first met at a polo match in 1989, but they did not get together until Dodi invited the princess to stay at his father's 30-bedroom villa in St Tropez in July 1997.

Much of Dodi's fortune was spent on impressing a string of beautiful models and actresses.

The playboy was linked to Blue Lagoon actress Brooke Shields, Val Kilmer’s ex-wife Joanne Whalley, Stranger Things star Winona Ryder and Frank Sinatra’s daughter Tina.

Following the 1997 car crash that led to the couple's deaths, Mohamed attempted to sell the yacht on a number of occasions before ultimately parting with it in 2014.

It was most recently purchased by Bassim Haidar in June of 2021, who sold it just over a year later with plans to upgrade to a larger vessel.

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Insiders reveal the truth about Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed's relationship

New documentary highlights the last few weeks of princess diana and dodi fayed’s lives.

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During the summer of 1997, photos of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed filled the tabloids as paparazzi photographers scrambled to snap shots of their apparent love affair.

In the new documentary Diana & Dodi: The Princess and the Playboy , members of Diana and Fayed's inner circle remember what they witnessed that summer — which would ultimately be the couple's last. 

She was a former member of the British Royal Family, he was a filmmaker and the son of a wealthy businessman who wanted to be included by the British elite. 

Featuring interviews with close friends, former employees and even Fayed's ex-girlfriends, Diana & Dodi: The Princess and the Playboy uncovers how the two met — and how Fayed's father appears to have orchestrated it all. 

Insiders reveal the truth about Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed's relationship | Diana & Dodi: The Princess and the Playboy

The film also documents how their relationship came under intense scrutiny by the press. Images of the pair together could fetch over one million euros, and they had to find elaborate ways of avoiding photographers. At the same time, a former girlfriend of Fayed's — who says they were engaged when he met Diana — was suing him, claiming he had promised her money to abandon her career. 

Was it true love? Former friends of Diana have said it was just a fling, a rebound from her very public divorce. But in the documentary, Fayed's former butler reveals that the filmmaker was planning to propose in Paris on the night of their deaths. 

• In Depth Expert investigation reveals the truth about Princess Diana's death 25 years ago

Diana & Dodi: The Princess and the Playboy tells the untold story of Dodi Fayed and the truth about his relationship with Princess Diana, featuring unprecedented access and new, revelation-packed stories.

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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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‘A Photo Can Destroy a Life’

How the crown re-created the images of diana’s final days within the constraints of taste, decency, and copyright..

The first four episodes of The Crown ’s final season may as well be called The Di Summer Collection. Most of the action parts ways with the Thames in favor of the sunnier Mediterranean Sea during the summer of 1997, with Diana (Elizabeth Debecki) and Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla) kindling a romance that culminates in their tragic deaths in Paris after being chased through a tunnel by the paparazzi. (They also return as ghosts for some reason .) Re-creating the final days of the People’s Princess was an exercise in both visual accuracy and creative liberty: While the tabloid images of her that proliferated at the time provided ample starting points, “we’re not making a documentary,” says set designer Alison Harvey. “You have to make it your own.”

That meant looking at some of the most famous images from Diana’s final summer and not only re-creating them in a way that would be instantly familiar to viewers, but also finding deeper emotional truths within the two-dimensional images. The season kicks off with Diana taking her sons on a yachting holiday in Saint-Tropez at the invitation of Mohamed Al-Fayed, who’s looking to set up the princess with his son Dodi. The series explores the couple’s burgeoning intimacy in scenes that directly parallel those famous paparazzi photos, which proved difficult to shoot on the water at times. However, everything that made the final cut exemplified The Crown ’s clear grammar of the way it films each of its royals — with some added irony thrown in. “For Diana’s scenes, it was so chaotic to shoot. You have about 15 boats and people are throwing up because they have to stay out there for hours until we get the shot,” director Alex Gabassi explains. “Then, with Camilla, you have those nice crane shots and everything is smooth. For me, that says it all.”

Diana’s paparazzi sea showdown

“Most of our conversations throughout this episode had to do with how much we wanted to portray her as a mother,” explains Gabassi, who directed episode one. “We knew it would be very sparse when you see her with the kids. We needed to put as much of that love out there as possible.” This maternal behavior gave the iconic leopard swimsuit a deeper meaning. “We knew there was that particular photo of her,” he says. “But we’re always tempted to give as much ambiguity as possible.”

Gabassi and The Crown creator and writer Peter Morgan settled on showcasing Diana’s style as a parent, with the impetus of her emerging in the swimsuit being that her son William feels compelled to stay inside the yacht in order to avoid the swarm of cameras. “We needed to strike a balance between her taking care of the kids and sacrificing herself by going out with the swimsuit,” he says. “She was giving them what they needed in order to be left in peace.”

The other side of that, however, was the looming specter of competing with Camilla’s 50th birthday party in the press. “Diana couldn’t appear as being someone with that kind of narcissism who just wanted to win over Charles and Camilla’s attention by the press,” Gabassi notes. “We wanted to give a bit of that, but also a sense that she would come out as a mother figure in order to protect her children.”

Gabassi’s read of the scene brought forth a minor disagreement between the director and Debecki: “I remember asking Elizabeth, ‘Could you pose a little bit at the end of the scene?’ And she said, ‘Do you think it’s right? I’m not sure about that.’ I responded, ‘There’s something incredibly attractive and yet dangerous in the way that you’re given all that attention.’ When she goes in and she knows these guys, she talks to them and calls them by their names and there’s a kind of camaraderie. You think to yourself, Oh, they might be friends. These guys are quite nice. At that moment, I think Diana was enticed by the idea of playing a figure that everybody loves.”

Gabassi ensured this was followed through in the post-mixing sessions with Morgan, when one paparazzo verbalizes to his peers to wrap it up and depart in their boats. “The negotiation paid off,” Gabassi says. “She gave something, and they got something. The conversation was always about how much Diana knew how to play the paparazzi. It’s been clear that she knew how to do it, which is something Camilla doesn’t know how to do.”

While Gabassi was consumed with the paparazzi’s motives, Harvey was tasked with their equipment. The main problem? Procuring the vast amount of lenses required for each person, which on the vintage market can cost up to $20,000 each. (A quick scan of the scene estimates more than two dozen would’ve been required.) For cost reasons, Harvey decided to make them as props. “It was more prosaic,” she admits, “but it had to be done that way.” Costume designer Sid Roberts had a bit more fun re-creating Diana’s leopard look. “The swimsuit is the new ball gown,” she says. Her team got in touch with Gottex, the Israeli company that made several of Diana’s swimsuits that summer — including the leopard one — and they agreed to collaborate on this season of The Crown . “Its leopard print leans into Diana’s animalistic strengths. It plays up to a safari,” Roberts explains. “I love that the swimsuit was for this moment because she’s in the wild, if you like, and she’s literally being hunted by photographers.”

Camilla’s 50th birthday party

While Diana is enjoying her sun-kissed summer, Camilla and Charles are back home in dreary old England to celebrate Camilla’s 50th birthday with an elegant soiree. Gabassi was forced to film on a “terrible and disastrously rainy day,” a weather pattern that helped inform the ease of their love.

“The first scene I did with Camilla was looking through the window down to Charles preparing the party,” he says. “I told Olivia Williams, ‘What can we do here that implies the connection is deeper now and she’s being accepted by him?’ I put her in the bedroom, waking up and coming out of bed. That wasn’t scripted. She’s in her nightgown and she’s being embraced by Charles. She’s part of that household.” The bookend of this scene comes from the speech Charles gives to Camilla later on at the party, which needed to come off as sincere as possible. “Camilla had been that kind of person,” Gabassi notes, “resilient and facing so much adversity, but she’s still there.”

And, yes, there’s a reason the only member of the royal family at Camilla’s birthday party is Margaret, and it’s not factual accuracy. (There’s no record of her being in attendance at the time.) “It echoes what she’s suffered and she could never achieve with true love. It was important for the audience to understand that this is a very steady relationship,” Gabassi says. “It’s interesting to see that being seen through the eyes of Margaret, who had gone through both stages — a crazy chaotic relationship and then someone who accepted her but still wasn’t quite right.”

Diana and Dodi’s kiss

As with Diana boating to the paparazzi to defend her boys, this was another instance of The Crown re-creating a moment and giving it additional narrative context. In the show, the image, which featured the couple kissing and embracing on the yacht, is set in motion by the couple having a heartfelt conversation about Diana’s priorities in life.

“It’s intimate, but there’s a sexiness and an affection between the two,” says Christian Schwochow, who directed episodes two through four. “They talk about something that really matters for Diana, which is the landmine charity. I think it’s a great idea to have one of the most beautiful moments in their relationship be about how much he cares about her and how much she cares for the charity work. When we actually see her doing the charity work later in the episode, it gets destroyed by the journalists because of this photo.”

Unlike with the leopard-print swimsuit shots, though, Diana’s pink floral ensemble is one of the less iconic aspects of these photos. That was freeing for Roberts, who was given free rein in remaking the swimsuit, which wasn’t a Gottex creation. “It was our time to play. I closed my eyes and thought, What do you remember about that swimsuit? What’s the essence? It’s a pink hue and there’s a real vibrancy,” she says. “This is her second holiday with Dodi, so they’re flirting. There has to be a kind of sexiness to all the stuff she wears.” Roberts created eight versions before she felt she properly translated the original in terms of the colors and scale of the flowers.

The story of this photo includes a third major character besides Diana and Dodi: the photographer who captured the kiss, Mario Brenna, who stated in a recent New York Times interview that his portrayal is inaccurate. While The Crown shows him being hired by Mohamed al-Fayed, Brenna claims he fortuitously encountered the yacht while on vacation. Regardless, the photo and its reported cost of sale ($2.1 million) encompass Diana’s deteriorating relationship with the paparazzi. “I hope viewers get a sense that a photo can destroy a person’s life,” Schwochow says.

Diana’s yachtside contemplation

The final scene of episode two features the most prevalent image of Diana’s time in the sun: the princess sitting, deep in thought, on the side of the Fayed superyacht. (Despite the appearance of a diving board, the plank is, in fact, a landing jetty.) “Everything that’s known as an image we tried to re-create as faithfully as we could within the constraints of taste, decency, and copyright,” set designer Alison Harvey says. For Schwochow, that meant capturing the “emotional truth” of the moment and Diana’s summer fling with Dodi — which at this point in the series had been going on for just over one week. “We feel that Diana is incredibly restless,” he explains. “There’s happiness, but there’s also quite a messiness in her life. We used this moment to create this forlornness and melancholy.”

Schwochow worked with Debicki for several hours to find “different physical positions” to best match the scene. While he filmed a few shots of paparazzi taking photos of Diana on the jetty, he ultimately didn’t use them in order to enhance the moment’s vulnerability. “There’s no magic trick to re-creating it — it’s just the actress and me,” he says. “The first shot on the boat behind her with the camera took an hour. Then some of the crew had to jump on a small tender, get to the shore, and get settled there with the boat’s captain. It takes a lot of time to find the perfect position off the boat to have the best sunlight.”

The other element of the shot that absolutely had to be correct was Diana’s blue swimsuit, which Roberts considers to be her third defining Crown silhouette, after the wedding dress and the revenge dress from earlier seasons. “I love the trajectory of those three silhouettes because it’s like the chrysalis of a butterfly,” she says. “We knew we had to do the blue swimsuit since the moment was so iconic and has the same significance in our story.” Roberts’s main priority in re-creating the swimsuit was capturing the color “because it’s this beautiful block of blue amongst her and the seas.” However, she also had to consider Debicki’s tall frame. “It’s vulnerable for an actor to go out on a diving board in just a swimsuit,” she adds. “The ’90s was very unforgiving in how high it was cut on the thigh and the hip. A lot of that for us was working out where Elizabeth would be comfortable.”

Diana and Dodi leave the Ritz

For Schwochow, the season’s defining tragedy begins in the anteroom before Diana and Dodi leave the hotel — which is possible to depict thanks to ample CCTV footage . “What’s interesting about the footage is you could see that they were laughing together. We saw Dodi gently touching her back and giving her comfort,” Schwochow notes. “We felt like they’re very much at ease and she feels very comfortable in his presence. That’s why we improvised on that night. We can’t hear what they say in the original footage, but it felt like they had this little moment of ‘Oh my God, what are we doing? Where have we ended up being together?’”

“This was a look I felt duty-bound to get accurate, so that the tragedy and sensitivity of the scene wouldn’t be interfered with,” Roberts explains, citing Diana’s Ritz look as the most difficult to re-create this season. The shoes and blazer were specially made for The Crown, while the jeans and top were contemporary Max Mara pieces with a ’90s-era aesthetic. The costume department purchased three of each item, just in case: “If it was just right, then it would almost all fall away into the background.”

One thing that would never be shown, however, was the crash itself. While Schwochow was keen on capturing Diana looking through the car’s rear window for the “visual truth” of the last photograph taken of her alive, once the car began its drive into the tunnel, imagery of any kind was off limits.

“We tried to create the scene like we thought it must have felt for them, looking back at the photographs,” Schwochow says. “That was a very early conversation we all had, to always be as respectful as possible. There was never a moment of the crash in the script. It wasn’t up for discussion. We also decided very early that we didn’t want to see the wreckage of the car.” Showing Diana’s dead body, either in the tunnel or at the hospital, was promptly rejected. “ The Crown treats the royal family always with a lot of respect. We didn’t want to be sensational because the story is about how the media was part of her death,” he adds. “I’m not saying the press was guilty, but they play a big role in all this because the world was hungry for these images of them.”

The funeral procession

To re-create the images of Philip, William, Charles Spencer, Harry, and Charles walking behind Diana’s casket at the public funeral ceremony (a moment Harry recalls being “torture” in his memoir, Spare ), the basic logistics of the gun carriage, coffin, flag, and letter to “Mummy” were easy enough for Harvey to procure, but the sheer amount of flowers proved overwhelming. “We kept buying flowers,” she recounts. “When Diana died, I was actually there doing a job outside of Buckingham Palace. The flowers were really, really staggering, and trying to re-create that would be impossible. We thought we’d be all right with 300 bouquets, but it just didn’t go anywhere and we needed more. Everyone was running around buying more and more flowers.” Harvey lost count of the final number.

Schwochow utilized CGI to approximately match the size of the crowd of mourners, which proved difficult with the simple act of walking — because of the green screens, the five actors had only a few dozen meters to walk before looping back and doing it all again. Rain also plagued the half-day shoot in London, in contrast to the sunnier weather of the actual day of Diana’s funeral. “You can see in some of the shots that it’s raining, and we couldn’t get rid of it,” he sighs. “That’s always a bit complicated to be in control of all the technical elements, but also to keep the actors in character and in their emotional words.”

William and Harry, in particular, had trouble covering the emotions they’d been trained to hide. “I have little Harry crying in the church where he has privacy, because there’s more of the family around him — no cameras, no photographers, no journalists,” Schwochow says. “I love the dialogue between Philip and William where he tells him, ‘Just concentrate on the act of walking. Don’t listen to the onlookers crying. Don’t listen to what they say.’ That’s the subtext: ‘Focus on the job because what we do here is part of our roles.’”

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In August 1997, Princess Diana was photographed kissing Dodi Fayed. Weeks later, they were gone.

D uring the summer of 1997, Princess Diana’s relationship with Dodi Fayed was all anyone could talk about. The most famous woman in the world was dating the son of billionaire,  Mohamed Al-Fayed .

Many will remember the tabloid splash 'The Kiss', where a paparazzi shot of the new couple kissing aboard his yacht was front page news. The picture sold for over $2 million, encouraging the already frenzied paparazzi to become even more relentless in their pursuit. 

Diana and Dodi were together for one summer before they both died in a high-speed car crash in Paris. Diana was 36, and Dodi was 42.

The first four episodes The Crown season six focus on Diana and Dodi's relationship, from their lavish holiday in Saint-Tropez with Princes William and Harry, to the aftermath of their deaths on August 31, 1997.

Who was Dodi Fayed?

Dodi was born in Egypt in 1955, the eldest son of Harrods tycoon  Mohamed Al-Fayed  and  Samira Khashoggi (his uncle was Saudi Arabian-born billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.)  Dodi was a film producer , receiving credits in  Hook ,  The Scarlet Letter  and  Chariots of Fire . He divided his time between London, Paris, the Riviera and Cairo.

How did Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed meet?

The pair met over a decade before they became romantically involved at a polo event that Diana attended with ex-husband Prince Charles in 1986. They also ran in the same circles in London.

But it wasn't until Dodi’s father invited Diana on a luxury holiday in June 1997 that they grew close.  

Mohamed Al-Fayed was an old friend of Diana's father, the late Earl Spencer. Diana accepted the invitation to stay at his palatial villa in St Tropez with her sons Prince William, then 15, and Prince Harry, then 12.

When did Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed start their relationship?

Dodi is said to have admired Diana from afar but set his sights firmly upon her during the group holiday in July 1997. He showered her with lavish gifts after their luxury break - a Cartier watch, baskets of tropical fruit, and enough roses to fill an entire room.

They became romantically involved and holidayed on the Mediterranean Sea together, in between Diana’s charitable visits to Bosnia and Angola in support of landmine victims, and New York City to meet with Mother Teresa.

Was Dodi Fayed married?

Dodi was married to model Suzanne Gregard in 1986 but their marriage only lasted for eight months. 

He had a reputation for being a bit of a playboy. Partly due to his immense wealth and the fact he’d been linked to many models and celebrities, inclu ding Winona Ryder and Brooke Shields. 

The biggest controversy is that he might have been dating Princess Diana and American model Kelly Fisher at the same time, if Fisher's claims are to be believed.

He was engaged to Fisher earlier in 1997 and she told the tabloids he left her for Diana during the group holiday in  Saint-Tropez.

Fisher tried to sue him for $500,000 because she said she had sacrificed her modelling career to marry him but she dropped the case out of respect for his family when he died.

What happened the night Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed died?

Diana and Dodi’s final holiday began on August 22, 1997, when they flew to the Med to cruise from the South of France to Sardinia.

It was in Sardinia that the Italian paparazzi caught up with them. The couple called time on their nine-day holiday to return to London via Paris.

But Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed never made it back to London.

On August 31, 1997, Diana and Dodi dined at his father's Ritz hotel in Paris. They were pursued by French paparazzi on motorbikes on leaving their dinner and crashed into a pillar in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel.

Diana, Dodi and driver Henri Paul all died in the crash. Paul was over the drink driving limit and an inquest later blamed grossly negligent driving by Paul and the pursuing paparazzi.

Were Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed engaged?

Dodi's father Mohamed Al-Fayed claimed a ring that Dodi purchased for Diana shortly before their deaths was going to be an engagement ring. The ring in question was put on display in the London Harrods store in 1998. It is alleged Dodi bought the $21,000 engagement ring only a few hours before the couple's death. Whether the couple would have stayed together is contested by those who knew Diana.

Her former press secretary Michael Gibbons questioned whether the relationship would last the summer in an interview with The Sun .

However Michael Cole, a former BBC royal correspondent who knew the couple, said he'd no doubt they were the real deal and they would have got married. 

This article was published  in 2019 and updated in 2022. 

Feature image: Getty.

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

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."

Among Princess Diana’s most iconic images—the revenge dress, the casual biker shorts—is a photo of her in an aqua blue swimsuit, sitting on a diving board over the ocean. Taken before her tragic death in August 1997, the solitary princess was captured aboard the Jonikal, the boat owned by Mohamed Al-Fayed , on a getaway with his son Dodi , her new fling. The shot is so recognizable, so symbolic of her isolation. (Decades later, SZA even recreated it on her SOS album cover and The Crown paid homage to it for its season 6 posters.) But it turns out that the real-life story of the trip behind it is even more complex. Most of what the public knows of Diana’s vacations with the Fayeds that summer in 1997 is limited to blurry paparazzi shots from afar. In The Crown ’s sixth season, Peter Morgan attempts to dramatize what might’ve happened behind closed doors. These scenes, however, were filmed in Mallorca instead of the French Riviera.

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.

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Inside the £13m 208ft ‘love boat’ yacht where Princess Diana & Dodi Fayed had their romantic fling which is on The Crown

• Becky Pemberton
• Published : 7:36 ET, Nov 16 2023

THE famous £13million superyacht where Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed enjoyed their romantic fling is featured on the new season of The Crown.

The glamorous royal and her wealthy boyfriend were famously pictured kissing on the luxury “love boat” Jonikal, which is now called Bash, before their tragic deaths in 1997.

Photos of the couple’s Mediterranean getaway circulated around the world, with The Sunday Mirror paying £250,000 for first rights to the collection.

The fall out of the photos was depicted on the sixth and final season of Netflix’s The Crown, with the Queen, played by Imelda Staunton, seen viewing the multi-page spread back home.

The stunning 208ft yacht can hold up to 18 people across nine staterooms, along with 26 crew members.

It also offers a range of impressive amenities including a jacuzzi, swim platform, sun deck, formal dining room, a bar, and office space.

The yacht belonged to Dodi’s multi-millionaire father Mohamed Al-Fayed.

The billionaire former Harrods owner amassed his astonishing fortune running several high-profile business ventures and a Premier League football club prior to the announcement of his death in August 2023.

The ship was first launched in 1990, and has had a number of owners over the years.

According to Boat International, it was sold earlier this year, and although the sum hasn’t been disclosed, the asking price was €15,500,000 (£13million).

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Diana’s final month included two cruises on The Jonikal.

The holidays sparked unfounded rumours that Diana was pregnant and about to announce plans to marry Dodi.

Dodi died aged 42 in a Paris car crash with Diana 26 years ago.

The pair first met at a polo match in 1989, but they did not get together until Dodi invited the princess to stay at his father's 30-bedroom villa in St Tropez in July 1997.

Much of Dodi's fortune was spent on impressing a string of beautiful models and actresses.

The playboy was linked to Blue Lagoon actress Brooke Shields, Val Kilmer’s ex-wife Joanne Whalley, Stranger Things star Winona Ryder and Frank Sinatra’s daughter Tina.

Following the 1997 car crash that led to the couple's deaths, Mohamed attempted to sell the yacht on a number of occasions before ultimately parting with it in 2014.

It was most recently purchased by Bassim Haidar in June of 2021, who sold it just over a year later with plans to upgrade to a larger vessel.

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• How <i>The Crown</i>‘s Depiction of Paparazzo Mario Brenna Stacks Up Against History

How The Crown ‘s Depiction of Paparazzo Mario Brenna Stacks Up Against History

T he widely anticipated final season of The Crown , which dropped its first four episodes on Nov. 16, picks up with the 1997 car crash that saw Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) and Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla) fatally pursued by paparazzi in Paris, and largely deals with its historic fallout. As the storyline jumps back eight weeks prior to the accident, the drama further unpacks the royal family’s tumultuous relationship with the media, in this instance the invasive practices of paparazzi during a defining period in British tabloid culture. It also portrays the deliberate use of photo opportunities to shape public perception at large.  

One such paparazzo depicted in the show is Mario Brenna , an Italian photographer who rose to prominence for his work with luxury fashion houses and photographs of Mediterranean high society. But Brenna's career-defining moment arrived when he captured the first photographs of Diana and Dodi embracing on a yacht off the coast of Sardinia in the summer of 1997.

Viewers are introduced to Brenna (played by Enzo Cilenti) in episode 2 during a sit-down interview about his profession. “Everyone wants pictures of celebrities. Pictures that show famous people. They are no different, just like us. Making mistakes just like us,” the character says in a lengthy monologue. “People pay one, two hundred thousand dollars for the right shot. But the right shot is hard to get. You have to be like hunters. Killers.” 

“There was this symbiotic relation with the press that Diana had,” royal historian Richard Fitzwilliams tells TIME. “The royals need certain images to get their points across… but it’s a desperately dangerous game.” 

While Brenna was not the only paparazzo who pursued Diana’s image over the years, he was among the best paid. Here’s what to know about his role in Diana’s final weeks, and the royal family’s wider relationship with photography.

Read more: The Crown Hits a Disappointing New Low in Its Maudlin Sixth Season

Who was the real Mario Brenna?

Brenna, then 40 years old and based in Monaco, had primarily worked as the official photographer of fashion houses such as Versace before he captured the candid image of Diana and Dodi on the latter’s family yacht on Aug. 4, 1997. 

Brenna, seemingly in the right place at the right time to take the lucrative photo, was completing another assignment nearby. But disputed reports claim that Diana called Brenna herself to stage the photo opportunity. Tina Brown writes in her 2022 book The Palace Papers , “Time and again, Diana chose to invade her own privacy, often for the capricious reason of making the men in her life jealous.” Discussing this photograph, she writes: “It was she who tipped off Italian lensman Mario Brenna—to send a taunting message to the real love of her life, Hasnat Khan.” Khan was a Pakistani heart surgeon who dated Diana for two years, and who many believe Diana still held affection for at her time of death.

The tabloids began an intense bidding war over the first photo of the couple’s budding romance, with the Sunday Mirror earning rights to print it on their front cover on Aug. 10, under the headline “ The Kiss .” The newspaper also fueled rumors about Dodi buying an engagement ring for Diana, and wrote: “Locked in her lover’s arms, the princess finds happiness at last.” 

The Los Angeles Times reported that Brenna earned up to $5 million for world rights to the image. 

Following the first visual insight into the couple’s relationship, other members of the paparazzi ramped up their efforts to secure their own big payout by capturing the couple’s next big moment. A 2006 report from the British metropolitan police states that Brenna’s photograph sparked these efforts. “Not only did this photograph appear to draw media attention to the couple, it is believed that the amount of money reportedly earned by Brenna focused the attention of the paparazzi,” the report reads.   

Brenna has largely stayed out of the public eye since the whirlwind of attention in 1997, though he did speak about photographing the royal during an interview on an Italian news program in 2017. 

Read More: The Princess and the Paparazzi: How Diana's Death Changed the British Media

How was Diana affected by the paparazzi more broadly?

The paparazzi’s relentless pursuit of Diana is well documented, and many blame the industry for her death on Aug. 31, 1997, in the Pont de L’Alma tunnel in Paris. Dodi and their driver, Henri Paul, also died in the crash. 

At Diana’s funeral days later on Sept. 6, her brother Charles Spencer delivered a speech that implicitly placed responsibility at the hands of the paparazzi, calling his sister “the most hunted person of the modern age.” Over the years, Prince Harry has also been unequivocally vocal about the role photographers played in his mother’s death.  

But royal observers note that, while the chase resulted in devastating consequences for Diana, and she often expressed a desire to leave the U.K. for a more private life, her relationship with the press was often more nuanced than a game of cat and mouse. 

“There’s no doubt there was a problem of privacy for the [then] Princess of Wales, but on the other hand she used the press. One thinks of the famous Serpentine Gallery little black dress image, or posing alone in front of the Taj Mahal ,” Fitzwilliams says. He adds that Diana was often able to use the public’s fascination to bring attention to her humanitarian causes such as addressing HIV stigma and advocating against landmines. 

Fitzwilliams notes that Diana likely leaned into her relationship with the media when she wanted to communicate something. “She was intending to make a statement that she seemed to have… found freedom,” Fitzwilliams says. But at times her personal life could overshadow her humanitarian work. “The Kiss” photograph was published while Diana was in Bosnia-Herzegovina connecting with victims of landmines, and the media frenzy temporarily eclipsed her advocacy efforts.

What was Charles’ relationship with photography?

The Crown depicts King Charles, then Prince of Wales, grappling with public perception of him as a father and seeking to improve the way Camilla was received. In July 1997, Charles hosted a 50th birthday party for Camilla , which is depicted in episode 1 as Charles struggles to get members of the royal family to attend. 

“As far as Charles is concerned, he was never especially good at public relations” says Fitzwilliams, noting the royal’s interview with Jonathan Dimbly in 1994 where he admitted to having an extramarital affair. Fitzwilliams argues that the most defining photographs of Charles as a prince often featured Diana, while Diana’s were of her alone. 

After the couple’s separation, Charles used photo opportunities to redefine himself. In one such instance, as depicted in episode 2, Charles staged a photocall with William and Harry taken by Scottish photographer Duncan Muir on the banks of the River Dee at Balmoral. In the episode, an advisor to the prince suggests playing up the optics of Diana as a “tabloid princess as opposed to a broadsheet prince.” 

There is also an element of giving something to the media and public, to earn privacy in return. “You have to feed the beast to some extent,” says Fitzwilliams. No clearer is this in The Crown than when Diana is on holiday with her children in Saint-Tropez and approaches a fleet of photographers on a speedboat to deliver an impromptu press conference she hopes will incentivize their departure. “You leave me and my boys alone please, and you’re going to get a big surprise with the next thing I do," her character says. As history tells, the paparazzi intensified their pursuit of Diana on her next holiday. 

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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.

Related Articles

Inside Princess Diana's last summer of love, heartbreak and murder

Princess Diana enjoyed a happy summer in 1997 with a new lover not knowing it was to be her last

• 14:48, 29 Aug 2018
• Updated 15:54, 31 Aug 2019

It is the perfect picture of a summer romance.

Diana, glowing, perches on the back of a jet-ski bobbing on a sun-kissed ocean as her new lover Dodi Fayed grips the handlebars. She appears laughing and carefree and - at 36 - on the brink of a new life after many troubled years.

It is still hard to believe that this brief love story played out against the glittering backdrop of the Med was to end in such tragedy.

Three weeks later, both Diana and Dodi were dead when their drunk driver lost control of his car as they were pursued by photographers through Paris.

It was the most terrible of ends for a woman who had had the world in her thrall for nearly two decades, and 21 years on the events of that last summer remain fascinating.

On her 36th birthday Diana attended the 100th anniversary of the Tate Gallery in London.

The Princess received 90 bouquets of flowers from admirers, and Harry gathered a group of classmates to sing "Happy Birthday" to her over the telephone.

By mid-July, Diana was in St Tropez with William, 15, and Harry, 12. Still reeling from her split from the surgeon Hasnat Khan , she had accepted Mohamed al-Fayed's invitation to stay at his palatial villa.

Al-Fayed was the then owner of Harrods. He had been a friend of her father, the late Earl Spencer, and her stepmother, Raine, the Countess of Chambrun, sat on the Harrods International Board.

There were a number of guests at the villa and al-Fayed's 42-year-old son Dodi was one of them. Partial to lavish displays of wealth, he was known as a playboy with an international jet-set lifestyle funded by his father's fortune.

Pictures of the holiday show Diana and her sons having the time of their life as they swam in the ocean and fooled around on a jet-ski.

On two evenings, Dodi rented a disco for William and Harry to enjoy privately.

But his main pursuit was romancing the most famous woman in the world. He showered her with gifts and soon the pair had embarked on a whirlwind romance.

Diana is first thought to have met Dodi, a graduate of Sandhurst military academy, at a polo tournament which she attended with ex-husband Prince Charles.

They moved in similar circles and had seen each other at polo events and film premieres in London's West End.

Dodi was not a public figure until that fateful summer. However he worked as a producer with credits including the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire and had also dated a string of well-known women including actresses Brooke Shields and Winona Ryder.

Designer Gianni Versace was gunned down outside his Florida mansion on July 15. Diana broke away from her languid summer of love and flew to Milan for his funeral.

Author Tina Brown, a personal friend of the princess, saw it as a turning point. "The murder of the flamboyant fashion star Gianni Versace... while Diana was on Al Fayed's yacht, was a meteor shower in the exploding sky of her final summer," she wrote.

Diana adored Versace's clothes and he frequently sent bundles of new designs to Kensington Palace. She was a walking advert for his brand, the most glamorous woman in the world, impeccably clad in Italian couture.

She attended his funeral in black dress and pearls, sitting by Elton John and Sting.

At some point between late July and early August Diana was to see William and Harry for the last time.

In a documentary last year to mark the 20th anniversary of her death, her sons spoke of how they had not seen her for almost a month before she died.

They spent August at Balmoral with their father and other senior royals and it were still there when tragedy overtook them.

Diana reportedly told the writer Shirley Conran that she felt that nothing she could offer William and Harry as a vacation could compete with Balmoral. "They do all those manly, killing things," she said, "and there's that wonderful go-cart track."

Without her boys Diana was at a loose end so was glad to accept an invitation to spend time with Dodi on holiday in Saint-Tropez.

Without her HRH title following her divorce the Princess had chosen several charities to focus on.

And it was her crusade against land mines which led to a three-day Bosnia visit to meet victims of mines and meet rehabilitation specialists that she did next.

Her trip coincided with news of her new romance with Dodi, a story that rapidly reverberated around the world.

On the morning of her departure, the newspaper headlines were unequivocal. "Diana -- it's a real romance," "Diana: I'm so in love,", "Romantic meal in new love's London flat -- then farewell kiss before Bosnia" on the morning of her departure.

Pictures had been published of the pair but it "The Kiss" picture which sold for a reported £1million which fired the frenzied interest in Dodi and Diana.

The images of that time show a carefree Diana lounging on the deck of the yacht with Dodi, kissing him, and cuddling in the warm sea and sprawled in the sun.

The pictures of them kissing - taken by Italian photographer Mario Brenna - were sold for more than £1million around the world.

Diana was, according to friends, relaxed about the publicity over her new relationship but would have known it would cause a surge in interest of new pictures of her with Dodi.

What she couldn't have known was three weeks later she would speed to to her premature death.

Diana flew to Greece with her friend Rosa Monckton.

They sailed in a small boat cruising the Greek islands until August 20 when she returned to England.

At the inquest into Diana's death Miss Monckton said that in the last days of her life, the Princess had obsessed over her failed relationship with surgeon Hasnat Khan, whom she wanted to marry, and that the relationship with Mr Fayed was merely a “distraction".

She said the Princess was worried about the number of gifts she had received from Mr Fayed and did not want him to think he could "buy her".

The Princess had mentioned a ring that Mr Fayed was going to buy her, but said it was going "firmly on a finger on my right hand", Miss Monckton said.

Back in the UK Diana pursued her new romance with Dodi.

The couple dined together and expensive presents poured into Kensington Palace including a huge box of tropical fruit, a roomful of pink roses, a Cartier panther watch.

Diana was spotted out jogging in London and visiting the gym she frequented in Kensington.

She also spent time with him at his apartment and at his father's sprawling house in Oxted, Surrey.

Diana and Dodi flew to the Med to cruise on al-Fayed's yacht travelling from the South of France to Sardinia.

The couple took a helicopter from London to Stansted airport in Essex.

There they boarded a G4 executive jet in the Harrods livery of green and gold and flew to Nice.

They transferred to the Jonika, whose luxuries included a helicopter pad.

The crew of 16 were ready to cast off at once.

After sailing from Corsica the yacht headed for the jet-set Sardinian resort of Porto Cervo.

Here they swam off the yacht and walked around the whitewashed terraces of the port unnoticed by holidaymakers.

Diana, who had a love and hate relationship with the public spotlight, had told her friend celebrity photographer Jason Fraser that she was away with Dodi but not where.

But it was in Sardinia that the Italian paparazzi caught up with Diana and Dodi, snatching pictures at sea of them relaxing on board and swimming off the yacht.

On the island, the couple strolled around the resort of Porto Cervo, the Aga Khan's fashionable hotel on the Costa Smeralda and dined at the noted hotel and restaurant, Calle de Volpe.

After a blissful nine days away, the pair were heading back to London when they stopped for the night in Paris. CCTV shows the couple inside the Ritz, smiling, hands entwined.

Twenty years on, the footage is both poignant and haunting. Dodi and Diana have less than an hour left to live.

The Princess's last summer of love was drawing to a devastating end.

MORE ON Princess Diana Dodi Fayed Royal Family Nice St Tropez Mohamed al-Fayed

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Princess Diana Kisses Dodi In Photo: Royal Had ‘Terrible Taste In Men’

Princess Diana’s photo kissing Dodi Fayed has resurfaced.

A snap of the late Princess of Wales hugging and kissing her boyfriend was shared on Instagram . The photo is the cover of a Sunday Mirror report. According to the headline, “Now Dodi flies off to buy an engagement ring for Diana.”

Royal fans who saw the picture had mixed reactions about it. Some said it was good that the royal found a new man while others were sad to see Princess Diana with another man. One netizen claimed that Fayed was just a fling before adding that Princess Diana was not stupid.

“She had terrible taste in men, so sad , the world still miss her,” one follower commented.

Meanwhile, another follower believed that no man would have ever deserved Princess Diana. Some fans reacted and said that royal fans should let Prince William and Prince Harry’s mom rest in peace.

“We’re keeping her memory alive. It's not like we're disturbing her grave. What do you do after somebody dies. You keep their memory alive and share important and interesting things about them,” a different user added.

Just recently, Prince Harry released an emotional statement to protect his wife Meghan Markle from the press who also harassed Princess Diana when she was still alive. According to the duke, he is seeing the same pattern of media treatment from his mom to his wife.

However, several sources did not agree with Prince Harry. According to Stephen Glover , Prince Harry misrepresented Princess Diana’s relationship with the press. He pointed out that the duke wrongly sees his mom as a “wholly innocent victim” of the media.

News.com.au’s royal correspondent Daniela Elser shared the same opinion. For her, Princess Diana understood the power of the press. In fact, she worked with the media during those times when she needed a voice and to fight back at the royal family. The media also helped her solidify her public image as a caring and joyful parent in contrast to Prince Charles, who appeared more dreary and musty.

© Copyright IBTimes 2024. All rights reserved.

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Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed's 'Last Minute' Wrong Decisions Killed Them Both

For the world, Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed were killed in a tragic car crash. However, a journalist told an outlet last year (in 2023) that sadly a series of Al Fayed's decisions on the night led to their untimely death. Although brief, Diana's romance with the Egyptian billionaire and film producer was a source of media fascination before she died on August 10, 1997.

Journalist Andrew Neil claimed, "Of course, Dodi was, sadly, the architect of his own death and Diana's. The decision to leave The Ritz wasn't taken until the very last minute, as was the roundabout route through a tunnel to get to Dodi's apartment. By Al Fayed's own testimony to me, nobody could have been lying in wait to assassinate them since nobody knew in advance what they were going to do or how they were going to do it," per The Royal Observer. 

The late couple were settled in The Ritz Hotel when Al Fayed decided to take Diana to his apartment close to the Champs-Elysées. But, Al Fayed was aware the paparazzi would follow them through. So he dialed his father, Mohamed Al Fayed, who died on August 30, 2023, for help and asked if he and Diana could use the businessman's personal security to escape the swarming photographers. And, of course, he allowed. 

Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed kiss, 1997. Diana, glowing, perches on the back of a jet-ski bobbing on a sun-kissed ocean as her new lover Dodi grips the handlebars. She appears laughing and carefree and - at 36 - on the brink of a new life after many troubled years. It is still… pic.twitter.com/wyTxPgwM8I — Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) August 1, 2023

The next contributing decision was when Al Fayed instructed the driver Henry Paul to take a different detour, once again, to avoid the intrusive media. Little did he know it was the same route that death would be waiting for them. Out of the four people in the car, only one survived- their bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones. However, to date, the sole survivor has no memory of the crash. 

An investigation probe launched in the mid-2000s concluded in 2008, citing "gross negligence" of the chauffeur and the paparazzi pursuing them . However, despite an apparent accident, Al Fayed's father, Mohamed, blamed a royal conspiracy and alleged it wasn't a natural death but a well-planned murder. The Harrod's owner told the inquest, "Diana told me on the telephone that she was pregnant. I was the only person that they told," per The Guardian.

RIP Mohamed Al-Fayed, 94. An extraordinary tour de force of a man who never got over the death of his beloved son Dodi in the crash that also killed Diana. Mohamed wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea and he was a flawed, complex character, but I liked him. pic.twitter.com/gMHSunkmzu — Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) September 1, 2023

But  PR executive Chester Stern told a publication, "He [Mohamed] backed off [Diana's pregnancy news] being a direct conspiracy led by Prince Philip in more recent years. This suggests he was quietly beginning to accept it was an accident." 

Shortly after Diana's relationship with Hasnat ended, she began dating Al Fayed in the summer of 1997. Similar to Diana, the Egyptian was divorced. They were first photographed kissing on the Fayed family yacht and less than a week before their death, Sunday Mirror wrote, "You only have to look at the sensual body language to know that they have found physical and spiritual fulfillment in each other," per PEOPLE . 

Why I don't believe that Diana and Dodi were ever in love! Along with millions worldwide I watched the first four new episodes of Netflix's The Crown, which linger over the final days of the relationship between Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed that led to both their deaths in a… pic.twitter.com/g27ub8QAgN — Amanda Platell (@amandajplatell) November 19, 2023

Although they seemed smitten with each other, royal historian Sally Bedell Smith told Vanity Fair , "Mohamed Al Fayed engineered the romance with Dodi. And Dodi basically did whatever his father told him to do. He was really the puppet master behind Dodi and Diana’s very brief, barely more than a month, romance." 

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Lady Diana, 27 anni fa la tragedia: l’ultima estate di un’icona

Le foto del suo ultimo viaggio in Sardegna ci mostrano una “eroina” fragile e malinconica

Diana da sola, sospesa sul trampolino dello Jonikal, lo yacht di Dodi, in una posa struggente e meditabonda che finirà nella locandina di “The Crown”

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