The trailer for The Crown season six begins with Elizabeth Debicki’s Princess Diana playing a piano on a yacht. The yacht is not hers, but rather, that of Dodi Fayed, the Egyptian billionaire whom she dated—and was with the very night she died. “Don’t really understand how I ended up here,” a melancholy Diana says in a voiceover while scenes showing paparazzi hounding her on a tender in the Mediterranean play.
Just as season four explored her marriage with Prince Charles, and season five her love for Haznat Khan, season six promises to turn the lens on her short, tragic relationship with Fayed. Although duly dramatized: The Crown is a work of fiction, after all.
There may be no modern figure whose personal life has been more exhaustively chronicled than the late Princess Diana. She first entered the glare of the spotlight at just 19 years old when she began to date Prince Charles, and never left: rarely was there a day without her photograph in the paper or her name in a headline for the next decade and a half, especially as her marriage began to crumble.
In 1977, a then Diana Spencer first met Prince Charles of Wales at Althorp House, her 1,500-acre family estate in Northamptonshire, England, when she was just 16 years old. Three years later, she and Prince Charles began to date, and he proposed on February 24, 1981. When a reporter asked Charles if they were in love, he famously replied, “whatever ‘in love’ means.”
An estimated 750 million people watched their wedding several months later. Diana called it “the worst day of my life,” according to the documentary Diana: In Her Own Words. “I felt I was a lamb to the slaughter,” she once said. “And I knew it.”
By 1986, both were reportedly participating in extramarital affairs. In 1994, Charles told his official biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, that he picked things back up with Camilla Parker Bowles. Meanwhile, it’s alleged that Diana’s affair with army captain James Hewitt started around this time, and rumors of their troubled marriage began to appear in the press.
In 1992, the couple officially separated.
Amid her unhappy marriage with Prince Charles, Princess Diana began an affair with army captain James Hewitt, which began in 1986 and ended around 1990. In 1994, Hewitt shared his story in a tell-all memoir which allegedly sold for millions of dollars. Reports at the time claimed he’d also been shopping the affair around to the tabloids for years. (“Hewitt’s reputation, it seems, has been dealt a mortal blow,” People wrote in a cover story published October of that year.) As of 2011, he was still giving interviews about his affair with the Princess: "If Charles hadn’t cheated, Diana wouldn’t have,” he told Entertainment Tonight.
Princess Diana’s relationship with Dr. Hasnat Khan began in September 1995. During their two years together, the two kept their relationship extremely private. (Or, as private as they could after reporters got word of the romance.) Yet the intense media attention notwithstanding, it was said to be a relatively normal relationship (Diana’s nickname for the heart and lung surgeon was “Mr. Wonderful.”) In one episode of The Crown, they show Elizabeth Debicki s Diana and Humayun Saeed Khan go to see a movie together—with the Princess wearing a wig to remain incognito.
To this day, Khan has hardly spoken about their relationship. The one exception? The statement he gave to police during a 2004 inquest into Princess Diana’s death, which was read in court. He spoke fondly of the late Princess: “I found her a very normal person with great qualities,” he said. Khan also admitted the two broke up due to his reluctance to be more public with Diana.
After Khan, Diana dated Dodi Fayed, a film producer and son of billionaire businessman Mohamed Al Fayed. The couple spent the summer of 1997 on the Fayed yacht, sailing around the South of France, before heading to Paris. Cameras trailed them everywhere they went.
There, tragedy struck: the couple died in a horrific car crash in a tunnel. An investigation into their death found their driver was drunk and speeding at 121 miles per hour while being pursued by a tail of paparazzi.
