More than two decades after her death, Princess Diana’s ill-fated entry into the British royal family is the main storyline in the long-awaited fourth season of the hit Netflix drama The Crown, which released on the streaming platform the past weekend.
The season has already begun to trend and is currently at number three on Netflix Pakistan. Jemima Goldsmith, who was a close friend of Princess Diana, praised the season and actor Emma Corrin for portraying Diana brilliantly.
“Emma Corrin has captured all the magic of shy Di,” wrote Jemima on social media.
“Prepare to fall in love with Princess Diana all over again,” she added.
Later, when a Twitter user commented that Corrin’s voice was “spookily accurate”, Jemima agreed with her.
Goldsmith also praised Tom Brooke for his performance.
The series shows Diana as a naive teenager who quickly becomes lonely in the role of Prince Charles’ fiancee and rollerskates around Buckingham Palace to pass the time. While the previous series depicted Charles as a sensitive and misunderstood boy, as Diana’s husband he is seen as cold and unfaithful, complaining to Camilla [Parker-Bowles] that she is “so weak, so fragile”.
The love triangle is one of the main storylines in the fourth season, which covers the late 1970s and the 1980s.
The scriptwriters also dramatise a notorious incident that year in which a 33-year-old man, Michael Fagan — frustrated at being unemployed and separated from his wife — broke into Buckingham Palace and entered the queen’s bedroom.
The queen is again played by Olivia Colman, the British actress who won an Oscar for The Favourite in 2019. In the fifth series, she will hand over the role of the older queen to 64-year-old Imelda Staunton, known for playing the cruel Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter films.
US actress Gillian Anderson plays Margaret Thatcher, the imperious first woman to head the British government, in a season dominated by strong female roles.
A critical and popular success, The Crown was first broadcast in 2016 and has won numerous awards, including three Golden Globes and 10 Emmy Awards. A total of 73 million people have watched at least one episode of the series, according to Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s joint chief executive and chief content officer.