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.
Emma Corrin, a 24-year-old actress little known until now, immerses herself in the role of the young Diana, capturing her soft voice and timid gaze from under a heavy fringe.
But the actress admitted in an interview with The Sunday Times that she felt a “huge amount of pressure” to pull off the role in the new season, which starts on Sunday.
Diana is shown as a naive teenager who quickly becomes lonely in the role of Prince Charles’ fiancee and rollerskates around Buckingham Palace to pass the time. Even before their unhappy marriage, she begins cycles of bulimia: binge-eating and then purging herself of food.
Diana Spencer had just turned 20 when the couple married in 1981, while Charles was 32. As heir to the throne, since reaching his 30s, he had faced pressure to marry to ensure succession.
Despite having doubts, he agreed to propose to Diana but did not sever ties with his long-time lover, Camilla Parker-Bowles. Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997 and Charles subsequently married Parker-Bowles in 2005.
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 that she is “so weak, so fragile”.
The breakup of their marriage due to infidelities and Diana’s confessional television interview was scandalous at the time and is making headlines even today.
The BBC has pledged to hold an independent investigation into how its journalist Martin Bashir persuaded Diana to take part in the sensational interview in 1995. Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, claims Bashir showed faked documents to persuade Diana to take part in the interview, where she famously complained “there were three of us in this marriage so it was a bit crowded.”
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 Hagan — frustrated at being unemployed and separated from his wife — broke into Buckingham Palace and entered the queen’s bedroom.
The queen, who kept her legendary sang-froid, 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.
The US actress Gillian Anderson plays Margaret Thatcher, the imperious first woman to head the British government, in a season dominated by strong female roles.
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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, Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s joint chief executive and chief content officer, said in January.
