British actress studied to play Lady Di
Actress Emma Corrin is stepping into the role — and the wedding dress — of Lady Di
The Crown Season 4 streams Sunday, Netflix
Emma Corrin's first moments as Diana Spencer in The Crown are furtive and fleeting. In fact, you can barely tell that the teenager scampering from column to column in the spacious family home is indeed the woman who'll become a British princess and ultimately die in a 1997 car crash in Paris.
Here she's dressed up for a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, wearing a green mask and leotard, and Prince Charles (Josh O'connor) is intrigued. We all are, more than four decades after the events depicted onscreen actually happened.
As The Crown reaches its fourth season on Netflix, the fictionalized life story of Queen Elizabeth II enters the stretch between 1977 and 1990 — covering Charles and Diana's relationship, the premiership of Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson) and the births of Prince William and Prince Harry. Olivia Colman, Tobias Menzies and Helena Bonham Carter return as the Queen, Prince Philip and Princess Margaret, respectively.
“The idea of playing Diana was very daunting at first because she's so well known,” says Corrin, who collaborated with dialect coach William Conacher and movement director Polly Bennett to help perfect her portrayal.
“With the voice and mannerisms, and particularly with her head tilt, I was determined that if I was going to include them I wanted to know why I was using them. Was she being shy? Was it a nervous thing? And as for her voice, she kind of goes down at the end of every line, which is interesting.”
Diana's storyline is based on her own comments about her life, including a widely viewed BBC Panorama interview in 1995. The producers worked with a U.K. eating disorder charity to help depict Diana's battle with bulimia, and those episodes carry a warning card with a link to a resource site.
“Those scenes were incredibly difficult. I really wanted to do it justice, and I worked very closely with the script team to make sure that we incorporated as much of it as possible. I didn't just want to allude to it — I wanted to make sure that it was fully represented,” Corrin says. “I also worked a lot on researching people's experiences and talking to people who'd experienced it to make sure that I was as informed as I could be.”
Diana's wedding to Charles was another key part of Corrin's portrayal. Back in 1981, more than 750 million people worldwide tuned in to see the ceremony at St. Paul's Cathedral, as well as Diana's dress: a silk taffeta and antique lace gown by David and Elizabeth Emanuel, with a 7.6-metre train, 10,000 pearls and an 18-karat gold horseshoe stitched into the petticoats to bring good luck.
The garment was re-created for The Crown, the work of Emmy Award-winning costume designer Amy Roberts. Although not an exact replica, it's intended to capture the spirit and style of the original.
“I had a lot of fittings to begin with, so I got to know the dress very well over many months. It was an amazing process to see how it was made and came together and then to put it on the day, it was very overwhelming,” says Corrin. “It was very heavy and every time I moved so many people had to move the entire train, which was really funny.”
Luckily, filming for this season of the U.k.-based production was nearly complete when the coronavirus pandemic hit, and the cast and crew rushed to finish before shutdowns in the film and television industry took effect.
On a much smaller scale, Corrin's hopes for any memorabilia from The Crown were dashed.
“Because we had to shut down so quickly because of COVID, I actually never had a chance to write my list of things I wanted to keep. But there was so much of her stuff that I would've liked to keep,” Corrin says.
Looking ahead at her career, the 24-year-old British actress is taking pains to avoid being known as “the Princess Diana girl” for very long. As it is, aside from The Crown, she has only six minor screen roles to her name. “(My team and I) are working very hard on any shoots I'm doing at the moment. We're trying to make them as far from Diana as possible so that I'm not always totally associated with her,” Corrin says. “I think it's probably worked in my favour that I don't really look like her when I'm not in hair and makeup, but I think I'm definitely going to have that comparison for a bit.”
When the first episodes of The Crown came to Netflix in 2016, it felt like a period drama. Claire Foy and Matt Smith starred as Queen Elizabeth II and husband Prince Philip, but looking little like the nonagenarians we know today. There were appearances by Winston Churchill, Edward VIII and other historical figures, and plots centred on such events as the Great Smog of '52, about which some younger Brits (or others) don't even know.
But as the seasons progressed, time marched forward and the plots started to resemble not so much historical re-enactments as recollections of recent current events. Season 4, spanning 1977 through 1990, has garnered great excitement for its introduction of Emma Corrin as Lady Diana Spencer and Gillian Anderson as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Even those too young to remember firsthand the Royal Wedding of '81, the Falklands War and Apartheid in South Africa will at least know of the events.
As such, the newest 10 episodes should disappoint neither longtime Royal watchers nor those tuning in to see Lady Di. Olivia Colman in her second and last go-round — she'll be replaced in season 5 by Imelda Staunton — excels at playing the Queen, and Josh O'connor is fantastic as the self-centred Prince of Wales, but it's the newcomers who really shine in this season. Thatcher was an outlier in so many ways. Taking office in 1979, she was one of the first female leaders of the modern era. But she was a ruthless PM, a staunch conservative thinker and, ironically, not a great advocate for women's rights.
She was also just six months older than Elizabeth. In the season opener, the Queen seems to imagine they'll get on famously, an idea shattered by their first chilly meeting. (The Royals take revenge after a fashion in episode 2, in which Thatcher visits Balmoral castle in Scotland and is humiliated by not knowing any of the proper protocol.)
Any portrayal of Thatcher has to start in the realm of caricature — hairstyle, handbag, harrumphing voice — but Anderson takes it forward nicely, displaying her humanity without losing sight of how driven she was. There was no down time for her — any spare moment might be profitably employed in the work of governing.
Lady Diana was another matter entirely. The future Princess of Wales was just 19 when she first met Charles's family — again at their summer residence in Scotland, which seems to have done double duty as a testing ground for potential family and friends. Her wedding day was not even a month after her 20th birthday. Charles was then 32, and still hopelessly in love with Camilla Parker-bowles (Emerald Fennell).
One scene that finds Diana roller-skating through Buckingham Palace, Duran Duran on her Walkman, again makes the figure from coins and commemorative plates into someone human and relatable. And with the benefit of hindsight, the series also shows Diana dealing with bulimia, long a secret and less understood then than now.
The length of the season — 10 hour-long episodes, which will no doubt devour a weekend for many devotees — allows for some fascinating digressions. Episode 7, The Hereditary Principle, finds Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) playing detective, and learning about some little-known Royal relatives. And episode 5 delivers a sympathetic and at times funny account of Michael Fagan, who in 1982 sneaked into Buckingham Palace and had a chat with the Queen in her bedroom.
And while this will no doubt annoy anti-monarchists, The Crown reserves its greatest sympathy for the Queen herself. Charles does not come off well, but the portrait of the sovereign is one of a woman devoted to her duty, and determined to do it to the best of her ability.
It's no surprise that the British government recently announced an extra bank holiday in 2022 to mark the Queen's platinum jubilee of 70 years. The Crown has two more seasons to run after this, but Elizabeth has no plans to retire.