Diana’s impact still felt yrs after death

‘She has a living legacy’

LONDON, Aug 26, (AP): The shock came late on a summer evening: After an idyllic Mediterranean holiday, Princess Diana had been in a car crash in Paris. Her boyfriend was dead; she was hospitalized, condition unclear.

She died a few hours later on Aug 31, 1997, plunging Britain into grief that lingers to this day. Twenty years later, the memory of Diana — a youthful mother cut down, leaving two children behind — remains vital, her impact still felt.

Time has blurred the memories, but many still remember Diana as a young bride, so taken with Prince Charles, and later, as a glamorous trendsetter dancing at the White House with John Travolta. She was the fun-loving mom taking her two boys on amusement park rides, and the tireless charity worker, reaching out to AIDS patients when they were still shunned by much of society.

The sons Diana left behind — Prince William, now 35, and Prince Harry, 32 — are playing increasingly important roles in Britain’s national life as the public focuses on the next generation of royals, sometimes at the expense of William and Harry’s father, Prince Charles.

Princess Diana

Charity

“Her essential legacy is her children and the fact is that they have become known more as her children than as his, in the sense that the charity work they are doing resonates with what she was doing — difficult issues like mental health, just like she took on AIDS,” Diana biographer Andrew Morton said. “So she has a living legacy.”

Morton’s 1992 book about Diana revealed the depth of her despair: her struggle with a serious eating disorder, attempts at self-harm, and what he calls the “deep unhappiness” of her union with Charles, which ended in a bitter divorce in 1996.

It was supposed to be so different. Charles was heir to the throne, and Diana’s entry into the royal family meant she was likely to become queen one day.

Theirs was perhaps a common story of infidelity and broken vows, but played out on an uncommonly public stage. Each used TV interviews and books by favored authors as megaphones in their bids for public sympathy.

Charles, with his somewhat stiff demeanor and unapproachable public persona, could never compete with Diana’s doe-eyed appeal, especially when she famously complained there had always been “three people in this marriage” — an arch reference to Camilla Parker Bowles, who would marry Charles eight years after Diana’s sudden death.

Many saw Diana as a young mother wronged by a privileged older husband’s refusal to give up his lifelong mistress — even though the princess admitted to affairs of her own.