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The Diana we’re desperate to meet
The return of The Crown will feature assassinations, avalanches and the tension between the Queen and Mrs T. But the most anticipated entrance has to be Diana’s. Here Nicole Lampert tells how they’ve captured her charisma
Finally it’s the moment viewers have been waiting for, the arrival of Diana. Her appearance is the most eagerly anticipated event in Peter Morgan’s hit show The Crown. The upcoming fourth season will take Diana from her early days as a shy kindergarten teaching assistant to a fairytale princess and an iconic global figure, as well as explore the early days of her disastrous marriage to Prince Charles.
Her entrance comes when it returns to our screens in November or December, almost exactly 40 years after Nigel Dempster revealed in the Daily Mail in 1980 that Charles had found his ‘future bride’, having transferred his attention to Diana Spencer from her older sister Sarah.
Like Diana at the time, the actress playing her in The Crown is also a young unknown. Emma Corrin, 24, is a privately educated Cambridge graduate, who didn’t go to drama school. By coincidence she’s originally from Sevenoaks in Kent, where Diana went to West Heath School from the age of 12 to 16.
Aware of how challenging the role would be for any actress, the producers started their search with a desperate call for ‘a mesmerising new young star with extraordinary range.’ The brief added, ominously: ‘She has to play charming comedy, flirt and social exhibitionist on the world stage, desperate and lonely selfharmer at her lowest ebb and the kind of psychological intensity of Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby.’
It would obviously be helpful too if she resembled Diana, and in some of the new scenes, as the kindergarten teaching assistant, and wearing a pink polka-dot dress on her 1983 tour of Australia, the likeness is uncanny.
Emma’s co-star Josh O’connor, who plays Prince Charles, agrees, saying it was ‘spooky’ how much of a ‘breathtaking spitting image’ of Diana she was. But Emma says she has never been told she looks like Princess Diana before – although strangely her mother, who works as a speech therapist, has been! ‘I have never had that,’ she adds. ‘I get told I look like a young Jodie Foster.’
Emma spent more than two hours a day in the make-up chair to achieve the Diana look, accentuating her doe eyes, and with several wigs re-creating the journey from ingénue to one of the most stylish women in the world.
Amazingly, she was still working hard for her final exams at Cambridge when she went through the auditions for The Crown. ‘They actually offered me the part in person,’ she says of her last audition. ‘It felt like I’d just been proposed to; it was the best moment of my life. There’s a lot of pressure, but I’ve been glued to the show since the first episode and to think I’m now joining this incredibly talented acting family is just surreal.’
Peter Morgan, the creator, writer and producer of The Crown, has complete confidence in her. ‘Emma is a brilliant talent who immediately captivated us when she came in for the part. As well as having the innocence and beauty of a young Diana, she also has, in abundance, the range and complexity to portray an extraordinary woman who went from an anonymous teenager to the most iconic woman of her generation.’
Like all the cast in this heavily researched production, she was given a large bundle of written material and documentaries to watch, and she spent hours on perfecting the princess’s distinctive high voice with a vocal coach and learning how to re-create her particular habit of glancing up from under her fringe, as well as her graceful way of moving.
‘Something they have been making clear from the start is that this is not an impression,’ says Emma. ‘I am going for essence. Any movement and voice work we have done has been figuring out why she talks the way she does, and how she was a massive departure from the Royal Family, a bit like Meghan is now I guess, by bringing something different in the way she talks.’
Season four brings back memories of naive young Diana, with a re-creation of that first photo, at the Pimlico nursery school where she worked, which showed her holding two of her charges while the sun shone through her skirt, revealing her shapely legs. And it follows how she becomes hardened into a mature but troubled woman who is the toast of America.
The retelling of the royal romance starts with a traumatic event: the assassination of Charles’s beloved great uncle Lord Mountbatten (Charles Dance) who was killed, along with a grandson, a local boy
‘It’s not an impression, I’m going for essence’
EMMA CORRIN
and his son-in-law’s mother, by an IRA bomb hidden on his boat in Ireland in 1979. Diana recalled how she’d watched Charles at the funeral on TV and when she saw him ten months later – the families were friends – she told him: ‘You must be so lonely? You know, it’s ghastly. You need someone beside you.’ He quickly decided he was in love. Diana was turning 19 when she got together with Charles. He was 31. After 13 dates they were engaged. The rehearsal of their 1981 wedding at St Paul’s has been filmed in Winchester Cathedral with Emma wearing a replica of the blue floral dress Diana sported before the big day. A later scene shows the joyful day when Diana, pregnant with Harry – with Emma sporting a fake baby bump – enjoyed an Easter Egg hunt at Buckingham Palace, chasing toddler William in the gardens.
The new episodes also focus on key moments – and key looks – from 1989, three years after Charles is thought to have resumed his affair with Camilla. In one scene Emma is seen outside The Savoy hotel in London, re-creating Diana’s appearance at the Barnardo’s Champion Awards. Emma wears a floral one-shoulder dress, reflecting one of Diana’s favourite silhouettes – a style which suited her immensely but which the Establishment is said to have hated, deeming it ‘not royal’.
Having played Charles so sensitively in season three, Josh O’connor, 30, says the heir to the throne will be portrayed in a harsher light this time. ‘Well, it’s the Diana years,’ he says. ‘If series three was to make people feel empathy for him, I guess we’re going to pull the rug from under him. We all have a set position on the dynamic between Diana and Charles. It’s been great to have the ability to either fight against that or, at times, acknowledge it and to challenge any question of, “Did he ever love her?” Personally, I think he must have done. There’s a wealth of layers to Charles and Diana, and I have loved seeking that out. I think Diana wasn’t completely innocent – I’m talking fictionally, in our story – so there are ups and downs. There’s the difficulty with Camilla
‘Personally I think he must have loved her’
JOSH O’CONNOR
Continued from page 5 and the whole family, so it’s going to be, hopefully, an interesting arc.’
Josh says they all enjoyed delving into an era which is so crucial to the modern Royal Family. ‘Everything changed when Diana came onto the scene,’ he says. ‘I think she changed the game, and modernised them, and made them relevant again.’
Also returning are Emerald Fennell as Camilla and Erin Doherty as feisty Princess Anne. The real Anne revealed recently that she’d watched early episodes of the show, which she found ‘quite interesting’. Peter Morgan says, ‘So many people asked me, after she first appeared, to put more of her in there. Anne’s often overlooked. But Erin’s portrayal means that everybody has fallen in love with her. I read that searches about her on Google went through the roof, she’s now one of the most popular royals.’
Prince Andrew’s romantic life is set to come under the spotlight too. His most famous affair was with actress Koo Stark, who is said to have threatened to sue producers if the portrayal of her is negative, while the period covered in this series also sees him marry Sarah Ferguson. Meanwhile, Edward is seen growing up and going to university.
There was a rush to finish filming before lockdown was announced. It meant one key scene of an avalanche had to be moved from the Pyrenees to Ben Nevis. The incident is likely to be a re-creation of the fatal moments in 1988 when a skiing party including Charles was caught in an avalanche in Klosters. Major Hugh Lindsay, a former equerry to the Queen, was killed and Charles was seen weeping as he was helicoptered off the slopes. The bizarre affair when Michael Fagan broke into the Queen’s bedroom in Buckingham Palace in 1982 will also feature in this run, but the 1987 It’s A Royal Knockout embarrassment, when the lesser royals dressed in medieval garb to play games for charity, is mercifully absent.
Once this series is over, an older cast are preparing to take the lead roles, with Imelda Staunton as the Queen and Lesley Manville as Princess Margaret. They are due to start filming next year, and die-hard fans will be cheered by Peter Morgan’s recent change of heart, when he announced in July that there will be a sixth series to come.