Will any actress ever capture the complexity of Diana?
Attempts to portray the ‘people’s princess’ on screen have all failed. Can Emma Corrin finally succeed,
The hardest-to-fill glass slipper in TV drama has finally found a shapely foot to fit it. The makers of The Crown announced this week that “newcomer” Emma Corrin will play the part of Princess Diana in season four of the drama, which will follow the royal from the ages of 18 to 22. So unknown is the actress that the only personal detail offered on the website IMDB is the fact she’s 5ft 8in. Photos show a striking English rose with beguilingly candid blue eyes, which is a promising start. I couldn’t find pics of Corrin in profile, so am yet to find out if she has the strong nose we associate with the late Princess. Mind you, when you reflect on previous screen interpretations of Diana it’s often seemed as if a pronounced hooter was the sole requirement for propelling an actress into the role. The first attempts to bring the Princess to the screen scandalised the establishment to the point no respected actress would take on the part.
The fact is, screen history suggests playing Diana is not an auspicious route to lasting fame and great reviews. Many have tried and, to date, all have failed. The most honourable botched job award goes to Catherine Oxenberg, who as the daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, at least had the breeding to walk and talk like someone born to rule. Oxenberg starred in The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana, one of two rosetinted American-made TV movies in the early Eighties, back in the days when most of the swooning public still thought of the marriage as a Mills & Boon love match. The rival film Charles and Diana: A Royal Love Story (1983) starred Caroline Bliss, being bashful, big-nosed and eminently forgettable.
From the harmless to the utterly ridiculous. No one will ever quite know why the sane and talented Naomi Watts signed up for the 2013 film Diana directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, based on the last two years of the Princess’s life. All the portents were there to read: Jessica Chastain had briefly accepted the role, then bolted. The attempt to balance prurient interest in Diana’s romance with heart surgeon Hasnat Khan with a tacked-on subplot about anti-landmine campaigning only made it more offensive. One critic spoke for many when he said, “I hesitate to use the term ‘car-crash cinema’, but the awful truth is that 16 years after that terrible day in 1997, [Diana] has died another death.”
Andrew Morton’s biography Diana: Her True Story got the full movie treatment in 1993 featuring Serena Scott Thomas – sister of the more famous Kristin. The film was supposed to have its premier in Monaco but Prince Rainier banned it, so it was screened in Cap Ferrat instead. The reviews were dire, but nothing daunted Serena Scott Thomas, who went on to play Carole Middleton in a Kate and William biopic.
But a special place in the annals of Diana-alike hell should go to Amy Seccombe for Diana:
A Tribute to the People’s Princess (1998). She delivered every line like the junior manager of a regional branch of Natwest. On the other hand, if there’s a funnier scene than Seccombe trudging across a town square in Palma laden with shopping bags, before being chased Benny Hill-style by the world’s paparazzi, I’ll eat my Prada sunglasses.
The problems involved in playing Princess Diana are obvious. No previous royal had ever played out so much of their life in the public gaze, both intentionally and unwittingly. There were the royal tours and formal interviews, but also the Panorama interview, the hours of taped conversations with Andrew Morton and the informal conversations she had with other media contacts, such as the Daily Mail’s Richard Kay.
But there were also the paparazzi lenses, the disloyal friends and retainers and the whispering campaign from Prince Charles’s circle. It’s incredibly hard to play a global idol – a Marilyn Monroe or an Elvis – but tougher still when everyone has a crystal clear idea of how that person thought, spoke and acted. Mystique isn’t just a protective layer for the famous, it allows the actors who study them to develop their own interpretation. Quite apart from that, there’s the challenges of Diana’s long-boned handsome beauty, charm and magnetism. That ineffable quality our grandparents’ generation called “it”, which makes rare individual’s eyes gleam and suck you in like a tractor beam. And this radiant allure evolved inside the royal birdcage – a swan born from a gawky Althorp cygnet. How to embody all that? The failure to accurately portray Diana contrasts curiously with the Queen, who has been played with aplomb on several occasions, notably by Helen Mirren and Emma Thompson.
But if anyone knows what he’s doing it’s Peter Morgan, whose brilliant writing has made half of us think his version of the Windsors is documentary fact. The makers of The Crown have never cast a famous actor when a fresh, fascinating one would do the job better. Who, before November 2016 would have seen Claire Foy as our monarch? Morgan says of Corrin that she “has in abundance, the range and complexity to portray an extraordinary woman who went from anonymous teenager to becoming the most iconic woman of her generation.” We may at last have a worthy screen people’s princess.
Screen history suggests playing Diana is not an auspicious route to lasting fame and great reviews