Princess Diana’s influence endures 20 years after death
Her legacy of charity lives on in her two sons
LONDON - 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 influence still felt.
Time has blurred the memories, but people around the world still remember Diana as a young bride, so taken with Prince Charles, and 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 who reached out to AIDS patients when they were 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.
“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.
Theirs was perhaps a common story of infidelity and broken vows, but it 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.
Refusing to fit the Windsor mold, she sought new ways to cope with fabulous wealth, worldwide fame, and sky-high expectations. She reached out and actually touched AIDS patients — a taboo at the time — and traveled to former combat zones to highlight the dangers land mines posed to civilians.
Many felt they could relate to her when she recounted her own battles with bulimia and talked openly of her disappointment and loneliness.
The depth of the public’s affection for Diana crystallized in the days after her death, when tens of thousands of mourners paid tribute to Diana by placing flowers outside London’s Kensington Palace, where she had lived.