Princess Diana:
William, Harry share memories nearly 20 years after her death.
Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy” will melt the heart of the most hardened cynic. The film, premiering Monday, July 24, on HBO is likely to be the most important hour of the anticipated saturation TV coverage of the 20th anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
The film, produced and directed by Ashley Gething, begins with Princes William and Harry looking at photos of their mother, and of themselves, frolicking with a woman Harry calls “a total kid,” with a wicked sense of humor.
The above-mentioned cynic might conclude that this is meant to counter the whole “shy Di” thing, and the focus on her obvious unhappiness performing her royal duties while her marriage to Prince Charles was falling apart — one of the public’s most indelible memories of “the people’s princess.”
But there is ample evidence that the royal princes knew their mum far better than the news media, who chased her around the world, and eventually through that tunnel in Paris on the last night of her life, Aug. 31, 1997.
To its credit, the film does not try to rewrite history, for the most part. One slight edit: The moment when Diana rearranged two of Charles’ many names at the West“Diana, minster Abbey altar during their 1981 wedding has been snipped out of the tape.
We get a sense of her sense of fun not only from her sons, but from her younger brother, Charles, Earl Spencer, and from family photos at Althorp.
“She was always caring of little
people,” Spencer says, “and I was the first little person she cared for.”
Both as princess and after she and Charles separated in 1992, Diana’s care for “little people” was amply documented, even when it got her into political hot water.
She gave a speech about the deplorable level of homelessness in London in 1995 that was seen by some as the Royal Family meddling in British politics. When William was 12, his mother brought him to homeless shelters so he could understand the severity of the problem.
She became a “soldier,” as one observer puts it, against AIDS and a photo of her taking the hand of an AIDS patient at Middlesex Hospital was seen around the world at a time when many were afraid to have any physical contact with someone who had the disease.
In the final years of her life, she became a soldier against land mines, visiting Bosnia only three weeks before her death, a country that was still riddled with land mines. Today, it is entirely free of land mines, thanks in large part to her activism.
All of this could be dismissed as Buckingham Palace PR, were it not for the relative openness with which Harry and William talk about their mother.
Harry admits “it’s still raw,” and says that he shut down emotionally for years because he was unable to process his grief.
“Even talking about her now, I can feel the hugs she used to give us,” he says.
“My mother lives with me every day,” his elder brother adds.
The day she died, Diana called Balmoral Castle to talk with her sons. Will is asked if he remembers what she said. He does, but doesn’t reveal her words. Given the ferocity with which she was hounded by paparazzi, who can blame him?
While it is clear that both men inherited their mother’s sense of duty and activism, Will, at least, also inherited a wariness about the press. He doesn’t mince words slamming “an industry that’s lost perspective,” trying to “make a woman cry in public to get the photographs.”
“One lesson I learned is that you never let them in too far because it’s difficult to get them out,” he says.
William and Harry have lived their lives in public, which, to an extent, goes with their jobs in the family business.
Yet the film reminds us that they were 15 and 12, respectively, when their mother died — just boys. Prior to the car crash, the boys had been shuttled back and forth between Diana and Charles, never feeling as though they had sufficient time with either parent.
As difficult as it has been processing grief, William and Harry have always had one thing that perhaps the rest of the world did not: They knew their mother for who she was, not the creation of paparazzi.
No doubt other programming will explore other aspects of Diana’s life, her relationship with Dodi Fayed and Dr. Hasnat Khan, her confessional collaboration with Andrew Morton on “Diana in Her Own Words.” No other current members of the Royal Family participate in this film, although Charles is seen in news footage, as is his mother. The Duchess of Cornwall is not mentioned or pictured.
Expect all of this and, heaven knows, a lot more as television overdoses on Diana coverage in August.
Through it all, “Diana, Our Mother,” will make a claim for legitimacy that no other TV documentary can touch. Of all that she accomplished in her life, her sons are her real legacy.