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We wanted to show they had their HAPPY MOMENTS
WE KNOW HOW IT WILL END, BUT AS THE CROWN RETURNS DIANA IS ENTHRALLED BY HER PRINCE. HERE, THE CAST TELL HOW THEY RE-CREATED THE ROMANCE – AND WHY IT TURNED SOUR
Soon after Prince Charles proposed to Lady Diana Spencer in February
1981, Diana was taken out for a girly lunch by one of Charles’s closest friends. That woman was Camilla Parker Bowles, an old flame of the prince who Diana was highly suspicious of, and the restaurant she chose was called, rather uncannily given the way events would pan out, Ménage à Trois.
That lunch is just one of the fascinating real-life incidents
Peter Morgan has re-created for series four of The Crown, which covers the period from 1979 to 1990 and is dominated by the fairytale royal romance and its subsequent unravelling. And in a twist you couldn’t make up, it was the scene that, unbeknownst to her, would land unknown actress Emma Corrin the role of her life as Diana.
‘We’d made the decision early on to cast Emerald Fennell as Camilla,’ says Peter. ‘But at the time we were still auditioning other actresses, which I shouldn’t admit because it’s terrible. The scene we used for the audition was that scene from an early episode of this new season, in which Camilla and Diana go to lunch. This really happened, Camilla took Diana to lunch in a restaurant called, of all names, Ménage à Trois, isn’t that weird? So we had the scene in the restaurant all set up for the Camillas to audition, and we needed someone to read the part of Diana, so we asked this young girl in. I remember being in the room, thinking, “That’s Diana!”’
It’s well known that Diana came away from that lunch with her suspicions assuaged. ‘It was brilliant,’ she’s said to have told courtiers. ‘We all understand each other.’ And Josh O’connor, returning as Prince Charles, thinks that at least in the beginning, Charles and Diana find considerable happiness together. ‘But I don’t think they would have lasted, even without Camilla,’ he adds. ‘I think Camilla was a symptom rather than a causal thing.
‘There have already been so many narratives about these two, but what Emma and I – and of course Peter – have been interested in is the idea that it can’t be as simple as who was the good one and who was the bad one. More that it was a marriage doomed to failure.’
Sadly, the problems did eventually arise and one of them was that in Diana, Charles had married someone whose appeal was more potent than his own. This fact was brought home to him when the couple took a trip to Australia two years after their wedding. ‘This is the guy who’s been waiting in the wings for his moment, and when it happens his moment is dampened,’ says Josh. ‘We had a lot of crowd scenes where you have lots of people cheering for Diana, shouting, “Diana, you’re great,” and just looking straight through Charles. ‘There’s one scene where Diana wasn’t there and the
scripted line was, “Where’s Princess Diana?” and Charles says, “She’s working, I’m afraid. You’ll just have to put up with me.” And at the last moment they added an extra line, which was, “But you’re rubbish!” I
thought that was the perfect moment to show how Charles has to deal with the kind of impact Diana has.’
What it came down to, he says, was that both Charles and Diana were all-too-similarly damaged
‘The older Charles gets the more gloomy he is’ JOSH O’CONNOR
human beings. ‘They are two individuals who crave the same thing – a parent figure. They’re isolated, and they have no real family relationships in the way you or I would have a relationship. Every scene I did
with Olivia [Colman, who plays the Queen], I was always thinking, “If this was my own mum, I’d probably run to her right now and give her a hug.” That’s totally not appropriate in this circumstance, and that makes them incredibly lonely figures.’
With Charles now in his 30s, worn down by the loss of both Camilla, who had married Andrew Parker Bowles, and his ‘honorary grandfather’, his beloved great-uncle Louis Mountbatten (played by Charles Dance), who is assassinated off the coast of Ireland at the beginning of the new run, Josh is playing a very different character from the idealistic youth of series three. ‘The older he gets the more gloomy he gets. He’s beginning to emulate Prince Philip more and more – no matter how much he resists that, it does manifest itself.
‘He’s also turning into more of a bachelor, which someone told me recently he really is. Even with Camilla he has his life and his structure, and if someone wants to fit in with that, they really have to fit in. Last season we gave a sympathetic account of him, and the feedback I had was that I’d done him some favours. This time might be different...’
Not, he adds quickly, that he finds Charles to be an unsympathetic character. ‘Peter’s writing is so balanced that at no point is there an actual villain. Everything is backed up with a sense of empathy, and I think – I hope – that if the real Prince Charles watches, he will see that we’re giving an account of a lost boy rather than the future King of England.’ He says he has no idea whether Charles really does watch the show. ‘And if I ever met him I don’t know what I’d say to him about it. I feel there’s a very clear difference in my head between the character we’ve created and the real Prince Charles, so as far as I’m concerned, I’ve separated the two.’ Well, mostly. ‘When we were filming at Lancaster House, which is in St James’s, I went into the garden and I was looking up at the windows of Clarence House, where Charles lives, and I saw that the flag was up. Someone said, “You know that means he’s in.” I was spooked out! It would have been awful if he’d seen us – I’d have been terrified!’ Viewers may well be spooked out when they see Emma Corrin’s portrayal of the young Diana in all her blushing virginal charm. ‘I’ve been told I look like her all my life,’ says the actress, 24, who was just a baby when Diana died in 1997. ‘My mum looks like her too, and did even more so when she was younger, to the extent that the day Diana died Mum got on the Tube and people fainted because they thought it was her!
‘I remember after my official audition a friend asked how it went and I said, “You know what? Even if I don’t get the part, that was probably the best hour of my life.” There was a ridiculous moment where Peter said, “I want to put in a scene with her singing from Phantom Of The Opera,” and without thinking I said, “Oh my gosh, I love that musical!” and I ended up doing a karaoke version of All I Ask Of You. When I left the room I thought, “Oh my God, what just happened?” The whole thing was surreal, but when I got the part, well, talk about a fairytale.’
In series five, in which Diana will be played by The Night Manager’s Elizabeth Debicki, we’ll see the tragic end to the fairytale. But for much of the fourth season Diana is still young, hopeful, and in love with her prince. ‘We all know what happens at the end,’ says Emma. ‘But we’ve been very much aware of not playing the ending, and it’s been interesting to find the moments of happiness between these two.’
A particularly happy moment is a scene when Diana and Charles dance together. ‘That was a challenge for me because any of my friends will tell you that I’m not good at it,’ laughs Emma. ‘I have many limbs and they don’t normally do what they’re
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‘I take offence at the idea that the Queen’s cold-hearted’ OLIVIA COLMAN
meant to. But I think for Diana, dance was how she got out all the emotions that she couldn’t articulate. So yes, Josh and I did have a dance together and it was brilliant fun.’
She also got to wear that wedding dress. ‘Trying on the dress for the first time was one of the most insane moments of my life, because the Emanuels had given us the original designs. When I finally wore the dress, it took about ten or 15 people to get me into it.
‘We were filming at Lancaster House, where there were three rooms divided by oak doors – the crew were setting up the cameras at one end and I was getting dressed at the other, and then we opened the doors and I was there in the dress and... everyone was just silent. There was this huge feeling of respect and of how much it meant for me to be wearing this. It was an incredible moment.’
We also see Diana’s bulimia portrayed unflinchingly, and the episodes that show it begin with a warning to anyone suffering from an eating disorder to seek help. ‘I did a lot of research, and learned to explore feeling either very empty or very full – of love as much as of food,’ says Emma. ‘We realised that a lot of the bulimia Diana experienced was in direct correlation to how her life was going. It became her way of taking control.’
She’s quick to add that her physical resemblance to Diana is not all that there is to her performance. ‘Although my neck is beginning to be really lopsided on one side,’ she jokes, referring to the princess’s trademark head tilt. ‘But that head tilt is not done just to replicate how Diana held her head. It comes from understanding that she held her head that way for a reason, and it’s very interesting to go into the psychology. “What’s that about? Why does
she do it? Is it through shyness? Is it because she wants to entice you? Is she trying to work something out?”’
Firmly in Charles’s corner throughout, as always, is his redoubtable sister Princess Anne, played once again by Erin Doherty. ‘Me and Josh decided we wanted these two to have that kind of camaraderie,’ she says, adding that in real life the level of closeness between the siblings is unknown. ‘But it feels human for them to be close, and it also feels like there’s really a need for it. Because they have such difficult relationships with their parents in terms of what they can communicate to them, so they become each other’s sounding boards and shoulders to lean on.’
Series four finds Anne often offering her older brother advice. ‘She’s there for him as a sister, but she also feels the pressure from her family to say, “Look, this is happening, suck it up.” And the funny thing is that although she’s his younger sister, she acts like the older one. I think he needs her to act that way for him.’
She says that while Anne’s relationship remains with complicated her mother in the new episodes, it is nevertheless maturing. ‘I think something happens as you grow as a woman. You start to understand your mother a bit more, and that flows into a lot of questions about why her own mother was the way she was with her. There’s stuff that begins to get unearthed that is really great to explore.’
She also shares many scenes with Tobias Menzies, who plays her father Prince Philip. ‘By now I feel that I do have a kind of father figure in Tobias. Anne and Philip are very similar in the sense that, like him, she doesn’t quite understand how to deal with emotions and so will run away from them. Peter writes that dynamic beautifully, because along with the similarities,
‘Philip is not immune to Diana’s charms’ TOBIAS MENZIES