Taking The Crown Down Under – its latest stars Diana and ‘wombat’ Wills
IT WAS her first overseas Royal tour – and the first time cracks appeared in her two-year marriage.
Now Princess Diana’s 1983 trip to Australia with a nine-month-old Prince William is being recreated for hit Netflix series The Crown, as our exclusive pictures show.
Actress Emma Corrin adopted Diana’s iconic early 1980s hairstyle and Sloane Ranger fashion sense to shoot the scenes in Dunsfold Aerodrome in Surrey.
She was seen walking up the stairs to a jet with the baby cradled by a nanny just behind.
The Royals spent 41 days touring Australia and New Zealand, to the adoration of huge crowds.
Many years later Prince William revealed he had been given an unflattering nickname on the tour: wombat. He joked: ‘I just basically got called that. Not because I look like a wombat, or maybe I do.’
Although she and Prince Charles – played by The Durrells star Josh O’Connor in the series – appeared very much in love during the tour, the Princess later revealed the strain she was under. She told biographer Andrew Morton that she would ‘cry her eyes out’ because of the pressure.
She also revealed her husband’s jealousy when she took the spotlight from him during public appearances. She said that, as she and Charles were being driven around Australia, ‘all you could hear was, “Oh, she’s on the other side”... they weren’t on the right side to wave at me or to touch me. Obviously he [Charles] wasn’t used to that and nor was I.’
Viewers get their first glimpse of
O’Connor as the Prince of Wales as series three of The Crown is released today, covering the years 1964 to 1977.
It is believed series four will take the story of the Queen up to the end of Margaret Thatcher’s 11 years in power. X Files star Gillian Anderson has been cast as Britain’s first female Prime Minister, but precise details of the storylines are being kept under wraps.
However, one insider told The Mail on Sunday the season will be ‘merciless’ in its portrayal of the collapse of Charles and Diana’s marriage.