The news stories from December 1991 show her attending a fundraiser for the fourth annual World AIDS Day, taking Prince Harry and Prince William to a show at Royal Albert Hall, and visiting Glasgow to see a medical research center.
To fill in that gap, the film relies on informed speculation, telegraphing its intentions in a brief epigraph: “A Fable From a True Tragedy.” Still, Stewart’s embodiment of the famous woman is convincing enough that it did take a bit of vigilance to remember at a recent screening that I was dealing with a work of art.
None of this actually happened, of course, but Spencer uses the Christmas holidays at Sandringham in 1991 as a set piece to depict 10 years of accumulated frustration and pain.
In dealing with those indelibly heavy emotions in 2021, 24 years after her death, the film is as concerned with the myth of Diana as with the woman herself, and it hinges on dramatic irony, the foreknowledge of her future Diana cannot possibly have as she drives the roads of Norfolk in her convertible.
The imagined narrative is a fruitful way to think about the stories of Diana’s life she never got to tell herself.
Other than one famous quip she reportedly made as a teenager, about how it might be fun to marry into the family “like Anne Boleyn”, there appears to be no record that Diana was particularly preoccupied by thoughts of Henry VIII’s executed second wife.
Now that the extent of the couple’s rift is well-documented, it’s impressive that Diana and Charles were able to maintain the facade as long as they did, perhaps due to the palace’s typical work to maintain a chasm between all the royals’ private lives and public personas.
To mourn Diana now is to miss profoundly the 60-year-old she would have become, the one who could tell us how her fairy tale became so fractured herself, with the benefit of hindsight and a bit of inner peace.
But in Tina Brown’s 1985 account of a trip to Balmoral, the Windsors’ “hellishly convivial” family gatherings aren’t that icy at all, and other reports have mentioned a gag-gift tradition, a commitment to practical jokes, and sitting rooms brimming with casual laughter.
In his 1993 Vanity Fair story, “Diana’s Revenge,” Anthony Holden describes her as “the only member of the family to maintain a tribal loyalty from her adoring public.” Simply put, it’s difficult to imagine a woman who would soon thoroughly beat the royals at their own P.R.
A few months after Diana’s death, a toy-marketing expert made a pessimistic prediction about the impact her image would have in the future.
Though the tragedy of her death is due to her unfinished life, the lingering uncertainties make her story generative for anyone looking for themselves in the image of the lonely princess.
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