Where's the 'People's Princess' Diana in 'The Crown' Season 5 and 'Spencer'?

From a 20-year-old married to a man much older than she was, Princess Diana grew to be a force in her own right. She pursued what and whom she loved. (Illustration by Suneesh K)

This has never happened to me before. That I quit halfway through watching not one, but two cinematic depictions of a real person.

Diana, Princess of Wales, was perhaps the most famous woman in the world in the 1980s and 1990s. Luminously beautiful, she had been married to a man widely perceived—rightly or wrongly—as a dull bloke who had anyway always been in love with another woman. Diana’s smile was dazzling, her eyes sparkled, and her heart seemed to be in the right place. She connected. She was, as Tony Blair called her, the “people’s princess”.

Men and women of my generation grieved for her troubles—a cool modern girl stuck in a stuffy marriage defined by arcane rules of etiquette and codes of behaviour. Many of us cheered when she walked out of that arid relationship.

I remember a friend of mine, a senior banker, weeping on the phone when Diana died in a car crash in 1997. That is the only time in my life that I heard a banker sob.

I have been a fan of the Netflix show The Crown, a biopic of Queen Elizabeth II, ever since it started streaming six years ago. I binge-watched each season and waited impatiently for the next one. The fifth season, released this month, would certainly have generated higher viewer interest than the previous ones. Because it would show events that many of us pre-millennials would have a vague memory of. To put it more bluntly, it would cover the Diana years of the royal family.

But after suffering through seven episodes of Season 5, I quit and will not sit through the remaining three.

The principal reason for this is the show’s depiction of Diana.

Diana, as played by Elizabeth Debecki, or rather, as conceived by showrunner Peter Morgan, comes through as a woman constantly teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown, to the extent that she sometimes seems demented. In every scene, her eyes are absurdly kohl-lined and open extra-wide, her body all tense and coiled up, making her look like some sort of psycho whom you would not want to share an elevator with. She is shown as a victim being driven into serious mental imbalance.

The Crown was the second Diana portrayal I opted out of. A few weeks before this, I had a bad experience with the 2021 film Spencer (Diana’s maiden name) on Amazon Prime. I lasted about 45 minutes with that. The film mines the Diana victimhood narrative to its lowest depths.

Spencer, which pompously calls itself “a fable from a true tragedy”, imagines a three-day Christmas retreat of the British royal family that Diana unwillingly attends.

She is now separated from her husband. The Crown sees Diana on the verge of a nervous collapse; in Spencer, she is having a full-on meltdown, with paranoid fantasies and hallucinations. Director Pablo Larrain plays it like a classic horror film set in an old mansion—at some points, it feels like a rehash of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, except that there’s no Jack Nicholson to make it either scary or fun.

A quivering hand-held camera follows Diana around in extreme close-up as she eats messily, pukes out all her food, and generally loses her mind. The dialogues are so heavy-handed that they sound like parody. “Beauty is useless. Beauty is clothing.” “I’m a magnet for madness. Other people’s madness.” “You know, the dust in this house, it almost certainly contains the dead skin of every person who’s stayed in it. This was once Queen Victoria’s room. So it’ll have her skin floating in the air. She wore black for 40 years after her husband died. That’s love, isn’t it?”

If all this self-pitying rubbish isn’t enough, Diana discovers a biography of Anne Boleyn in her room—one of King Henry VIII’s wives whom he beheaded. She promptly begins to see Boleyn seated opposite her at dinner, and so on. She flees down long empty corridors, gripped by some unknown terror, like in a teen slasher movie. She looks into the mirror with dreadful anticipation, as if a leering ghost were about to materialize behind her suddenly.

But to my perhaps-insensitive soul, the effect was that of a psycho who can pull out a meat cleaver from under her gown at any moment and go to work on innocent bystanders.

These portrayals of Diana do immense injustice to her. Of course, she had a difficult relationship with her husband and his family, but she also had the courage to step out of it. She overcame her problems and came out fighting fit. She moved on and lived a full life, while enjoying a level of wealth and privilege that very few women on earth can even dream of.

She constantly complained about being chased by the paparazzi, but she also used the media cleverly, when it suited her, to tell her side of the story.

The late journalist James Whitaker possibly knew the British royals better than anyone else. He covered the family for nearly five decades, and even claimed a bit of credit for Charles choosing Diana as his bride. In an interview to the American television network PBS in the early 1990s (I have not been able to ascertain the exact date), he said: “I think that the cruellest thing that one could do to (Diana) is to write nothing about her and not take her picture for six months. I'm not going to say she loves being chased and harassed… but I think she feeds personally off the level of publicity that she gets… I think she runs a problem… saying one minute I do want you and I want to use the media to get my message across… You're going to run into a problem if you (then) suddenly say, right I'm now switching off, go away, come back when I want you.”

Diana was hardly a rabbit caught in the media headlights.

Whitaker goes on to say, referring to a conversation he had with Prince Charles’ private secretary Richard Aylard, that in 1991-92, Charles and his men were actively “putting out the message that ‘Diana’s gone bonkers’.” In fact, in a 1995 BBC interview, Diana herself accused Buckingham Palace of trying to project her as mentally unbalanced.

But that is exactly what The Crown and Spencer do—show Diana going nuts. The unfunny joke is that these are intended to be narratives sympathetic to her.

Above all, they imply that Diana enjoyed little agency in her life. In The Crown, the only real act of free will she commits to is when she falls in lust at first sight with a surgeon she meets by chance.

These depictions are an insult to Diana. She was not a weak woman. She fought hard and intelligently against what she saw as injustices done to her by the institution that her husband’s family is. From a 20-year-old married to a man much older than her who was heir to the British throne, she grew to be a force in her own right. She pursued what and whom she loved, and definitely did not aspire, to quote Dylan Thomas, to go gentle into that good night.

She deserves much better than these portrayals. She demands much more nuance, and less of the easy judgements and lazy slotting.