American actress Kristen Stewart is tipped to win an Oscar for playing Princess Diana in the movie Spencer.
I saw it this week and she certainly gives an extraordinary portrayal of a fragile and paranoid bulimic trapped in a miserable marriage. She even looks a bit like the princess too, thanks to skilful styling and identical clothes.
But this celluloid Spencer is most definitely NOT Diana. And the depiction of her nightmare Sandringham Christmas in 1991 is an absolute travesty.
Anyone expecting a Diana biopic soon learns this is “a fable from a true tragedy”. Or rather, a fairytale woven from fact and fiction to tug at the heartstrings.
I don’t expect many people will leave the cinema believing that Diana really talked to her dead father’s jacket or ate the pearls from a broken necklace with her soup.
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And even the most ardent fans would struggle to believe she was saved from suicide by the ghost of Anne Boleyn. But mixing truth and fantasy in this way is damaging – because it tarnishes the real Diana’s memory and taints the monarchy too.
Netflix hit The Crown does the same. Diana’s friend Jemima Khan quit as an advisor saying the new series fails to show her enough “respect or compassion”.
Prince William is furious that the focus on Diana’s final months will “perpetuate the false narratives” about his mother. But Prince Harry is keeping schtum.
He has admitted watching The Crown and says while it’s only “ loosely based on fact” he is “way more comfortable with that than I am [with] seeing stories written about my family or my wife”. And, of course, there’s that £100million deal he’s struck with Netflix to make his own shows.
This week Meghan and Harry both took another pop at the “toxic” tabloid news media.
But then Meghan had to apologise to a court for “forgetting” she had asked an aide to brief the authors of that biography she and Haz didn’t co-operate with.
It was interesting that she referred to herself in the third person in emails… like the star of her own royal movie. And that she wrote a letter to her father, calling him “Daddy” in order to “pull at the heartstrings” in case it leaked.
As a result of this mix-up she may now be called to give evidence on oath at a trial of her newspaper privacy claim. And while the American actress could easily give us an Oscar-winning performance, the Duchess of Sussex can’t.
Because Megxit has killed this royal fairytale – and now we just want the facts.
