6 AR THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020Television
When we first glimpse her, minutes into Sea-
son 4 of “The Crown,” Lady Diana Spencer is
dressed as a tree and hiding behind a plant,
the picture of long-legged innocence in a fo-
liage-festooned leotard. “Sorry, I’m not here,”
she says coyly to Prince Charles, the highly
eligible heir to the British throne, who has ar-
rived at her family’s estate for a date with her
older sister Sarah.
“That’s sneaky of her,” Sarah says to
Charles afterward. “I told her to leave us
alone.”
Here is Diana in her contradictory glory,
naïve and conniving, full of charm and full of
guile, destined to marry a prince and wreak
havoc on a monarchy. Everyone already
knows the sorry end to this disastrous love
story. But the new season of “The Crown”
(coming out Sunday, and not a moment too
soon, after all we’ve been through) takes us
back to its beginning, when Charles was a
self-pitying bachelor, Diana was an unworld-
ly earl’s daughter, and the world was thrilled
to believe in what seemed like the happiest of
fairy tales.
Fans of the long-running royal drama have
been waiting excitedly for this season, antici-
pating the story line they know best: the
emergence of Diana as the glamorous, atten-
tion-sucking vortex around which the royal
family swirled for so many years. Even
Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, the royal
family’s newest rebels, look wan and dull in
comparison to Diana, who was not just “the
People’s Princess,” as Prime Minister Tony
Blair called her, but an international super-
star for the tabloid age.
With its intoxicating stew of ingredients —
royalty, beauty, adultery, celebrity, media in-
trigue — the tale of the doomed princess has
been one of the most rabidly consumed true-
life tales of the past few decades. Even 23
years after her death, Diana is still a cottage
industry, her story fueling too-many-to-count
books, films, documentaries, musicals, plays,
mini-series and even present-day tabloid
stories, her sapphire-and-diamond engage-
ment ring (currently displayed on the hand
of Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge,
Prince William’s wife) instantly recogniz-
able. Now the new season of Netflix’s
marquee series, under the watchful eye of its
writer and showrunner, Peter Morgan, has to
perform its greatest high-wire act yet: how to
make such a familiar story feel fresh and
new.
For the part of Diana, the production cast
the unknown actor Emma Corrin, 24, a re-
cent graduate of Cambridge University, who
plays the princess from the ages of 16 to 28.
Alert Diana-philes will notice that Corrin has
gotten the princess’s seductive signature
gesture — head tilting to the side, eyes glanc-
ing coquettishly upward through her bangs
— just right. But inhabiting that most-talked-
about of women presented challenges of its
own.
“It’s very difficult; it’s a lot to take on and a
lot of pressure, especially as we get close to
when it comes out,” Corrin said in an inter-
view. The series is fiction, she pointed out,
and her portrayal of Diana is her own. “I
never went into this thinking I wanted to em-
body or mimic her,” she said. “I think of her
more as a character, and this is my interpre-
tation of her.”
Peter Morgan’s multigenerational saga, a
consistently enthralling mix of serious his-
tory and frothy gossip, has already spanned
more than 30 years. This new season brings
us into the 1980s, the era of big hair and puffy
dresses, of pleated pants and Conservative
government. In Britain, it was the decade of
Margaret Thatcher, the country’s first female
prime minister (Gillian Anderson, her man-
ner imperious and her voice full of card-
board).
As always, intimate developments in the
lives of the queen and her family are set
against the sweep of British politics and the
wider forces of history: the Falklands war;
the Irish Troubles; Thatcher’s efforts to re-
make her party and upend the welfare state;
the subsequent economic upheaval. As we
move closer to the present, these events
seem less like distant history and almost like
familiar home movies, parts of a collective
past shared by many viewers.
Morgan said that he had approached the
new season in the same way he had all along,
but that expectations for it seemed higher.
“I’m slightly more conscious of accuracy asopposed to truth, and I’m leaning into accura-
cy as much as I can,” he said, speaking by
phone from London.
Luckily, the research team had a trove of
firsthand material to draw on. The vicissi-
tudes of the royal marriage were ag-
gressively covered by the British tabloid
press, often with the tacit help of Diana (al-
though she denied it at the time). In addition
to endless newspaper accounts, the produc-
tion turned to Jonathan Dimbleby’s exhaus-
tive biography of Prince Charles, written
with Charles’s help and providing an insight
into his difficult relationship with his par-
ents; and Andrew Morton’s explosive biogra-
phy of Diana, based on hours of confessional
tape recordings from the princess and full of
juicy details about her marriage. “In earlier
seasons our subjects were not given to this
kind of self-reflection, so this was very help-
ful,” Annie Sulzberger, the production’s head
of research (and the sister of The New York
Times’s publisher, A. G. Sulzberger), said in
an interview from London.
The show had a team of advisers with di-
rect knowledge of the events, a change from
previous seasons, when “there were fewer
people alive we could talk to,” said Oona O
Beirn, a “Crown” producer who worked
closely with the research team. (For in-
stance, in the first season, they had just one
surviving source from Churchill’s office; now
there is a plethora of contemporary experts,
including Patrick Jephson, a former private
secretary to Diana.) “As the show has be-
come more well known, we get approached alot, and then it’s a case of talking to who we
think would be helpful,” O Beirn said.
As always, they have taken many cine-
matic liberties. “Crown” watchers in Britain
are already debating what is accurate and
what has been changed for dramatic pur-
poses. In one episode, for instance, Diana
gets a crash course in royal-family protocol
— where to walk, where to stand, how to
speak in public. In real life, Sulzberger said,
the instruction came from two members of
the palace staff. But “The Crown” gives the
job to Diana’s grandmother, the harsh Lady
Fermoy, a lady-in-waiting to the queen
mother known for testifying in court against
her own daughter, Diana’s mother, during Di-
ana’s parents’ bitter divorce. “We had some
advice from one of our advisers that Lady
Fermoy was more of the kind of taskmaster
we were looking for,” Wagner said. The re-
sulting scenes are painful: Diana really does
come across as a lamb to the slaughter, a de-
scription she once used of herself.
Sulzberger said that with so many people
alive to remember what happened, the show
was particularly concerned with plumbing
the nuances of the story. That meant ac-
knowledging potential bias in even knowl-
edgeable sources. For instance, accounts
sympathetic to Diana at the time stressed
her despair over Charles’s infidelity while
conveniently eliding her own adulterous ad-
ventures. But “The Crown” makes it clear
that there were two sides to the tale, showing
Diana promising the queen that she will give
up her lover, James Hewitt, and then goingThe Netflix series takes on
Diana, the princess who
enchanted the world.
Top, Josh O’Connor
and Emma Corrin
playing Prince Charles
and Princess Diana
in the Netflix series
“The Crown”; above,
Olivia Colman, left,
portraying Queen
Elizabeth II; right,
recreating a royal
stroll; and below,
Diana and Charles in
March 1981.ALEX BAILEY/NETFLIXBy SARAH LYALLDES WILLIE/NETFLIXHer Turn to Capture ‘The Crown’
DES WILLIE/NETFLIXASSOCIATED PRESS