Diana's doppelganger: How actress Naomi Watts has eerily recreated the last tumultuous years of princess's life in new movie
By RICHARD KAY and GEOFFREY LEVY
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What a moment to recreate the life of Princess Diana — as we celebrate the birth of the baby who would have been her grandson.
Later this month, 16 years after her death in a Paris underpass car smash, a film about her will be premiered in London, called Caught In Flight. It is about the last two years of her life.
Any actress called on to recreate the magic of Diana has a tough job, but the evidence of these pictures shows that Australian actress Naomi Watts has uncannily captured the style and essence of just what made Diana the most famous woman in the world.
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This picture of Diana (right) alone with her thoughts was taken just a week before her death. She is aboard Mohamed al Fayed’s yacht, the Jonikal, in Portofino, Italy. This time there was no William and Harry — Diana and Dodi were alone together on their third, and final, Mediterranean holiday. We shall never know what she was thinking about. A week later the yacht was back in French waters and the couple flew to Paris.
To focus on such a narrow period of Diana’s life must necessarily exclude so many key elements of her dramatic story.
And yet those last two years were a defining period, giving the world a glimpse not only of the substantial and influential woman that she could have been, but also the depth of her fragility.
Two key figures feature in those two years. One is Hasnat Khan, the heart surgeon with whom she fell in love and was even prepared to live with in Pakistan, if it came to that.
The other, when she had lost Khan, was Dodi Fayed, with whom she found fun and romance and with whom she subsequently died.
The young girl was called Sandra Tigica and she had stepped on a landmine. At the age of 13, she was without her left leg. It had been blown off three years earlier by the mine, and she was still waiting for a prosthetic limb. This was Angola in January, 1997, and you have only to look at Tigica’s face, and then Diana’s, to see why the Princess had thrown herself so passionately into her anti-landmine campaign.
June 3, 1997, started out as an evening at the ballet, which Diana adored. She was at the Royal Albert Hall for a gala performance of Swan Lake by the English National Ballet. In her chic, strappy cocktail dress — by Jacques Azagury — she caught the eye of a fellow guest, Mohamed al Fayed. Over supper, the colourful Harrods tycoon suggested she and her boys William and Harry might like to holiday with him and his family at his house in St Tropez. She knew the boys would love it and agreed. It was the first step in a series of events that were to lead to her death — because on that holiday Mohamed introduced her to his son, Dodi.
Diana made sure she was pictured dramatically walking in an Angolan minefield, albeit one that had been cleared. Landmines were to become the most significant episode of her post-HRH life, but it caused indignation in Westminster where the Princess of Wales was described by one Government minister as ‘a loose cannon’. It didn’t stop her.
In November, 1996, two months after her divorce, Diana was in Australia — officially to visit a cardiac institute in Sydney. The real reason was to see where surgeon Hasnat Khan, with whom she was in love, had worked. She wore this blue Versace dress to a ball. When someone admired her shoes, with crossover C straps, she said: ‘I call them Charles and Camilla because they make my feet ache.’
IT WAS this picture (far right) that told the world this was a real affair with Dodi. He was the first man since Prince Charles with whom she had allowed herself to be photographed intimately. It was early August 1997, and although friends have come to say that she fell for Fayed on the rebound from Hasnat Khan, the fact is they were blissfully happy together.
November 20, 1995, has become one of the most analysed and disputed dates in recent royal history. That evening an astonished Britain watched enthralled as Diana talked on BBC television’s Panorama about the ‘three people’ in her marriage and admitted she had been in love with James Hewitt.
This is the most haunting picture of Diana, because it was the last one to show her alive. We see her pushing through the revolving doors of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. The CCTV picture records the time as 9.50pm on August 30, 1997. Moments later she and Dodi were in the back of the Mercedes speeding across Paris, and to tragedy in the Pont d’Alma tunnel.
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