Unearthed Princess Diana Audio Exposes Troubling Times, Thoughts on Marriage and Baby Harry
Echoes of the pathos that was behind the persona of Diana, Princess of Wales, emerged in newly released audio recordings that are being used for a documentary about the princess who died at 36 on Aug. 31, 1997.
Snippets of audio tapes that will be used in the documentary, “Diana: The Rest of Her Story,” were released Friday according to Good Morning America
In one short recording, Diana spoke about then-Prince Charles, prior to their divorce, and Diana’s mother Frances Shand Kydd.
“My husband won’t even talk to Mummy, barely, because at Harry’s christening, Charles went up to [her] and said, ‘You know, we’re so disappointed. We thought it’d be a girl,'” Diana said.
“And Mummy snapped his head off and said, ‘You should realize how lucky you are to have a child that’s normal,'” Diana said, noting the incident had consequences.
“And ever since that day, a shutter [has] come down, and that’s what he does when he gets somebody answering back at him, so to speak,” she said.
In another recording, Diana spoke about her troubles with Raine Spencer, her stepmother.
“I said everything I possibly could and Raine said, ‘You have no idea how much pain your mother put your father through,'” Diana said.
“And I said, ‘Pain, Raine, it’s one word you don’t even know how to relate to. In my job and in my role, I see people suffer like you’ve never seen, and you call that pain.’ I said, ‘You’ve got a lot to learn,’” Diana said. “I remember really going for her gullet.”
In one short passage, Diana spoke about her marriage to Charles, from whom she was divorced in 1996, a year before her death.
“It was so grown up. Here’s Diana, a kindergarten teacher. I mean the whole thing was ridiculous,” she said in the clip, according to the New York Post.
Dr. James Colthurst, who gave the tapes to Andrew Morton, Diana’s biographer, said Charles’s affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, now Queen Camilla, had a severe impact on Diana.
“You could see her fading physically,” Colthurst said. “It was clear to all those who knew her that the bulimia was a reaction to the circumstances she found herself in.”
Morton, who used the tapes for his bestselling 1992 book “Diana: Her True Story,” said the tapes will help people get a better sense of Diana according to Good Morning America.
“It’s one thing to read something on a page, but it’s quite another to hear the person talking about it, and here we have Diana talking about her ambitions for the future,” Morton said, according to Good Morning America. “There’s a real poignancy about some of the aspects of the tape, and I think people will get a really vivid sense of her personality and her character.”
Tom Jennings, director and executive producer of the new documentary, said it has a different concept than any project previously done about Diana.
“I said, ‘Andrew, wait. We do this completely different. There’s no narrator. There are no modern-day interviews. We only use media from the time. It would be like Diana is narrating her own film,'” Jennings said. “And he said, ‘No one has ever asked me to do it that way before. When can you come to London?'”
Jennings continued, “I was in London the next morning. [Morton] pushed play on these tapes, and for the next seven hours, we sat in a very small room, [and] it was as if Diana was sitting there with us, telling us her life story.”
The documentary is expected to be released in 2024.
Morton noted that the tapes are from a different world.
“She never thought for a second that Camilla would become queen, so we have a very different perspective on unfolding history,” Morton said, according to CNN.
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