Lady Diana - The Picture Encyclopedia of Cultural Images

Lady Diana - The Picture Encyclopedia of Cultural Images

Lady Diana was born in a noble family as daughter of Edward and Frances Spencer, Viscount and Viscountess of Althorp. She did not excel in her elementary and high school studies, and wanted to be a ballerina before her marriage to Prince Charles.

In the early 1980’s, Prince Charles, already being in his thirties, had a growing pressure on him to marry. His wife had to fulfill numerous expectations of the royal family, some of which made Camilla Parker Bowles, the Prince’s girlfriend at the time, unfitting for the position. Allegedly, she helped to select the young Lady Diana as a wife for Prince Charles.

The couple married in 1981. The early years of the marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, now Princess of Wales, passed in relative calmness. Lady Diana gave birth to two children, Prince William in 1982, and Prince Henry in 1984. Lady Diana took an important part in the fight against AIDS, by being the first celebrity to publicly touch an infected person, to prove that the HIV virus is not contagious through physical contact. Later on, in the 1990’s, she became a VIP volunteer of the Red Cross, and raised her voice against landmines. She influenced the government of the UK and other countries to sign the Ottawa treaty (1997) which abolished the use of anti-personal landmines.

The marriage started to fall apart in the late 1980’s. Lady Diana was susceptible to depression and other personality disorders, and Prince Charles had a complicated love life even before the marriage, which he apparently resumed. Lady Diana had always been popular in the press and the media, and her love affairs with different men earned her even more popularity than her charity work at that time. According to later interviews with her, Lady Diana also attempted suicide repeatedly in the last years of her marriage.

The couple separated in 1992 and officially divorced in 1996. Lady Diana remained a public figure, partly because of her continued charity work, and partly because of her love life and association with rich and famous men. Rumors and articles about these affairs were popular even after her death.

The death of Lady Diana gained at least as much publicity as her life, and may be the result of the attention of the media she had during the 1990’s. She died in a car accident in Paris, in 1997, along with her current boyfriend, Dodi Al Fayed, and their driver. The fourth person, their bodyguard, was the only survivor of the accident. Allegedly, the couple left a hotel in Paris, and was chased by a convoy of French paparazzi, when they entered a highway tunnel, and hit the wall. The driver, who was allegedly drunk and under the effect of drugs, and Dodi Al Fayed died on the scene. Lady Diana was taken to hospital, but died a few hours later.

The life, marriage, and story of Lady Diana has remained a popular topic of books and newspaper articles of all sorts ever since. A few years after Lady Diana’s death, her butler released videotapes to the media in which Diana is discussing her marriage with Prince Charles. Some of the publications concerning the Princess of Wales, especially the videotapes, caused an outcry among the public, and were not published in the United Kingdom.

Picture 1: Lady Diana