But only one man has been called the "love of her life"—British Pakistani surgeon
Princess Diana reportedly had her fair share of fleeting affairs, but there was only one man she fell head over heels for: Hasnat Khan, a 36-year-old Pakistani heart surgeon.
Princess Diana's romance with Dodi Fayed, the Egyptian-born film magnate, was just beginning when the two died in a car crash in Paris on August 31, 1997. Now, their relationship has taken centerstage in the fifth season of Netflix's The Crown.
In real life, Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed dated for a few months before their sad deaths in a vehicle collision in Paris in late August 1997. Dodi Fayed and their driver were killed on the spot, in the incident, while Diana died from her injuries hours later.
In 1997, Mohamed Al-Fayed invited Diana and the young princes Harry and William to holiday with them, where Diana and Dodi began to get to know each other and, inevitably, fall in love.
Before dating Diana, Dodi was in a relationship with American-born model Kelly Fisher. In The Crown season 5, Erin Richards plays Kelly, with the Netflix drama depicting her in a romance with Dodi, much to the chagrin of his father, Mohamed Al-Fayed.
Maggie admits in a scene near the end of the movie that she's actually in love with Princess Diana. It's a little out of left field thematically, but she makes this confession to prove to Diana that there is love for her in the world even though the family she's married into doesn't treat her that way.
Throughout her life, Diana was a devoted mother to her sons, William and Harry, and a lifelong advocate for children, AIDS-related causes, and victims of landmines. Hailed as the “people's princess,” she is also credited with helping to modernize the monarchy.
Diana enjoyed a close relationship with her sons before her tragic death in 1997. She wanted her children to have as normal an upbringing as possible and treated them to days out at theme parks, sent them to public school and took them on royal tours.
As TIME pointed out, the royal family had been cool towards Diana even before her divorce from Charles, due to the attention she attracted from the tabloids. While the precise reasons for the coolness are “still ultimately a matter of speculation,” Lacey says, “there was no doubt it was there.
Instead, that ending was a rubber stamp on a set of divorce papers in 1996. But the truth is, divorce is never what Diana wanted. “Given the choice, she would have stayed and tried to make a happy marriage,” her personal trainer/confidant, Jenni Rivett, said in a recent episode of Yahoo's The Royal Box.
Diana's relationship with palace staff
In the movie, Maggie confesses to Diana that she's in love with her. While Diana had many dressers in real life who assisted her with personal care and her wardrobe, there is no evidence she had romantic overtures from them.
Speaking in the audio tapes, Diana said of her wedding day: "I don't think I was happy. I never tried to call it off, in the sense of really doing that, but I think [it was] the worst day of my life." She also described herself as being "a lamb to the slaughter."
Before she was taken out of the car, he held her hand and comforted her. "My God, what's happened," Diana then asked him, in what proved to be her final words. "I massaged her heart and a few seconds later she started breathing again.
Within hours of Diana's shock death, Prince Charles was in Paris to ensure that his ex-wife's body was brought back to the UK at the earliest possible opportunity.
Diana and Dodi were together for one summer before they both tragically died in a high-speed car crash in Paris. Diana was 36, and Dodi was 42.
Diana was in a committed relationship with Hasnat Khan from 1995 to 1997, and they broke up shortly (very shortly) before Diana started dating Dodi Fayed.
In 1991, Diana revealed to biographer Andrew Morton that at her wedding, she looked for Camilla in the congregation. She revealed (per Good Housekeeping), "I knew she was in there, of course. I looked for her." She continued, "So walking down the aisle, I spotted Camilla, pale gray, veiled pillbox hat."
Camilla did attend Charles and Diana's wedding in 1981. However, Princess Diana said that Camilla did not wear white, noting instead that the future queen consort donned a light gray for the occasion.
Later, Diana revealed that she'd had doubts throughout her engagement about marrying the prince. As Insider's Mikhaila Friel reported, Diana said in a series of tapes recorded in 1991 that she became doubtful when she discovered Charles had a bracelet made for Camilla Parker-Bowles, now the Duchess of Cornwall.
Diana's departure from the estate with her sons is the first time she gives a full smile, giving the name “Spencer” — Diana's family surname — to do something as mundane as pick up fast food has, in a way, restored her identity, and helped her regain a sense of herself she had lost.
It's true that Princess Diana didn't like hunting (and especially didn't like her sons taking part). However, there's no evidence that she ever walked out into the middle of the men hunting on Boxing Day and demanded her sons come with her like she does in Spencer.
In Robert Kirkman's original graphic novels, Maggie eventually strikes up a relationship with fellow survivor Dante, portrayed by Juan Javier Cardenas in the TV adaptation. However, the screen version of Dante was soon revealed as a spy for the Whisperers, who was planted in Alexandria to stir up paranoia.
According to Camilla: From Outcast To Future Queen Consort author Angela Levin, Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, and Diana's grandmother, Lady Fermoy, had a huge part to play in it, as did the fact that Princess Diana was much younger than Camilla and therefore, in theory, more likely to give birth to the heir to the ...
Not only did the Queen then intercede and tell the Waleses it was time to divorce, but with Diana's paranoia having been stoked to such a degree and with her having lost trust in “key people,” as her brother has argued, she had made the decision to give up her official government bodyguard day-to-day.