The world saw her for the first time framed in the doorway of a house, like Isabel Archer in Portrait of a ladyand in the same way as the protagonist of Henry James’s great novel, Lady Di keep questioning us.
Diana Spencer, the shy girl with a cardigan and plaid skirt and flat shoes who I worked in a daycare and was chosen to become Princess Diana, wife and mother of the future king of England. The world saw her leave through that door in 1980, next to the sign “Young England Kindergarten”, not knowing – but perhaps suspecting, hence the lowered head and uncertain, frightened eyes – that it was a sliding door, that a door closes and another opens, and that sometimes there is an invisible sign, not that of a kindergarten, but that of “abandon all hope (of a normal life) you who enter.”
The almost adolescent future wife of a future king unable to choose, Ophelia from post-imperial Hamlet whom the United Kingdom has always struggled to love; the girlfriend and suffering mother, tears always in private except once – the visit to Australia – even in public, poorly hidden anorexia and bulimia (those who had eyes to understand understood everything even then, before the revelations of the courtiers), the separation from Charles and the rebirth, the wonderful haute couture dress with a swan neck that continues to inspire fashion, senseless death in a black Mercedes driven by a drunk and hunted by paparazzi on a moped under the Alma Bridge, on August 31, 1997…
I spent more than 25 years remembering her, more for her silences than for the sensational interview that made the world talk – “there were three of us in that marriage” – and the testimonies post mortem about the very low and unreal opinion of the Windsors -“that fucking family”- of the woman who had understood almost immediately that she would never be queen, unable to enter the game – in the court and in the media – of the one who is today the current queen, Camilla, by express will of Isabel.
Diana continues to challenge us, she challenges those of us who were there and the new generations, the “people’s princess” crowned by the media and the millions of participants in that global mourning so many years ago. She also questions – as she befits one of the most media figures of the 20th century – cinema and television, which in the era of streaming dedicates films and series to him that are the pop version of the journalistic investigations of yesteryear. Oscar-nominated films, failed movies, forgettable and soon-forgotten television snapshots, a musical that vanished into thin air and still leaves us stunned by the vulgarity of its execution: many actresses have played Diana, but the important ones right now are only four.
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