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The true story behind Princess Diana's iconic yacht photo

All you need to know about the iconic photo of the late princess of wales that went around the globe.

Princess Diana was always a fashion icon , we can never forget her legendary 'revenge' dress , but one of her best-known looks was snapped when she holidayed on the Jonikal yacht with the al-Fayed family, scenes which were immortalised in the fifth and sixth seasons of The Crown .

The holiday that Diana enjoyed, alongside sons Prince William and Prince Harry , would be her last before she was tragically killed in a car accident in 1997. One of the most memorable photos saw the late Princess of Wales sat on the yacht's diving board looking out over the sea.

Even though the photo of Diana in the teal swimsuit is now one of the most poignant photos of the late royal, how much do you know of the story behind it? Read on to find out all you need to know…

Why was Diana on the yacht?

Princess Diana had become friends with the businessman Mohamed al-Fayed, with the pair reportedly meeting a polo match before becoming friends. Following her divorce from the then Prince Charles and the ending of her relationship with heart surgeon Dr. Hasnat Khan, Mohamed invited Diana to join him and his family on a trip to St Tropez, in southern France.

Ahead of the trip, Diana had been in Milan to attend the funeral of fashion designer and friend Gianna Versace, who had been murdered by Andrew Cunanan. The late royal later travelled to Sarajevo, in Bosnia, to highlight the issue of landmines in the country. During her time in the city, she met with people who had been injured by the mines.

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The trip would end up being Diana's first time meeting Dodi al-Fayed, and the filmmaker's then-girlfriend, Kelly Fisher, was allegedly on the trip.

Who took the photo?

On 10 August, paparazzi photos were published in the Sunday Mirror showing Princess Diana and Dodi sharing a kiss, which intensified media presence around the couple and their holiday. Paparazzi photographers began renting dinghies to try and get new photos of the royal, with some even going for prices up to £1million.

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It's ultimately unknown which photographer grabbed the photo of Diana on the side of the yacht, which was published on 24 August, a week before Diana died. The snap saw the Princess in her teal swimsuit sat at the end of the yacht's diving board, with a life ring floating in the water beneath her.

See below for more images of Diana on the Jonikal…

Diana and Dodi

Diana and Dodi grew close on the trip, and in this photo the pair shared an intimate moment as they relaxed in the sun together.

Diana with the al-Fayed family

The late Princess of Wales had been invited on the trip by Mohamed al-Fayed, and she enjoyed the businessman's company during her time onboard.

Diana in blue

Diana favoured the teal swimsuit during her time in St Tropez.

Diana's paparazzi moment

The royal was aware of the media presence, and she light-heartedly teased photographers in this photo, mimicking a pair of binoculars with her hands.

Diana stretches

The mum-of-two also brought this stunning green and blue one-piece with her on the trip, and in this photo she enjoyed some morning stretches on the yacht's deck.

Diana's family moment

Diana didn't go on the holiday alone, and she also enjoyed time with her sons Prince William and Prince Harry, and a young Harry can be seen here with his mum while she spoke to someone on the phone.

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‘The Crown’: The Story Behind That Princess Diana Yacht Photo

Perched on the edge of a diving board in a blue swimsuit, the famous paparazzi shot caught the former royal in a moment of reflection

It’s telling that the lead image in the promotion of the final series of The Crown, a show ostensibly about Queen Elizabeth II and her ascendent line of heirs, is not of HRH. Instead, it’s an iconic shot of the person who's really at the centre of the Netflix show's sixth season: the late Princess Diana.

The photo in question has become embedded in popular culture since it was taken on Diana’s last holiday before her death. The ex-royal sits, pensively, on the diving board of a superyacht, looking out to sea in a turquoise swimsuit. But what is the true story behind one of the most famous images of the Princess Of Wales?

The backstory

In July 1997, Diana was on a Mediterranean holiday with her boyfriend at the time, Dodi Al Fayed, son of the then-Harrods’ boss, the late Mohammed Al Fayed. Diana and Dodi – and the Princes William and Harry – all spent time together in Castle St. Therese, Al Fayed’s 30-bedroom villa in St. Tropez in the South of France.

But Diana was called to Milan on 22 July, where she attended the funeral of her friend Gianni Versace, who was murdered by a fan on the steps of his Miami home on 15 July.

The author and friend of Diana, Tina Brown, later wrote: “The murder of the flamboyant fashion star Gianni Versace... while Diana was on Al Fayed's yacht, was a meteor shower in the exploding sky of her final summer.”

With the weight of the death of her friend still on her mind, in early August, Diana travelled alone to Sarajevo to publicise the fight against landmines in the country. Here, she came face to face with some horrific tales of mutilation of the people, and spent time working with rehabilitation groups of survivors.

By early August, after an emotionally turbulent few weeks, Diana was back on holiday with Dodi, this time on his yacht, known as Jonikal.

But on 10 August, pictures of Diana and Dodi kissing in Sardinia were published in the Sunday Mirror , and all hell broke loose; especially when it was claimed Diana could possibly be engaged, or even pregnant. In the trailer for series six, Imelda Staunton’s Queen is shown the front-page splash and told: “Interest in the princess’ private life is unlikely to die down any time soon”, and it’s likely that in real life Diana would have received a stern phone call from the palace.

From this point onwards, it only intensified the swarms of paparazzi clamouring for pictures of the pair on holiday. Video footage from the trip shows dinghies filled with men with long-lens pictures surrounding the yacht, desperate to catch another money-spinning shot of the couple together – with figures going as high as £1 million a photo.

On 24 August, Diana, dressed in just the teal swimsuit, took a walk out to the diving board of the yacht and sat down on it. She would have had a lot to process from the past few weeks.

She would also have known the press were desperate for pictures of her and Dodi together – perhaps she told him to stay below deck to protect him while she gave photographers a shot to appease them.

But according to one paparazzo in the documentary Sex & Power , the romance was just for show: “No-one knows this, so it’s ­actually quite interesting. [The crew member] said, ‘They don’t share the same bedroom, he calls her ma’am, is ­incredibly deferential and respectful. But as soon as she goes outside to wave to the paps, she’s bending over and kissing him and hugging him’... The truth [of their romance] is the opposite.”

Was this then another posed shot designed to reset the narrative, or was it simply a candid picture of the troubled princess in genuine thought? Whatever the case may be, the photo's melancholy pull is still being felt.

The first half of The Crown series 6 streams on Netflix from November 16.

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‘The Crown’: Behind the Photo of an Embrace That Changed Princess Diana’s Life

In the show, Mohamed al-Fayed sends the photographer Mario Brenna to capture shots of Diana and al-Fayed’s son, Dodi, on vacation. The portrayal is inaccurate, Brenna says.

By Alex Marshall

Reporting from London

It’s summer 1997, and Princess Diana is flirting with Dodi Fayed, a globe-trotting playboy, on the Jonikal, a yacht floating on sparkling Mediterranean waters.

Diana, teasingly, says that she likes men who have lips that are “just the right temperature.”

“Are mine the right temperature?” Dodi replies.

“I don’t know,” Diana says: “Need to check.” Then, the couple kiss, blissfully unaware that just a few meters away, Mario Brenna, a slick Italian photographer, is on a boat, with a long-lens camera trained on the couple.

A few days later, Brenna’s shots of the princess and her new beau are on the front pages of newspapers worldwide.

This is a central scene in the sixth and final season of Netflix’s royal drama “The Crown” — the first batch of episodes premiered on Thursday — and a moment that signaled the start of a tabloid frenzy around the couple that many blame for their deaths on Aug. 31, 1997, in a car crash in Paris as they were chased by photographers.

Yet the depiction is far from accurate, according to Brenna, speaking in what he said was his first interview with an English-language newspaper.

For a start, “The Crown” has Mohamed al-Fayed — Dodi’s father, and a retail and hotel tycoon who died this year — appearing to hire Brenna to take the shots, in an effort to push Diana and Dodi’s relationship into the public eye, and cajole the pair to marry.

In an email, Annie Sulzberger, the head of research for the show — she is also the sister of The Times’s publisher, A.G. Sulzberger — said that “there are a few theories about how Brenna managed to find the Jonikal moored somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea,” but the one the team found most credible was that one of al-Fayed’s employees leaked the boat’s location to Brenna.

But Brenna said the idea that al-Fayed hired him was “absurd and completely invented,” and that no one leaked information about the yacht’s whereabouts to him. Every summer at that time, he was in Sardinia so he could take paparazzi shots of famous people, he said, and coming across Diana and Dodi was simply a “great stroke of luck.”

On Aug. 1, 1997, Brenna said he approached Diana’s yacht on a fast moving inflatable boat after mistaking a blonde woman making a telephone call on its upper deck for an old acquaintance. As he got closer, he was stunned to realize it was the princess.

Bruno Malka, Brenna’s agent at the time who helped sell the images to Paris Match magazine, said in an email that he thought Brenna was familiar with the yacht, “without knowing it was Diana and Dodi” onboard that day. Brenna was successful, Malka added, because he had spent so many years working in the region.

After spotting the couple, Brenna said he spent the next few days stalking the boat, including climbing a cliff to get a better view. From that elevated position, about 400 meters away from Diana, he took several photos of Diana and Dodi in an embrace. The shots were almost blurred, Brenna said, because the heat haze meant he struggled to get the pair in focus.

Still, he knew immediately he’d secured “a historic photo.” He’d also captured an image that “solved my personal and family problems,” he said, at a time when he had recently divorced and so “was not swimming in wealth.”

He unloaded the rolls of film from the camera, then buried them to make sure they didn’t get exposed to the sun as he tried to take more images, and also as he feared a competitor might have seen him at work and try to steal his camera and so obtain the images every other photographer in the Mediterranean had been hoping to get first.

On Aug. 10, the Sunday Mirror, a British tabloid, splashed Brenna’s image on its front page . “The Kiss,” the headline read. Soon, Brenna said, he was selling the pictures worldwide. In the following six-to-eight months, he said, he made about 1.7 million pounds, or $2.1 million, from his photos of the couple.

Brenna’s pictures — and the prices news outlets paid for them — sparked a frenzy. In 2013, Jason Fraser, a British photographer who helped Brenna sell his images, told The Daily Mail that after they were published, over 2,000 photographers arrived in the Mediterranean hoping to get their own snaps of Diana and Dodi. “I felt the whole thing was spinning out of control,” Fraser said. Weeks later, the couple died.

In “The Crown,” Brenna (portrayed by Enzo Cilenti) explains his methods to camera. To capture celebrities misbehaving, the fictional Brenna says, you have to take risks. Paparazzi also have to act like “hunters … killers.”

Brenna said in the email interview that he did not share this opinion of his work (“I do not identify with the term ‘killer,’”) and that he was never contacted by anyone from “The Crown” to learn about his experiences (Netflix did not respond to a request for comment).

After Diana and Dodi’s death, al-Fayed sued Fraser, the British photographer, for taking photos of Diana and Dodi on a boat, saying it was an invasion of privacy. Brenna said he did not face any such action, adding his images were legal as they “were taken outdoors, in a public place.” And he regretted the privacy crackdown that happened since, with governments and stars trying to stop the paparazzi from taking photos: “There is still the right to report,” he said.

Today, Brenna lives near Lake Como, in Italy, where he said he’s photographed celebrities including George Clooney, Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé, even as the dawn of social media had impacted his profession significantly, including its financial rewards.

Brenna said he and his family enjoyed the success of the photos throughout August 1997. But then, Diana died. When he heard the news, Brenna said, he “couldn’t believe it” and cried, not least because he had two children himself and so could understand what her death would mean for Diana’s boys. He made a decision “not to speak or disclose anything about the incident until William and Harry reached adulthood.”

The mere thought that his images “could have contributed to fueling the hunt for Diana and Dodi obviously saddens me,” Brenna said. But he did not think his work added significantly to the furor around the princess.

“If it hadn’t been me,” he added, “someone else would certainly have captured those images.”

Alex Marshall is a European culture reporter, based in London. More about Alex Marshall

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Inside the Superyacht Princess Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed Spent Their Final Vacation On

A look at the vessel that saw the beloved royal’s last vacation.

It was hot gossip, this adventure that the princess took abroad after having finalized her divorce from then Prince Charles less than a year before—something that was hinted at at the end of season 5 of The Crown as Queen Elizabeth is pressed to endorse a vacation a-sea with Fayed and her grandchildren, Prince Harry and Prince William. Diana was famously photographed sitting on the passerelle of this boat. Years later, in real life, Harry described the trip in his memoir, Spare , with fond recollection. “Everything about that trip to St. Tropez was heaven,” he wrote.

While the series was filmed on a lookalike super yacht in Mallorca , the real boat was equally lavish. The 208-foot ship was commissioned by Dodi’s father, former Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed, who brought on naval architect Vincenzo Ruggiero to design it in the late 1980s. It was built by Italian shipyard Codecasa and launched in 1990. The steel and aluminum super yacht boasted nine staterooms that altogether accommodate up to 18 people, in addition to a crew of 26. Amenities included a Jacuzzi, swim platform, sun deck, formal dining room, a bar, and office space. Mohamed had named the yacht Jonikal (it has subsequently been called Sokar and is currently called Bash ) .

Shortly after Diana’s and Dodi’s deaths, Mohamed gave the interior a redesign by H2 Yacht Design and a refit that included extending the hull. He attempted to sell the yacht on a number of occasions, ultimately parting with it in 2014 to an anonymous buyer. The new owner carried out further work, including machinery upgrades, a repaint, and fresh teak decks. In 2021, the yacht came into the hands of Bassim Haidar , the founder of Intercomm and GMT, who gave it a further $9.7 million refit after a reported bridge deck fire—and its current name Bash . It’s now back to turn-key condition after an 18-month remodel completed in April 2023 by marine engineering and management company Capax and boat interior company Bobic Yacht Interiors . It features a beauty salon, massage area, high-tech gym, and a spacious main salon.

In May, Robb Report reported that Bash is available for charter in the Mediterranean starting at $278,000 per week, plus expenses. In June, Haidar listed Bash for $16.8 million, according to Boat International .

There was a second motor yacht named Cujo, which Diana and Fayed also took earlier that summer. It was built in Italy in 1972 for John von Neumann, who commissioned the Italian Baglietto shipyard to build the world's fastest motor yacht. She was given two 18-cylinder engines that allowed it to go as fast as 42 knots. Fayed had bought the boat from his cousin, Saudi businessman and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. In August, the Mediterranean Sea reclaimed Cujo, as the 62-foot artifact of Diana’s life hit an unidentified object off Beaulieu-sur-Mer on July 29 and sprang a leak, Vanity Fair reported. The seven people on board were rescued by teams from Antibes and safely returned to shore.

An imitation of Jonikal will feature in The Crown season 6, a set that was intended to visually illuminate the tension between Diana and the royal family. “Diana’s south of France adventure was bright and lovely pastel colors, and her world even in Kensington Palace is optimistic and warm, compared to the queen’s residence at Balmoral, which is very static, with gloomy light and drab colors,” set decorator Alison Harvey tells ELLE DECOR.

Filming on the yacht off the island of Mallorca (a St. Tropez stand-in) required many moving parts with few do-overs. “We brought in the drapes, the artwork, many furnishings,” Harvey explains. “Everything was set in the early ’90s, so we thought hard about the colors and textures that we brought in.” Harvey’s team had just half a day to dress the yacht, and then it was off to sea. “There was no getting on or off after that,” Harvey says, adding that they were “subsumed by the logistics of what we had to achieve and the time we had to do it.”

However painstaking the process, the yacht scenes will offer an intriguing context—though largely fictitious—for the iconic photographs that exist of those final weeks leading up to Diana’s death.

Rachel Silva, the Assistant Digital Editor at ELLE DECOR, covers design, architecture, trends, and anything to do with haute couture. She has previously written for Time, The Wall Street Journal, and Citywire.

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What Really Happened During Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed’s Vacation?

The Crown depicts her jaunts on Mohamed Al-Fayed’s yacht, the Jonikal, where her romance with Dodi kicked off.

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Diana was invited by Mohamed, a friend and businessman, to vacation in Saint-Tropez with her sons in July 1997. The Harrods owner would also goad his own son to join, too. The invitation came at a good time, after a few rough blows for Diana: Prince Charles was throwing a lavish birthday party for Camilla Parker Bowles at Highgrove, the house he and Diana once shared. And she had just broken up with surgeon Hasnat Khan, due to the media frenzy around their relationship. It was the month before William and Harry would be at Balmoral with their father and the rest of the royals, who no longer accepted her. So off she went, straight to the $20 million yacht that Fayed bought just before the trip to impress her—Tina Brown writes in The Diana Chronicles .

Prince Harry has looked back fondly at that trip, mostly because of the quality time they spent with their mom. “Actually, we’d been with Mummy weeks earlier when she first met him [Dodi], in St. Tropez,” he writes in her memoir Spare , per Today . “We were having a grand time, just the three of us, staying at some old gent’s villa.

“There was much laughter, horseplay, the norm whenever Mummy and Willy and I were together, though even more so on that holiday. Everything about that trip to St. Tropez was heaven. The weather was sublime, the food was tasty, Mummy was smiling.”

But the cameras followed her, like they always did. The Crown depicts photographers sailing out toward the Jonikal to snap images of the princess sunbathing and swimming in her one-piece. It also shows her approaching the boats filled with paparazzi to forge a deal: She’ll pose for them for a few shots if they’ll leave her and her kids alone.

Part of this is true. The New York Times reported in 1997 that Diana was quite cooperative with the press, at least during the first trip in July: “Three times, on separate occasions, she went out to the sea front and jumped off a small pier into the water, with photographers around her. Then, after leaving for 10 days with Mr. Fayed on the boat trip during which the photographs of the embracing couple were taken, she returned.”

“It was clear enough to all of us that she wanted to show the British establishment she was free,” Frederic Garcia, who photographed Diana on the trip, told the paper at the time. But her and the Al-Fayeds’ exasperation with the media grew after helicopters flew over the boat, according to the NYT .

Perhaps her openness to being photographed was her response to Camilla’s birthday party. “She just wanted to make the people at Balmoral as angry as possible,” her friend, art collector Lord Palumbo, told Brown. Now it wasn’t just a revenge dress; it was a revenge photo shoot with revenge swimsuits on a revenge vacation.

Brown even writes that the biggest photos from the trip, of the princess kissing a shirtless Dodi on the boat, “were the direct result of tips from Diana herself.” After they were published, she called photographer Jason Fraser, who “was in cahoots” with Mario Brenna, who shot the images, to ask why the pictures were so grainy. But she wasn’t the only one working with the press. Mohamed also had a publicist tip gossip columns on her and Dodi’s whereabouts and frame their getaway as a sensational romance, according to Brown.

Meanwhile, Dodi was juggling this burgeoning love story with another one. He was already engaged when he first joined Diana on the boat at his father’s behest in July. His fiancée was Kelly Fisher , an American actress and model, and their wedding was scheduled for the following month, on August 9, 1997. He had even left Fisher in Paris to board the Jonikal in St. Tropez. She joined later but, just as it’s shown in The Crown , she was relegated to a different Al-Fayed boat, where Dodi would visit her at night, Brown writes. Fisher soon caught on. In August, she sued Dodi for breach of contract, and was represented by high-profile lawyer Gloria Allred. But she withdrew the suit after his death.

In Spare , Harry remembered thinking Dodi was “cheeky” but overall was content with the relationship: “As long as Mummy’s happy, I told Willy, who said, he felt the same.” But Brown reported in her 2007 book that Prince William grew concerned. He told friends it was weird that they were on vacation with what seemed like a “substitute family.” When photos of Diana and Dodi on the boat were published, William complained to her that the boys at school would mock him for it.

After doing significant charity work in Bosnia with land mine victims, Diana reconvened with Dodi on the Jonikal in August. “The fact that she came back for a second visit so soon really shows her loneliness more than it does a passion for Dodi,” Dominick Dunne reported for Vanity Fair in 2008. But the privacy—or whatever amount of it that they had—might have appealed to her. “A splendid yacht. A helicopter. A private plane. Guards to keep the paparazzi at bay. She probably knew that she was being used by a social climber for his and his son’s advancement in London society, but in high society it was a fair deal. Each benefited.”

Dodi and Diana’s romance would be short-lived, but he showered her with gifts during their six-week relationship, including a pearl bracelet and diamond wristwatch, according to Vanity Fair . With him, the princess felt “so taken care of,” her confidant Lady Elsa Bowker told Brown. And on top of that, he was a “sympathetic, unthreatening listener,” wrote Tom Bower, author of Mohamed Al-Fayed’s unauthorized biography.

But their relationship probably wasn’t going to be a lasting one. According to Brown, Diana suspected Dodi might propose to her, but told a friend that the ring would go “firmly on the fourth finger of my right hand,” meaning she would not have accepted. Her sister Sarah McCorquodale later testified, “I just did not think the relationship had much longer to go.”

It’s been believed that the romance was even orchestrated by Mohamed himself. According to Bower, the older Al-Fayed would check in on Dodi and Diana during the trip (which is also portrayed in The Crown this season). McCorquodale also told the court that Diana “thought the boat was being bugged by Mr Al-Fayed Senior.”

On that second trip in August, Diana and Dodi were photographed together in the South of France and Sardinia, before heading to Paris for their tragic final days. There, they would be chased by cameras again for the last time.

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The Harrowing Symbolism Behind the Famous Diving Board Photo of Princess Diana

By Elise Taylor

On October 9, Netflix announced the first half of the sixth season of The Crown on Twitter by sharing a single image: Elizabeth Debicki, sitting on a diving board in a turquoise swimsuit, with her back to the camera as she stares out into the sea. With over 2.6 million views, it’s a visual that resonated with many—and not just because of the Netflix marketing department’s graphic design skills.

There are tens of thousands of photos of Princess Diana in existence. A handful of them, including the royal in front of the Taj Mahal and wearing the little black “revenge dress,” are considered iconic. There is, however, perhaps only one of those legendary images that could be considered harrowing.

On August 24, 1997—a week before her tragic death in Paris—paparazzi captured Princess Diana sitting on the diving board upon Mohamed Al Fayed’s private yacht “Jonikal” off the coast of Portofino. What was intended to be a private vacation quickly turned into a media circus after the British tabloids published her kissing Fayed’s son, Dodi, on board. Bids for those photos went up to £500,000. Although Diana always had a de-facto bounty on her head, it was now at an eye-watering and dangerous sum—especially as rumors that the Princess was pregnant, or engaged, began to swirl.

As a result, paparazzi swarmed her the entire trip, desperate to capture the Princess and her new love interest. One of those photos? Diana, solo, on a diving board. Even far off shore, she could be tracked down by a camera lens—and, therefore, never alone.

The Crown's Elizabeth Debicki in the poster for the show’s final season. 

Once she arrived in Paris, an accessible and busy metropolis, this clamor to take her photograph reached a fever pitch. On August 31, while being chased by paparazzi on motorbikes, the car Diana was being driven in by an intoxicated driver crashed in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. According to witness testimony, paparazzi continued to take photos as the couple lay dying.

Over two decades after her death, the haunting photo of her on the diving board is still seared into our consciousness: a symbol of  Diana’s glamor, her isolation, and the relentless pursuit of her likeliness. It was used for the 2013 poster of the biopic Diana, starring Naomi Watts, and inspired SZA’s cover art for her album SOS. “I just loved how isolated she felt, and that was what I wanted to convey the most,” the musician told Hot 97 . Now, Peter Morgan and The Crown are just the latest to have harnessed its emotional power.

While it’s unclear how much the photo will play a role in the upcoming season, the show will cover Diana’s final days—bringing the tragic story of the final weeks of Diana’s life front and center once again.

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The Crown: Five insights into the yachts featured in series six

On 16 November, the first volume of series six of The Crown was released on Netflix. Not only has it stirred up controversy regarding its depiction of recent historical events, but the series has also sparked the public's interest in the infamous yachts associated with the royal family's timeline.

The final instalment of The Crown features two ladies and two yachts, all of which are indelibly linked to Dodi Al-Fayed. It captures the simmering romance between Princess Diana and Dodi – a film producer and son of billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed – as well as Dodi's fiancée, Kelly Fisher. In the drama, the Princess of Wales is whisked away to the former Harrods owner's villa (and superyacht) in the south of France, where she enjoys a summer on the continent with sons Prince William and Prince Harry in 1997.

The series shows the group on what was Mohamed Al-Fayed's yacht, the 63.8-metre Codecasa which was known as Jonikal (later Bash, now Isabell Princess of the Seas ) . Understandably, with the People's Princess aboard, the yacht was heavily photographed by the paparazzi – leading to the creation of that iconic Princess Diana yacht photo. The camera also pans to a smaller yacht we can assume is the 20-metre Baglietto Cujo , a yacht the Al-Fayed's spent a lot of time on and which sadly sank earlier this year.

Wondering what happened to Jonikal ? If the series was filmed on the original boat? Where the set location was? BOAT answers all your yacht-related questions surrounding the latest series.

That Princess Diana yacht picture

There are many iconic images of Princess Diana – not least the shot of her in the "revenge dress" – but up there are the images of her sporting a range of low-backed swimsuits from her summer in St. Tropez. Perhaps the most memorable is Princess Diana sitting on the diving board of Jonikal. The series recreates the moment her photo was captured, legs swaying above the oscillating sea, toes pointed ballerina-esque. It also draws on her plea to the paparazzi to give her boys some privacy as she meets them mid-sea on her tender, stealing the show in her leopard-print swimsuit.

The whereabouts of Jonikal today

The yacht carries great significance knowing Dodi and Princess Diana were pictured there just weeks before their fatal car accident. It belonged to Dodi's father and, during the series, Princess Diana and Dodi are portrayed sharing intimate moments on board: her, looking up from the piano she is playing, doe-eyed; him, opening up about his engagement and the struggles with his father. There is also the scene where they have an ice cube fight between decks; the scene where Dodi's siblings and Princess Diana's children jump off the diving board; where the pair share what would've been an intimate kiss, had the photographer on his motor yacht not snapped it.

It was successful telecoms entrepreneur Bassim Haidar who later bought the yacht in 2021. The fact that it’s the former Jonikal is a source of pride for Haidar, who told BOAT : "I really loved Lady Diana. Whenever anyone comes on board I always show them where the famous picture was taken." The yacht was sold in August this year.

The yacht the series was filmed on, Titania 

The Crown was not filmed on Isabell Princess of the Seas (ex- Jonikal ), but rather on the 72-metre Lurssen superyacht Titania . The yacht, which was delivered in 2006, is owned by British businessman John Caudwell. Back in 2021, Caudwell commented on the news via his social media accounts, stating that he "cannot confirm or deny any filming secrets" but hinted that viewers should "keep your eyes peeled towards the end of season five and start of season six."

The refit in 2012 amped up her charter facilities – adding a second owner’s cabin on the upper deck, a gym on the sundeck and an extension to the stern to accommodate a beach club (which can be spotted in the series) with a full water park that floats off the stern.

The other yacht (and the other woman)

Jonikal is not the only yacht to have featured in The Crown series six, filmed in Mallorca. At one point, the camera also pans to another yacht the Al-Fayed's spent a lot of time on, the 20-metre Cujo. The drama shows Dodi's fiancée at the time, Fisher, getting escorted by tender past the yacht Dodi and Princess Diana are on ( Jonikal ), and instead shuttled away to what Fisher refers to as "the smaller yacht". 

In August this year, the real-life Cujo sunk around 35 kilometres off the coast of Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France.

Other yachts featured in the series

Christina O had 122-metre shoes to fill in season five, playing Alexander – the converted cruise ship where Princess Diana and Charles celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary . Delivered in 1965 by German shipyard Lubecker Flender Werke , the superyacht hosted the royals and their sons princes William and Harry a year before the couple separated.

A replica of the Royal Yacht Britannia also starred in the fifth Netflix series. Britannia was used as Queen Elizabeth II’s royal yacht from 1954 to 1997, hosting up to 250 guests at a time while being operated by 21 officers and 250 crew from the Royal Navy. It was decommissioned as a cost-cutting measure by the UK government in 1997.

The second part of The Crown will premiere on Netflix from 14 December.

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The True Story Behind 'The Crown’s Infamous Kiss Photograph

Princess Diana became the most photographed woman in the world after "The Kiss."

Editor's note: The below contains spoilers for Season 6 of The Crown.

The Big Picture

• Princess Diana's life was constantly invaded by the paparazzi, who followed her every movement and turned her personal relationships into a public spectacle.
• Mario Brenna's photograph of Diana and Dodi Fayed sharing an intimate moment on a yacht sparked a frenzy in the press and fueled a relentless pursuit for their pictures.
• The paparazzi's obsession with capturing Diana's image ultimately contributed to her tragic death in a car crash, and "The Kiss" photograph played a significant role in these events.

Since the imminent rise of paparazzi culture during the 1990s, candid photographs of celebrities have always held a negative stigma, especially after the tragic death of Princess Diana ( Elizabeth Debicki ). Part 1 of The Crown 's final season, streaming on Netflix, has a major focus on the summer of 1997, when the recently divorced Princess of Wales became the prized jewel of a media frenzy. Without the personal security of the Royal Family, Diana was not afforded the kind of privacy she was given during her marriage to Prince Charles ( Dominic West ). Her every movement was followed through long-lens cameras ( Diana reportedly yelled at a photographer outside a movie theater in London and shouted, “You make my life hell!" ), and the press made her life into a scrutinized fishbowl — even her personal relationships were not her own.

Episode 2, "Two Photographs," revisits the paparazzi's ruthless pursuit of Princess Diana's picture. The start of the show introduces the audience to a real-life character who was responsible for capturing the infamous Sunday Mirror photograph, Italian paparazzo Mario Brenna . The photograph shows "Di" and Dodi Fayed ( Khalid Abdalla ) sharing an intimate moment aboard a yacht on the Mediterranean Sea. Although the latest season of The Crown is a dramatized account of these events , it's no secret that Brenna's successful photograph is shown to have preluded Diana's deathly car chase less than a month later. But there's so much more to the story behind "The Kiss."

Follows the political rivalries and romance of Queen Elizabeth II's reign and the events that shaped the second half of the 20th century.

What's the Truth Behind Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed's Romance?

On July 11, 1997, Diana and her sons, Prince William ( Rufus Kampas ) and Prince Harry ( Fflyn Edwards ), were kindly invited to join Mohamed Al-Fayed ( Salim Daw ), the business owner of Hôtel Ritz Paris and Harrods department store, at his Saint Tropez villa for a summer vacation. Dodi Fayed unexpectedly joined the party aboard Al-Fayed's yacht t he Jonikal, which becomes an integral character of its own seen in the final season of The Crown . Di, Dodi, and the Princes were said to have enjoyed a splendid time aboard the yacht, and Diana and Dodi grew fond of one another during this period.

According to Netflix's Beneath The Crown: The True Story of Diana and Dodi's Last Summer , both Princess Diana and Dodi were involved with other romantic partners before they met. Diana was reportedly dating heart surgeon Hasnat Khan ( Humayun Saeed ), whom she often referred to as "Mr. Wonderful," and clearly had big plans for their future . In the summer of 1997, Dr. Khan was rumored to have broken up with the Princess because of the consistent media attention surrounding them. On the other hand, Dodi, being a successful film producer , had a reputation as a playboy and was seen dating multiple A-list women over the course of his Hollywood career, including actress Brooke Shields, before meeting model Kelly Fisher, whom he was engaged to at the time he met the Princess of Wales.

After the vacation, Diana returned home to an apartment full of roses and an $11,000 gold Cartier watch as a present from Dodi. Diana's friends believe she developed an interest in dating Dodi to make Dr. Khan jealous . Just 11 days later, the Princess returned alone to the Jonikal and embarked on a week-long trip with Al-Fayed's son. The media went crazy, with rumors spreading of a possible romance. Most of the press coverage was heavily negative, which sparked numerous amounts of controversy around the pair. Photographers rose in numbers as the couple's relationship grew truer every day. Per Beneath The Crown , it surfaced that Mohamed Al-Fayed asked renowned publicist Max Clifford to positively endorse their relationship. Photographers were then tipped off to find Diana and Dodi's location, and on August 10, Mario Brenna found them first.

How Did Mario Brenna's "The Kiss" Change Princess Diana's Life Forever?

Per The Independent , Mario Brenna was an official photographer for the Versace fashion house who lived in Monaco in 1997. Brenna happened to discover the yacht on an inflatable boat off of the Sardinian coast (He claims he spent occasional summers around the Mediterranean Sea to catch celebrities vacationing, as stated in the National Post .) He slowly approached the Jonikal when he thought he had seen a former acquaintance. To his shock, it was actually the "People's Princess" in the arms of Dodi Fayed. Captured from 500 yards away, Brenna hurriedly snapped photos of the couple "kissing" onboard and flew straight to London to show fellow celebrity photographer Jason Fraser the historic images.

Brenna recounts finding the couple that day as a “great stroke of luck." Despite the summer haze, the photograph sparked a chaotic bidding war between major publishing companies. Brenna ultimately sold "The Kiss" to the Sunday Mirror for £250,000 . The Sun and The Daily additionally paid him £100,000 each. Fraser, who helped in negotiating the deals, sold the rights internationally, which brought their earnings to over $2.1 million in global sales.

Following Brenna's phenomenon, "The Kiss" fueled an all-out paparazzi hunt for Princess Diana and Dodi's picture. Everywhere they traveled, the paparazzi hounded the couple, with no respect for their privacy. If Brenna could make a fortune out of one photo, other photographers had a chance to do the same. Diana participated in several humanitarian works following the picture, including becoming an advocate for landmine removals in developing countries. However, her efforts were regularly overlooked by her affair with Dodi. The couple also received racist backlash after "The Kiss," with most comments disapproving of Dodi's ethnicity as depicted in The Crown .

Swarms of press, even helicopters, surrounded the yacht in which Dodi and Diana often stayed. As stated in Beneath The Crown, Dodi had encouraged Diana to dabble in Hollywood acting, with talks to co-star alongside Kevin Costner in a sequel to the box-office hit The Bodyguard . These dreams would never come to fruition. On August 31, 1997, Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed were declared dead following a car crash through a tunnel at Place de l’Alma in Paris, France . There are countless conspiracies revolving around their deaths, but it was undeniable that their car was mercilessly tailed by a pack of paparazzi who wanted to snap the couple's picture. Mario Brenna confesses to The New York Times that he couldn't help but think "The Kiss" triggered the horrifying events that led to the death of Princess Diana: "If it hadn’t been me, someone else would certainly have captured those images."

What Does 'The Crown' Get Right and Wrong About "The Kiss"?

The Crown is no stranger to negative criticism when it comes to dramatizing the lives of the Royal Family. Aside from a few historical flaws, Episode 2, "Two Photographs", surprisingly does an adequate job of re-imagining the events that made Princess Diana one of the most photographed persons of all time. What the show changes is Prince Charles's reaction to seeing the picture in the Sunday Mirror. The episode depicts Charles hiring Scottish photographer Duncan Muir, a fictionalized character, to take pictures of him with William and Harry as a ploy to outshine the publicity from Diana's controversial photo. It is later revealed that the Scotland photoshoot dominated the front pages of The Mirror and The Daily Record, but this didn't happen.

According to Business Insider , on August 12, 1997, the young Princes and their father participated in a photo shoot at the royals' annual vacation at Balmoral. A handful of photographers snapped the photos, not one, and the images were featured only on pages eight, nine, and five of the respective newspapers. The failed Scotland pics were still overshadowed by the public's fascination with "The Kiss," and the press made rather unfavorable remarks with subheadings like: "Young princes look embarrassed by dad's Harry Lauder image."

"Two Photographs" also mixes up some facts regarding how Dodi started courting the "People's Princess." In the show, Mohamed Al-Fayed acts as a matchmaker for the couple, endlessly pressuring Dodi to flirt with the Princess in order to prove he is worthy of inheriting his father's wealth. Dodi seems stressed about making a connection with Diana during her vacation onboard the yacht as he is engaged to Kelly Fisher (a fact that is accurate). When the couple does become more intimate, The Crown implies that Al-Fayed tipped off Mario Brenna as to their whereabouts, but Brenna claimed the misconception that Al-Fayed hired him to take "The Kiss" was "absurd and completely invented."

What the final season does right in Part 1 is the portrayal of Diana and Dodi's romantic affair and the paparazzi's relentless invasion of their private lives. Di and Dodi briefly dated for a little over a month, and their relationship was always under the microscope. As shown in The Crown , the pair did develop fond feelings for one another, and a rumored engagement as well, but the press could only imagine what their true relationship entailed. History has proven that Diana was nothing but a cash grab to the paparazzi who sought her out only in hopes of making a fortune overnight. Once she and Dodi became the eye of the world, the media never respected her space, time, or family when it came to capturing "the shot." The Crown ultimately does not sugarcoat the brutal paparazzi culture that led to Princess Diana's final moments .

Per the National Post, Brenna admitted that The Crown never made an effort to contact him about the true story of how he captured "The Kiss" or his feelings following the doomed aftermath. Furthermore, he told the Times he does not agree with how he or the paparazzi are represented in the final season. "Two Photographs," despite its blemishes, urges fans to acknowledge the prestigious drama as a fictionalized chronicle and acts as a time machine to reflect on the unfortunate events that shocked the world into a bitter period of grief. If "The Kiss" was never captured, would the "People's Princess" still be here today?

The Crown is available to stream exclusively on Netflix in the U.S.

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How 'The Crown' Star Elizabeth Debicki Recreated Princess Diana's Infamous Yacht Photos (Exclusive)

The images of Princess Diana reportedly sold for £500,000 a week before the car crash that took her life.

For The Crown hair and makeup designers, excellence lies in accuracy. The award-winning team spoke to ET about Elizabeth Debicki 's transformation to become the beloved Princess Diana , most notably for scenes that recreated now-infamous paparazzi photos. 

"When you’re trying to do real-life transformations, you really rely on somebody’s very recognizable silhouette," Cate Hall, The Crown 's hair and makeup designer, told ET. "So even if it's Elizabeth Debicki’s face, you put the wig on and it's the right shape and it says 'I am Diana.' And that in combination with her performance and voice and costume does the job." 

First look images for The Crown season 6 tease a recreation of infamous paparazzi photos of the late Princess of Wales in a blue bathing suit at the end of a diving board, which, per Vogue , sold to tabloids for £500,000 just a week before the devastating car crash that took her life. 

Hall and her team spent long hours perfecting Debicki's wig for shots like these. "We probably had at least four, four-hour fittings before we were even close to going, 'OK, this is what we're going to do,'" Hall said. She added that Debicki also dyed her eyebrows for the look, and stuck to a strict schedule of spray tans, nail routines and daily hair and makeup changes. 

She continued, "In terms of fittings, I would say she's probably spent upwards of 30 hours in the hair and makeup chair while we do stuff." 

Debicki took over the iconic Diana role in  The Crown 's fifth season, after  Emma Corrin  played the princess' early years in season 4. In the first part of this week's season 6, Debicki will portray Diana's final days, including the devastating car crash that took her life. 

"An immense, immense responsibility," Debicki told ET last week on how the cast and crew approached the princess' death. "It's difficult to describe, it was something that we thought about, that we carried with us, that woke us up in the night." 

Debicki continued, "We tried our very best to do [the story] properly." 

Dominic West will return as Prince Charles in season 6, with Olivia Williams as Camilla Parker-Bowles. Khalid Abdalla is back at Dodi Fayed, and Salim Daw will return to play his father, Mohamed Al Fayed. Imelda Staunton plays the queen, Lesley Manville plays Princess Margaret and Jonathan Pryce plays Prince Philip. 

Season 6 of  The Crown: Part 1  is now streaming on Netflix.  Part 2  will release Dec. 14. 

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Princess Diana Paparazzo Fights Back at The Crown: “Absurd and Completely Invented”

By Chris Murphy

Mario Brenna, the Italian photographer who made a small fortune after snapping photos of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed embracing on a yacht, says the final season of The Crown gets it all wrong. In what Brenna says is his first English-language newspaper interview, the paparazzo tells The New York Times via email that The Crown ’s depiction of how he captured Diana and Dodi is “absurd and completely invented.” 

Episode two of The Crown season six, “Two Photographs,” follows the lengths to which Brenna (played by Enzo Cilenti ) went to capture the money shot of Diana ( Elizabeth Debicki ) and Dodi ( Khalid Abdalla ) yachting in the Mediterranean in the summer of 1997. As The Crown depicts it, Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al Fayed ( Salim Daw ), seemingly arranged for Brenna to take the photos of Princess Diana and Dodi on his yacht, the Jonikal, in the hopes that Brenna’s photographs of the couple would push their nascent relationship into the public eye. According to The Crown ’s head researcher, Annie Sulzberger —sister of Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger —“there are a few theories about how Brenna managed to find the Jonikal moored somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea,” and the Netflix series decided that the “most credible” explanation was that one of Mohamed’s employees leaked the location of the boat to Brenna.

But according to Brenna, The Crown ’s version of events is completely false. Brenna claims that he spent every summer in Sardinia, where the Jonikal was moored, and that he simply came across Diana and Dodi in a “great stroke of luck.” Per his account, Brenna approached the Jonikal on August 1, 1997, thinking that Diana was an acquaintance of his before realizing that she was, in fact, the People’s Princess.

Over the next few days, Brenna says, he worked tirelessly to take what he calls the “historic photo,” eventually scaling a cliff about 400 meters from the yacht to get the best angle. From there, he was able to capture Princess Diana and Dodi in a private moment.

With the help of his agent at the time, Brenna would sell those photos for about 1.7 million British pounds, or $2.1 million. At the time, Brenna was “not swimming in wealth” due to a recent divorce, he says, and the photos of Diana and Dodi “solved my personal and family problems.” 

The photos substantially changed Diana’s and Dodi’s lives as well. After one of Brenna’s photos was plastered on the front page of the Sunday Mirror, more than 2,000 photographers flooded Sardinia in the hopes of capturing similar shots. Part one of The Crown ’s final season captures the media frenzy surrounding Diana and Dodi, which ultimately contributed to the fatal car crash that killed them both on August 31, 1997. 

Brenna also takes issue with The Crown ’s depiction of his character. The episode shows Cilenti’s Brenna saying that for paparazzi to be successful, they must act like “hunters…killers.” 

“I do not identify with the term ‘killer,’” Brenna tells the Times. He also says that he was not contacted by anyone involved in The Crown to discuss his experiences, despite playing a pivotal role on this season. (Netflix did not respond to the Times ’ request for comment.) A source previously told Vanity Fair that Prince Harry also was not consulted on this season; they added that he has no ill will toward the series or Netflix.

Brenna has some regrets about his unwitting role in Diana and Dodi’s fate, telling the Times that when the pair died, he “couldn’t believe it” and wept. The idea that his photos “could have contributed to fueling the hunt for Diana and Dodi obviously saddens me,” he says. Nevertheless, he pledged “not to speak or disclose anything about the incident until William and Harry reached adulthood.” Ultimately, he stands by the photos and his right to have taken them as a member of the free press. “There is still the right to report,” he says. “If it hadn’t been me, someone else would certainly have captured those images.”

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How The Crown Recreated the Iconic Princess Diana Diving Board Photo

Spoiler alert: It wasn't actually a diving board she was sitting on.

"It's the platform you [use to] get on and off the yacht," reveals Alison Harvey, The Crown 's series set director. Or the passerelle, as it is more commonly known in the boating world.

Nevertheless, it was that haunting image, which would later send shockwaves around the world following Diana's passing, that was poignantly chosen as the main poster of the sixth and final season of The Crown . And according to the show's production team, recreating the photo took a village.

"We were very lucky to go to a real superyacht. I think if we tried to do it from scratch we would have never made that," Harvey says of remaking Mohamed Al Fayed 's 208-ft yacht, Jonikal, for the series. "We had the bones of the set that we then enhanced with more period details to make it feel more like the Fayed's world."

The result: the interior of the yacht featured a blue and yellow motif with Egyptian art, paintings, fabrics and patterns from the '90s. "Everything [was] stylized to fit the Fayed world to counteract with The Queen's world, which is a much more dreary environment," continues Harvey. "It was that old money, new money [kind of thing]."

Getting Elizabeth Debicki , who plays Diana in the series, to look exactly like the Princess of Wales in that moment also required some reimagining. "There were some restrictions in term of copyright and what we could show, what we couldn't show, and how the picture was taken," explains Harvey, "so it was slightly adapted for our purposes."

For starters, the hair and makeup department were tasked with making a wig that looked like Diana's hair post-swim. "The challenge was really this thing of realizing that iconic Diana but without being able to fall back on her very manufactured hair and makeup that we're used to seeing in the media," Cate Hall, hair & makeup designer of The Crown , explains. "Obviously [Elizabeth's wearing] a wig, but it's about if you look at the shading, the color, the tone and the way it's sitting. Most of our efforts go into any which way we can into making [wigs] look natural and I think it does look natural and lived in."

Then the costume department had to recreate the turquoise bathing suit to look identical to the one Diana wore in real life. "We didn't get the [actual] designer to do it," says Sidonie Roberts, The Crown 's co-costume designer, "so it was our version of it."

While "it was relatively simple" to do so, "the question with us with Elizabeth was what does she feel comfortable in? Because '90s to 2000s swimwear is pretty high on the thigh," says Roberts. "That I think was our first fitting with her, so it was getting a balance between the actual shape and also what Elizabeth, as an actress would feel comfortable, being quite exposed, in this scene. But in terms of color, we just went similarly as the other one because it is a moment in itself and we wanted to keep that iconic moment as it was."

In the days that followed that photo, Princess Diana and Dodi traveled to Paris, where they died in car crash on August 31 . Diana was 36 and Dodi 42. The first part of The Crown, which is available to stream on Netflix now , follows the weeks leading up to and after their death. The rest of the season is set to hit the streaming platform Thursday, December 14.

Sophie Dweck is the associate shopping editor for Town & Country, where she covers beauty, fashion, home and décor, and more. 

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“The Crown” has never shied away from tackling the British Royal family’s most memorable moments — and gorgeous fashion.

The Netflix series’ upcoming sixth and final season will hit the streamer in two parts.

The first four episodes of the concluding season will air on Nov. 16 and the remaining batch will debut on Dec. 14.

Princess Diana’s tragic death is at the forefront of “The Crown” Season 6, as seen in its trailer and so are many of her iconic fashion moments that made headlines just months before her shocking death.

The last segment will take viewers into the modern era of the British royal family, beginning with Diana’s passing in 1997 and ending in the mid-2000s.

But until then, let’s look back at the series’ most memorable Princess Diana fashion moments

Cheetah swimsuit 1990 & 1997

Elizabeth Debicki donned a replica of Princess Diana’s leopard-print one-piece bathing suit.

Diana wore the look in 1997 during a summer trip to the French Riviera with her then-boyfriend Dodi Fayed, who was also tragically killed just a month later in the Paris car crash.

This swimsuit should not be confused with a similar one Debicki wore in Season 5 when reenacting the vacation Diana took to the British Virgin Islands in April 1990 with sons Prince Willam and Prince Harry, as well as other members of the royal family.

Diving board picture

Season 6 of “The Crown” will also see Debicki recreate Princess Diana’s famous diving board photo taken just one week before her death in Portofino, Italy, in 1997.

In the well-known photos, Di sits at the end of a diving board under a large body of water in a light blue one-piece bathing suit.

The photos were taken when Diana was dating Dodi Fayed and staying on his family yacht.

Historic landmine walk

Netflix released the first look at Debicki recreating Princess Diana’s famed landmine walk in October.

The scene will be included in Season 6 of the series and shows Debicki in a nearly-exact replica of Diana’s gold earrings, swept blonde hair, protective face mask, and a white collared shirt.

The real historic landmine walk in Africa happened just months before the Princess of Wales tragically died on August 31, 1997.

Her final public engagement in red dress 

“The Crown” recreated the red-belted shift dress that Princess Diana wore for her last public engagement at the Northwick Park & St. Mark’s Hospital on July 21, 1997, for its upcoming Season 6.

The dress was designed by one of the princess’ closest creative friends, Catherine Walker.

Floral dress at 1988 polo match

Debicki wore a floral dress in the first episode of Season 5 similar to the ones that the real Diana wore in the ’80s and ’90s.

The episode took place in 1991 as Dianna and then-Prince Charles explored Italy on a yacht with their sons Prince William and Prince Harry.

The outfit could have been inspired by the blue floral dress Diana wore to a polo match in 1988.

Princess Diana wore at Balmoral Castle in real life

In that same episode, Debicki wears a white ball gown and tartan sash when Diana attends the Ghillies Ball at Balmoral Castle.

There were no photos of the real Diana at the event ever released to the public, video of the event shows Princess Di seemingly wearing something similar to what is depicted in the series.

“Revenge dress”

Perhaps the most notorious Princess Diana fashion statement was the little black “revenge dress” she wore to the Serpentine Gallery in 1994.

Princess Diana wore the shoulder baring number the same night that Prince Charles confessed on national television that he had been unfaithful during their marriage.

“The Crown” tackled this look in Season 5, Episode 5 with Debicki’s replicated dress and jewelry looking just as stunning as the real thing.

“Panorama” interview

“The Crown” Season 5 recreated Princess Diana’s infamous interview with disgraced BBC journalist Martin Bashir.

Debicki looked just like the late Princess of Wales in a nearly identical blazer and skirt that Diana wore for the event.

Engagement announcement

Emma Corrin only portrayed Princess Diana on “The Crown” for Season 4 but got to recreate Di’s iconic engagement outfit that she wore when she and then-Prince Charles announced their engagement on the grounds of Buckingham Palace.

The blue skirt-suit was bought off-the-rack at Harrods ahead of the February 24,1981 announcement.

The Cojana suit’s gorgeous sapphire hue tone went perfectly with Lady Spencer’s sapphire and diamond engagement ring.

Diana’s wedding dress

“The Crown” costume designer Amy Roberts decided to “ have fun with the replica rather than obsessing over the details” of Princess Diana’s wedding dress in Season 4 of the show.

The show paid tribute to the puffy sleeves and pearly hue of the real dress while not recreating it stitch by stitch.

Designed by former husband-and-wife duo Elizabeth and David Emanuel, the real dress, according to Daily Mirror , featured 75 feet of silk taffeta, 300 feet of tulle crinoline and 450 feet of netting for the veil.

Casual pink ensemble

Princess Diana’s fashion sense was iconic even when she was just lounging around at home.

Photos of her in a pink sweater and pink checkered pants at Highgrove House in Doughton, Gloucestershire in July 1986 were recreated in Season 4 of “The Crown.”

Actress Emma Corrin donned the outfit while roller skating around her home in the series.

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Here Are The Real Photos Of Diana On Vacation That Inspired Those Scenes In The Crown

The Princess of Wales did indeed have a little chat with paparazzi on a boat.

The sixth and final season of The Crown got off to an emotional start by depicting Princess Diana’s final weeks before her death in August 1997. At the time, Princess Diana was newly dating Dodi Fayed, son of Harrod’s owner Mohamed Al-Fayed and famously spent time on Al-Fayed’s yacht in the south of France that summer with 12-year-old Prince Harry and 15-year-old Prince William. She was being constantly followed by the paparazzi, and is seen confronting photographers in The Crown in an effort to get them to leave her sons alone so they could enjoy their holiday. Which, according to photos taken of the princess at the time, appears to be at least somewhat based on a real event.

Season 6, Part 1 of The Crown saw Princess Diana (played by Elizabeth Debicki) vacationing off the coast of Saint-Tropez with her sons, Prince Harry and Prince William (played by Fflyn Edwards and Rufus Kampa, respectively), on Al-Fayed’s yacht. If The Crown is to be believed, Prince William in particular was struggling to have a good time on his holiday because of the constant presence of the paparazzi. And so, Princess Diana decided to throw on a swimsuit and jet over to the photographers to pose for some shots in an effort to get them to leave.

The Crown’s version...

“Enjoying your holiday?” a member of the paparazzi asks Princess Diana in The Crown when she is seen approaching them on a boat, and she replies. “Yes, we’re having a lovely time, apart from one little thing, you lot. Seriously, how long are we going to have the pleasure of your company? The attention is starting to freak out the boys.”

She offered the paparazzi a “surprise” if they would leave her sons alone as they snapped photos of her. And while we don’t know if the real Princess Diana offered them a surprise, she absolutely did confront them that summer.

How it looked in real life...

A year after Princess Diana’s death in a car crash in Paris, journalist and biographer Sally Bedell Smith wrote about the royal’s relationship with the paparazzi for Vanity Fair — in particular, that fateful summer in the south of France. “On a holiday in July 1997 with her boyfriend Dodi Fayed and his family in Saint-Tropez,” Bedell Smith wrote at the time, “she first eluded paparazzi by crawling along a balcony and hiding behind a towel, then surprised a contingent of British tabloid reporters and photographers ... by addressing them from her motorboat in a fetching leopard-print bathing suit. ‘You will have a big surprise coming soon, the next thing I do,’ she teased, and implied that she was thinking of living abroad.”

This wasn’t the only moment that the Netflix series recreated from Princess Diana’s holiday that last summer. Princess Diana was also seen in a super colorful swim suit, hanging out on the beach with her sons. A scene The Crown pulled off perfectly.

In real life, most of the photos from that moment were taken with Princess Diana spending time with her sons on the yacht, even wrapping her son Prince Harry up in a big hug while wearing the iconic swimsuit.

Princess Diana was also photographed sitting on the diving board of Al-Fayed’s yacht, all alone in a bright blue bathing suit. Looking, some might say, quite lonely.

Like the series showed, Princess Diana in 1997 was also seen wearing a bright blue one-piece swimsuit, staring off into space.

While The Crown has certainly done an impeccable job of recreating real-life photos of moments from the lives of royals, it’s important to remember that these are dramatized and fictionalized versions of real events. No matter how spot-on they might look to us.

This article was originally published on November 20, 2023

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‘A Photo Can Destroy a Life’

How the crown re-created the images of diana’s final days within the constraints of taste, decency, and copyright..

The first four episodes of The Crown ’s final season may as well be called The Di Summer Collection. Most of the action parts ways with the Thames in favor of the sunnier Mediterranean Sea during the summer of 1997, with Diana (Elizabeth Debecki) and Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla) kindling a romance that culminates in their tragic deaths in Paris after being chased through a tunnel by the paparazzi. (They also return as ghosts for some reason .) Re-creating the final days of the People’s Princess was an exercise in both visual accuracy and creative liberty: While the tabloid images of her that proliferated at the time provided ample starting points, “we’re not making a documentary,” says set designer Alison Harvey. “You have to make it your own.”

That meant looking at some of the most famous images from Diana’s final summer and not only re-creating them in a way that would be instantly familiar to viewers, but also finding deeper emotional truths within the two-dimensional images. The season kicks off with Diana taking her sons on a yachting holiday in Saint-Tropez at the invitation of Mohamed Al-Fayed, who’s looking to set up the princess with his son Dodi. The series explores the couple’s burgeoning intimacy in scenes that directly parallel those famous paparazzi photos, which proved difficult to shoot on the water at times. However, everything that made the final cut exemplified The Crown ’s clear grammar of the way it films each of its royals — with some added irony thrown in. “For Diana’s scenes, it was so chaotic to shoot. You have about 15 boats and people are throwing up because they have to stay out there for hours until we get the shot,” director Alex Gabassi explains. “Then, with Camilla, you have those nice crane shots and everything is smooth. For me, that says it all.”

Diana’s paparazzi sea showdown

“Most of our conversations throughout this episode had to do with how much we wanted to portray her as a mother,” explains Gabassi, who directed episode one. “We knew it would be very sparse when you see her with the kids. We needed to put as much of that love out there as possible.” This maternal behavior gave the iconic leopard swimsuit a deeper meaning. “We knew there was that particular photo of her,” he says. “But we’re always tempted to give as much ambiguity as possible.”

Gabassi and The Crown creator and writer Peter Morgan settled on showcasing Diana’s style as a parent, with the impetus of her emerging in the swimsuit being that her son William feels compelled to stay inside the yacht in order to avoid the swarm of cameras. “We needed to strike a balance between her taking care of the kids and sacrificing herself by going out with the swimsuit,” he says. “She was giving them what they needed in order to be left in peace.”

The other side of that, however, was the looming specter of competing with Camilla’s 50th birthday party in the press. “Diana couldn’t appear as being someone with that kind of narcissism who just wanted to win over Charles and Camilla’s attention by the press,” Gabassi notes. “We wanted to give a bit of that, but also a sense that she would come out as a mother figure in order to protect her children.”

Gabassi’s read of the scene brought forth a minor disagreement between the director and Debecki: “I remember asking Elizabeth, ‘Could you pose a little bit at the end of the scene?’ And she said, ‘Do you think it’s right? I’m not sure about that.’ I responded, ‘There’s something incredibly attractive and yet dangerous in the way that you’re given all that attention.’ When she goes in and she knows these guys, she talks to them and calls them by their names and there’s a kind of camaraderie. You think to yourself, Oh, they might be friends. These guys are quite nice. At that moment, I think Diana was enticed by the idea of playing a figure that everybody loves.”

Gabassi ensured this was followed through in the post-mixing sessions with Morgan, when one paparazzo verbalizes to his peers to wrap it up and depart in their boats. “The negotiation paid off,” Gabassi says. “She gave something, and they got something. The conversation was always about how much Diana knew how to play the paparazzi. It’s been clear that she knew how to do it, which is something Camilla doesn’t know how to do.”

While Gabassi was consumed with the paparazzi’s motives, Harvey was tasked with their equipment. The main problem? Procuring the vast amount of lenses required for each person, which on the vintage market can cost up to $20,000 each. (A quick scan of the scene estimates more than two dozen would’ve been required.) For cost reasons, Harvey decided to make them as props. “It was more prosaic,” she admits, “but it had to be done that way.” Costume designer Sid Roberts had a bit more fun re-creating Diana’s leopard look. “The swimsuit is the new ball gown,” she says. Her team got in touch with Gottex, the Israeli company that made several of Diana’s swimsuits that summer — including the leopard one — and they agreed to collaborate on this season of The Crown . “Its leopard print leans into Diana’s animalistic strengths. It plays up to a safari,” Roberts explains. “I love that the swimsuit was for this moment because she’s in the wild, if you like, and she’s literally being hunted by photographers.”

Camilla’s 50th birthday party

While Diana is enjoying her sun-kissed summer, Camilla and Charles are back home in dreary old England to celebrate Camilla’s 50th birthday with an elegant soiree. Gabassi was forced to film on a “terrible and disastrously rainy day,” a weather pattern that helped inform the ease of their love.

“The first scene I did with Camilla was looking through the window down to Charles preparing the party,” he says. “I told Olivia Williams, ‘What can we do here that implies the connection is deeper now and she’s being accepted by him?’ I put her in the bedroom, waking up and coming out of bed. That wasn’t scripted. She’s in her nightgown and she’s being embraced by Charles. She’s part of that household.” The bookend of this scene comes from the speech Charles gives to Camilla later on at the party, which needed to come off as sincere as possible. “Camilla had been that kind of person,” Gabassi notes, “resilient and facing so much adversity, but she’s still there.”

And, yes, there’s a reason the only member of the royal family at Camilla’s birthday party is Margaret, and it’s not factual accuracy. (There’s no record of her being in attendance at the time.) “It echoes what she’s suffered and she could never achieve with true love. It was important for the audience to understand that this is a very steady relationship,” Gabassi says. “It’s interesting to see that being seen through the eyes of Margaret, who had gone through both stages — a crazy chaotic relationship and then someone who accepted her but still wasn’t quite right.”

Diana and Dodi’s kiss

As with Diana boating to the paparazzi to defend her boys, this was another instance of The Crown re-creating a moment and giving it additional narrative context. In the show, the image, which featured the couple kissing and embracing on the yacht, is set in motion by the couple having a heartfelt conversation about Diana’s priorities in life.

“It’s intimate, but there’s a sexiness and an affection between the two,” says Christian Schwochow, who directed episodes two through four. “They talk about something that really matters for Diana, which is the landmine charity. I think it’s a great idea to have one of the most beautiful moments in their relationship be about how much he cares about her and how much she cares for the charity work. When we actually see her doing the charity work later in the episode, it gets destroyed by the journalists because of this photo.”

Unlike with the leopard-print swimsuit shots, though, Diana’s pink floral ensemble is one of the less iconic aspects of these photos. That was freeing for Roberts, who was given free rein in remaking the swimsuit, which wasn’t a Gottex creation. “It was our time to play. I closed my eyes and thought, What do you remember about that swimsuit? What’s the essence? It’s a pink hue and there’s a real vibrancy,” she says. “This is her second holiday with Dodi, so they’re flirting. There has to be a kind of sexiness to all the stuff she wears.” Roberts created eight versions before she felt she properly translated the original in terms of the colors and scale of the flowers.

The story of this photo includes a third major character besides Diana and Dodi: the photographer who captured the kiss, Mario Brenna, who stated in a recent New York Times interview that his portrayal is inaccurate. While The Crown shows him being hired by Mohamed al-Fayed, Brenna claims he fortuitously encountered the yacht while on vacation. Regardless, the photo and its reported cost of sale ($2.1 million) encompass Diana’s deteriorating relationship with the paparazzi. “I hope viewers get a sense that a photo can destroy a person’s life,” Schwochow says.

Diana’s yachtside contemplation

The final scene of episode two features the most prevalent image of Diana’s time in the sun: the princess sitting, deep in thought, on the side of the Fayed superyacht. (Despite the appearance of a diving board, the plank is, in fact, a landing jetty.) “Everything that’s known as an image we tried to re-create as faithfully as we could within the constraints of taste, decency, and copyright,” set designer Alison Harvey says. For Schwochow, that meant capturing the “emotional truth” of the moment and Diana’s summer fling with Dodi — which at this point in the series had been going on for just over one week. “We feel that Diana is incredibly restless,” he explains. “There’s happiness, but there’s also quite a messiness in her life. We used this moment to create this forlornness and melancholy.”

Schwochow worked with Debicki for several hours to find “different physical positions” to best match the scene. While he filmed a few shots of paparazzi taking photos of Diana on the jetty, he ultimately didn’t use them in order to enhance the moment’s vulnerability. “There’s no magic trick to re-creating it — it’s just the actress and me,” he says. “The first shot on the boat behind her with the camera took an hour. Then some of the crew had to jump on a small tender, get to the shore, and get settled there with the boat’s captain. It takes a lot of time to find the perfect position off the boat to have the best sunlight.”

The other element of the shot that absolutely had to be correct was Diana’s blue swimsuit, which Roberts considers to be her third defining Crown silhouette, after the wedding dress and the revenge dress from earlier seasons. “I love the trajectory of those three silhouettes because it’s like the chrysalis of a butterfly,” she says. “We knew we had to do the blue swimsuit since the moment was so iconic and has the same significance in our story.” Roberts’s main priority in re-creating the swimsuit was capturing the color “because it’s this beautiful block of blue amongst her and the seas.” However, she also had to consider Debicki’s tall frame. “It’s vulnerable for an actor to go out on a diving board in just a swimsuit,” she adds. “The ’90s was very unforgiving in how high it was cut on the thigh and the hip. A lot of that for us was working out where Elizabeth would be comfortable.”

Diana and Dodi leave the Ritz

For Schwochow, the season’s defining tragedy begins in the anteroom before Diana and Dodi leave the hotel — which is possible to depict thanks to ample CCTV footage . “What’s interesting about the footage is you could see that they were laughing together. We saw Dodi gently touching her back and giving her comfort,” Schwochow notes. “We felt like they’re very much at ease and she feels very comfortable in his presence. That’s why we improvised on that night. We can’t hear what they say in the original footage, but it felt like they had this little moment of ‘Oh my God, what are we doing? Where have we ended up being together?’”

“This was a look I felt duty-bound to get accurate, so that the tragedy and sensitivity of the scene wouldn’t be interfered with,” Roberts explains, citing Diana’s Ritz look as the most difficult to re-create this season. The shoes and blazer were specially made for The Crown, while the jeans and top were contemporary Max Mara pieces with a ’90s-era aesthetic. The costume department purchased three of each item, just in case: “If it was just right, then it would almost all fall away into the background.”

One thing that would never be shown, however, was the crash itself. While Schwochow was keen on capturing Diana looking through the car’s rear window for the “visual truth” of the last photograph taken of her alive, once the car began its drive into the tunnel, imagery of any kind was off limits.

“We tried to create the scene like we thought it must have felt for them, looking back at the photographs,” Schwochow says. “That was a very early conversation we all had, to always be as respectful as possible. There was never a moment of the crash in the script. It wasn’t up for discussion. We also decided very early that we didn’t want to see the wreckage of the car.” Showing Diana’s dead body, either in the tunnel or at the hospital, was promptly rejected. “ The Crown treats the royal family always with a lot of respect. We didn’t want to be sensational because the story is about how the media was part of her death,” he adds. “I’m not saying the press was guilty, but they play a big role in all this because the world was hungry for these images of them.”

The funeral procession

To re-create the images of Philip, William, Charles Spencer, Harry, and Charles walking behind Diana’s casket at the public funeral ceremony (a moment Harry recalls being “torture” in his memoir, Spare ), the basic logistics of the gun carriage, coffin, flag, and letter to “Mummy” were easy enough for Harvey to procure, but the sheer amount of flowers proved overwhelming. “We kept buying flowers,” she recounts. “When Diana died, I was actually there doing a job outside of Buckingham Palace. The flowers were really, really staggering, and trying to re-create that would be impossible. We thought we’d be all right with 300 bouquets, but it just didn’t go anywhere and we needed more. Everyone was running around buying more and more flowers.” Harvey lost count of the final number.

Schwochow utilized CGI to approximately match the size of the crowd of mourners, which proved difficult with the simple act of walking — because of the green screens, the five actors had only a few dozen meters to walk before looping back and doing it all again. Rain also plagued the half-day shoot in London, in contrast to the sunnier weather of the actual day of Diana’s funeral. “You can see in some of the shots that it’s raining, and we couldn’t get rid of it,” he sighs. “That’s always a bit complicated to be in control of all the technical elements, but also to keep the actors in character and in their emotional words.”

William and Harry, in particular, had trouble covering the emotions they’d been trained to hide. “I have little Harry crying in the church where he has privacy, because there’s more of the family around him — no cameras, no photographers, no journalists,” Schwochow says. “I love the dialogue between Philip and William where he tells him, ‘Just concentrate on the act of walking. Don’t listen to the onlookers crying. Don’t listen to what they say.’ That’s the subtext: ‘Focus on the job because what we do here is part of our roles.’”

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See Inside the Superyacht Princess Diana Shared With Dodi Fayed

By Katherine McLaughlin

Since her untimely death in August of 1997, Princess Diana’s last summer spent with Dodi Al-Fayed has been described in various ways: a passionate love affair, a fake publicity stunt, a temporary fling, a rouse to infuriate another suiter, or the beginning of a lifelong commitment. Although the stories change, the setting remains: a summer tour through the Mediterranean aboard a multi-million dollar superyacht. Later this year, nearly 25 years to the day, the 208-foot vessel will launch for sale again. 

The yacht is full of glossy and dark wood paneling. 

Originally named Jonikal , then Sokar , and most recently Bash , the luxury vessel was first owned by Mohamed Al-Fayed, former owner of Harrods and father of Dodi Al-Fayed. During the fateful summer, Al-Fayed hosted Princess Di and her two sons aboard the Jonikal . After the couple’s tragic death, Mohamed Al-Fayed attempted to sell the yacht numerous times before it was finally bought in 2014. It was most recently purchased by Bassim Haidar in June of 2021, who is selling it just over a year later as he reportedly has plans to upgrade to a larger vessel. “She is in the yard being refitted, and will be launched for sale in September,” said John Wood, director at Seawood Yachts. 

Coffered ceilings add a dramatic, yet timeless feel. 

Bash , as the yacht is currently named, was designed by navel architect Vincenzo Ruggiero in the 1980s and built by the superyacht building firm Codecasa before launching in 1990. The vessel can hold up to 18 people across nine staterooms in addition to rooms for 26 crew members. Among many notable features, Bash includes a jacuzzi, swim platform, sun deck, a formal dining room, main saloon, a bar, and office space. Full of dark wood paneling and coffered ceilings, the interiors are reminiscent of the Arts and Crafts style of the early 1900s. 

The vessel includes nine staterooms in addition to plenty of space for the crew. 

Powered by Wärtsilä engines, the yacht has a cruising speed of 15 knots and top speeds of 20 knots. Even though an exact price hasn’t been advertised just yet, the last time the boat was sold, it was listed for $10,000,000. 

By Cindy Tannoury

By Nora Taylor

By María Noval-Quílez

This Old Photo of Princess Diana Is Going Viral—and the Reason Is Particularly Poignant

It's sort of staggering to realize we're approaching the 25th anniversary of Princess Diana's death on August 31, 1997. That may be the reason it caught us off guard when our social media feeds were suddenly populated with a striking—and poignant—image of Diana, snapped exactly one week before she passed away, following a car crash in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris.

The image shows Diana, sitting on a diving board attached to the edge of Mohamed Al Fayed's private yacht called the 'Jonikal' while on vacation with her new beau, Dodi Al Fayed, in the South of France.

Her feet are dangling over the edge as a lone seagull swoops overhead—the only sign of life around the Princess of Wales as she sits solo, taking in the view.

For royal watchers, many compared the image to another iconic shot where Diana was pictured looking contemplative and seated alone. In 1992, mere months before she and Prince Charles were to formally announce their separation, the pair traveled to India on a royal tour. But while Charles was away at another meeting, Diana appeared in front of the Taj Mahal—an eternal monument of a husband's love—all by herself.

Back to the Jonikal: What stands out about that shot, beyond the context of what was to come in a week's time, is Diana's serenity. She appears to have a look of inner calm. In those final days, had Diana, a woman tortured by the tabloids and pictured here in a rare moment of solitude—ironically, caught by a camera—found her bliss?

A picture is worth a thousand words, of course, and we'll never know what Diana was thinking out there on the diving board. What we do know is that she was fresh off a visit from her two sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, and approaching the one-year anniversary of her divorce from Prince Charles.

But that's what makes one of the final photos of the Princess of Wales so breathtaking and, ultimately, haunting. A brand-new future was before her and we—the royal voyeurs—can't help but feel contemplative as we stare at this shot. "What could have been?," we will forever wonder.

For more about the royals,  listen to the Royally Obsessed podcast  with co-hosts Rachel Bowie and Roberta Fiorito. Subscribe now or follow us on Instagram  @royallyobsessedpodcast .

The Trailer for HBO's "The Princess," a Doc About Princess Diana's Public Life, Just Dropped (& It's Giving Us Chills)

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Princess Diana’s Friend Shared a Rare Photo of Her Vacationing on a Yacht

Princess Diana's friend, Valentino co-founder Giancarlo Giammetti, shared a rare photo of the royal vacationing on a yacht in the '90s.

• Princess Diana's friend , Valentino co-founder Giancarlo Giammetti, shared a rare photo of the royal vacationing on a yacht in the '90s.
• Diana wears bikini bottoms and a shirt tied at the waist in the snap, which was reportedly taken in September 1990.
• Diana had been married to Prince Charles  for eight years when the photo was taken, and would separate from him two years later.

This is pretty lovely: Giancarlo Giammetti, the co-founder and honorary president of Valentino, posted a rare photo on Instagram of Princess Diana vacationing on a yacht. Giammetti, a close friend of the late royal, shared a total of four photos of Diana earlier this week, offering a glimpse into some happy, carefree moments of her life.

First, Giammetti shared two photos of Diana wearing red Valentino dresses, captioning the post, "TV 'The Crown' has once again reminded us of the struggle of Princess Diana ! Here two photos of her in Valentino red dresses that show the smiling and sweet side of Diana."

Then, the Valentino co-founder shared two more candid photos of the royal, captioning the post, "And here two moments of friendship with her." In the first, she speaks with Giammetti and fellow co-founder Valentino Garavani,  as  Tatler  reports . But it's the second that's especially remarkable (swipe right below to see it), depicting Diana not as a formal public figure but as a relaxed, happy young woman on board a yacht with her friends, wearing a tied purple shirt with patterned bikini bottoms and holding a drink.

In the photo, reportedly taken in September 1990, she poses with Kyril, Prince of Preslav and Valentino, as the group vacation off the coast of Stromboli, an Italian island north of Sicily. The snap was taken eight years after Diana married Prince Charles , and two years before their separation, according to  Tatler . 

A post shared by Privategg (@giancarlogiammetti) A photo posted by on

The Crown  has revived public interest in Diana's difficult experience as a member of the royal family, depicting her troubled marriage to Prince Charles, the restrictions of royal life, and her struggle with bulimia. Unsurprisingly, the royals themselves aren't exactly thrilled about the show, with  Diana's brother, Charles, Earl Spencer, one of its most outspoken critics . Appearing on British TV show  Love Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh  last weekend, Charles said  The Crown  relied on "invention" to fill in the details of Diana's life, and urged viewers to take it as "fiction." 

"The worry for me is that people see a program like that and they forget that it is fiction," Charles said. "They assume, especially foreigners, I find Americans tell me they have watched  The Crown  as if they have taken a history lesson. Well, they haven’t." He continued, "There is a lot of conjecture and a lot of invention, isn’t there? You can hang it on fact but the bits in between are not fact."

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Emily Dixon is a British journalist who’s contributed to CNN, Teen Vogue, Time, Glamour, The Guardian, Wonderland, The Big Roundtable, Bust, and more, on everything from mental health to fashion to political activism to feminist zine collectives. She’s also a committed Beyoncé, Kacey Musgraves, and Tracee Ellis Ross fan, an enthusiastic but terrible ballet dancer, and a proud Geordie lass.

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How One Photo Immortalized Princess Diana’s Loneliness

O f the many photos of Diana, Princess of Wales , one image has become iconic for capturing the unnerving loneliness she experienced during her life. The photo shows Diana in a candid moment alone, sitting on the end of a diving board.

It's a picture that helped define the essence of the People's Princess—a glamorous outsider, the patron saint of isolation, a public figure who struggled to protect her personal life. It should come as no surprise that when Netflix announced Season 6 of The Crown , the first installment of which debuted on Nov. 16, the streamer shared the news by recreating the famed image of the princess, reimagining it with actor Elizabeth Debicki: Her back is to the camera, her chin protectively tucked into her shoulder in Diana's signature habit, her loneliness in full view even as so much as her is obscured.

Read more: 25 Years After Princess Diana's Death, She's Still Shaping the Royal Family

The Crown is hardly the first to pay homage to the photo—from the promotional poster for the 2013 Naomi Watts-fronted film Diana to the invitation to the Off-White Spring/Summer 2018 fashion show , which was inspired by Princess Diana, the diving board photo has been reproduced, reappropriated, and referenced, looming large in the collective imagination, a tangible visual for the melancholy of Diana's life. Most recently, the musical artist SZA recreated the photo for the album artwork for her album, SOS , a decision she said she was drawn to because of "isolated" the princess appeared.

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"Originally I was supposed to be on top of a shipping barge, but in the references that I pulled for that, I pulled the Diana reference,” SZA said in an interview with Hot 97 . “Because I just loved how isolated she felt, and that was what I wanted to convey the most.”

SZA confirms theory that Princess Diana inspired her ‘SOS’ album cover. pic.twitter.com/61biLn7JXm — Pop Base (@PopBase) December 7, 2022

The image would be striking for its composition alone. Diana, clad in a turquoise one-piece bathing suit, perches, almost precariously, on the edge of the diving board of Mohamed al-Fayed 's private yacht, with seemingly nothing but sea surrounding her. That the photo is a long shot taken by a paparazzo, six days ahead of her death, in the throes of a media maelstrom that had erupted after tabloid pictures were published of her kissing al-Fayed's son, Dodi, reads in retrospect like ominous foreshadowing.

Read more : How Princess Diana Changed Lives by Discussing Her Mental Health

And while there's no shortage of photos that illustrate how alone the princess often felt in royal life— her awkward Balmoral engagement photo with an aloof Charles , the shot of her wearing her black sheep sweater to a polo match , the infamous picture of her solo visit to the Taj Mahal —the image of Diana sitting solo on the diving board has become one of the most iconic images because it highlights the bittersweet isolation of Diana's life—a woman who could never be alone, but was no stranger to being lonely.

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The Kate Middleton Photo That Was Too Good to Be True

By Jessica Winter

It’s such a lovely photograph—if only it were real. The occasion is Mothering Sunday, the U.K. equivalent of Mother’s Day, which fell this year in March. Mom sits at the center, big toothpaste smile, and she’s having a great hair day. She’s pulling her two little ones close to her on either side, and her oldest boy is just behind, beaming affection, his arms slung around her. They all seem to be laughing at whatever the photographer—Dad—is saying or doing. It’s sweater weather, and they look so cozy in their knits (that fluttery scalloped collar under the girl’s cardigan! A dream!). This picture is why people have kids; it’s why people scroll Instagram wondering why everybody else’s family is nicer than theirs. If there was something faintly uncanny about the photo—did Mom’s head seem to float on a different plane? Was her neck somehow foreshortened, or was that just the cowl-neck on her sweater?—maybe it was just the sense of otherworldly perfection.

Because the mom in the picture is Catherine, Princess of Wales, who has been recuperating from abdominal surgery and been out of the public eye since Christmas, and because the credited photographer is William, the future King of England, the image was released to news agencies and posted to the British Royal Family’s social-media accounts, pointedly dated “2024.” Sweet as the picture was, something possibly ghoulish haunted the motivations behind its publication. The moment it hit the Internet, it scanned as a proof of life for a princess who had become indefinitely invisible without much explanation, leaving a void that people filled with rampant speculation and conspiracy theories . The audience for the photograph was large, and they peered at it closely. Perhaps inevitably, they thought they saw strange things: not just touch-ups of hair or skin but serious tampering.

Amateur analysts should always tread lightly when it comes to digital photos, which are typically full of noise and junk. Once, many years ago, a snapshot of my cat wandered onto the Internet and became a lower-tier meme—“ Invisible Motocross ”—inspiring passionate discussion across an anonymous Venn diagram of cat-culture scholars and forensic-photography sleuths about how the distribution of light and shadow behind my cat and the way her furry outline cut against the background proved, without a doubt, that the photo was a fake. (My rebuttal: If I knew how to use Photoshop, I would have edited in a nicer living-room backdrop. That apartment was such a shithole!) Stare at any meaningful image for too long and you will eventually end up in the back yard with Lee Harvey Oswald , taking measuring tape to shadows, trying to strike that strange backward-leaning pose, looking like somebody’s patsy.

The Middleton-Windsor photograph , alas, was not an Invisible Motocross situation. What tears it is a spot not far below Kate’s collar—a seeming delineation between what appear to be two discrete images. This digital boundary cuts the zipper on Kate’s jacket in two and blurs the bottom half. It’s like a pattern mismatching at the seam of a poorly stitched garment, and, once you see it, you start seeing all the other torn and puckering seams in the image: the way Princess Charlotte’s wrist looks too big for her sleeve, which seems to be melting into her skirt; the way that strange snippets of hair fall on and blend into various shoulders. Soon, in an extraordinary and humiliating wave of repudiation, news agencies including the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Reuters, and Getty all issued kill notices for the picture, forbidding its distribution on their channels. “ AT CLOSER INSPECTION IT APPEARS THAT THE SOURCE HAS MANIPULATED THE IMAGE ,” the A.P.’s notice explained, going on to say that an unedited version of the photo would not be forthcoming. On TikTok, an impressively resourceful sleuth dug up video from a 2023 charity event, in which Kate and her children seemed to be in the same outfits that they wore in the supposedly new, post-surgery picture.

Damage control begat more reason for damage control. Despite the Royal Family’s famous dictum “Never complain, never explain,” an apology was issued: “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.” The statement was signed “C,” for Catherine, even though William was the credited photographer, and thus ever so slightly more plausible as the Kensington Palace employee who is responsible for doing touch-ups on official photographs.

A furious Daily Mail editor declared that Kate had been “thrown under a bus” by Kensington Palace—forced to take the fall for a major institutional lapse: “I think it’s disgraceful, I think it’s very ungentlemanly of Prince William to put the onus on her. For goodness sake, he’s the one who took the photograph.” On social media, video circulated of an interview with Prince Harry, professional royal defector, talking about the family’s propensity for naming scapegoats in times of P.R. crisis. (As many have pointed out, it may be impossible to exaggerate the media tsunami that would have erupted if Meghan Markle, whom the U.K. press always cast as the Wicked Witch of the West against Kate’s diaphanous, do-no-wrong Glinda, had distributed a doctored photo of herself with Archie and Lilibet.)

At a certain point, the attempted crisis management began to look almost intentionally self-sabotaging. A grainy image emerged of William and Kate in the back seat of a car leaving Windsor Castle; Kate is turned away from the camera, in one-quarter profile. Almost immediately, a savvy royal watcher found a 2016 image of Kate, which appears to map onto the paparazzi snap with suggestive precision. The photographer who claimed credit for the car picture, which was syndicated through an agency called GoffPhotos, denied to the New York Post that any editing shenanigans had taken place. But the discovery of the older picture intensified the ghostliness of the new one, casting Kate, in her demure chignon and pillbox hat, as a gothic apparition that you can’t be sure you really see, like the lady in the lake in “ The Turn of the Screw ” or the woman in the doorway of the grand house of Tony Soprano’s afterlife. Suddenly there was a chill in the air, a shiver down the spine.

The most plausible explanation for Kate’s absence remains the simplest, and it is also the one that was announced in the first place, back in January: she is recovering from major surgery. What Kensington Palace did not disclose at that time was how hopelessly naïve it appears to be about technology, social media, and its global public’s sophisticated understanding of them both. As David Yelland, a former editor of the U.K. tabloid the Sun , said on a podcast he co-hosts, “I think this is a twentieth-century organization, maybe even a sixteenth-century organization, trying to play twenty-first-century games.” Some of their failings, however, are timeless. “The royal body exists to be looked at,” the novelist Hilary Mantel wrote in a controversial and brilliant 2013 essay for the London Review of Books . If Kate is not seen, she ceases to exist; she seems to die, and throws her public into a confused quasi-mourning that demands deft and elegant intercession. (There was a whole movie about this!) Nobody at any time, neither a subject of Elizabeth I nor a TikTok influencer in 2024, would ever be satisfied by a smudged glimpse of maybe-Kate’s ear and cheekbone—which is all that the GoffPhotos picture had to offer—as evidence of the royal body’s good health.

The rap on Kate was always that, despite her abundant beauty, charm, and high-heeled indefatigability—maybe in part because of it—she was boring, especially in contrast to Diana, her husband’s mother and eternal Princess of Wales, who possessed all of Kate’s gifts and more: vulnerability, unpredictability, a certain irresistible too-muchness. Mantel, in her London Review of Books essay, called Kate, not without empathy, “a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own.” Mantel went on, “She appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture. Diana was capable of transforming herself from galumphing schoolgirl to ice queen, from wraith to Amazon. Kate seems capable of going from perfect bride to perfect mother, with no messy deviation.”

The time line of Diana’s fascinating transformations can be tracked in indelible, often appealingly imperfect images: the teen-age day-care worker unaware of the sun shining through her translucent skirt; the demure bride floating on plumes of taffeta; the doting young mother nuzzling her boys in casual photos taken en plein air; the supermodel in the revenge dress; the jet-setting divorcée getting papped on a playboy’s yacht. Kate could never achieve the iconic stature that Diana built from these images, and likely she never wanted to. (It is not terribly reductive to say that Diana died in the midst of doing what Kate is struggling to do now: deal with the press.) But, aside from her wedding to William, in 2011, the ongoing uproar over these recent photographs is the most captivating episode of Kate’s entire public career, and all because of a spectacularly failed attempt to present the perfect image. ♦

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William calls Kate the "arty one" amid photo scandal, as he and Harry keep their distance at Princess Diana event

By Ramy Inocencio

Updated on: March 15, 2024 / 10:39 AM EDT / CBS News

London —  Not even an event honoring the late Princess Diana could bring her estranged sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, back together this week. At the 25th annual Diana Legacy Awards, honoring young global change makers in London, the two brothers clearly kept their distance Thursday night — in both time, appearing hours apart, and in place, as they were half a world away from each other.

William, the Prince of Wales, attended in person and celebrated the 20 winners, whom he lauded as prime examples of "my mother's belief that young people can change the world."

"She taught me that everyone has the potential to give something back, that everyone in need deserves a supporting hand in life," William said of his late mother.

Hours later, long after his brother had departed the event, Harry congratulated this year's Diana Award recipients, via video from his home in California.

He said his mother would be "incredibly proud" of the humanitarian work the winners, who were from 13 nations including the U.K. and U.S., are doing.

"Thank you very much for inspiring so many others and, at the same time, protecting my mother's legacy. I really appreciate that," said Harry.

The last time the two brothers were seen side-by-side was September 2022, just after their grandmother Queen Elizabeth II  died. They were also both at the queen's funeral, and at their father's coronation  in 2023, but not in close proximity.

"The rift is ongoing. They work separately in terms of those things," veteran journalist and royal commentator Roya Nikkhah told CBS News on Friday after attending the Diana Awards ceremony. "It's a great shame that William and Harry can't unite in person for something like that, but it's been going on for a while. Nobody expects anything different."

The British monarchy has fallen under uncomfortable scrutiny over the past week. 

• Royal insider says Kate photo scandal shows the "wheels are coming off"

Before the award ceremony on Thursday, William casually spoke at another event about his wife Kate, the Princess of Wales, just three days after she apologized for editing a family portrait that was posted to the couple's official social media accounts to mark Britain's Mother's Day.

"My wife is the arty one," William told children at an opening event for a youth charity center.

Those words, and their timing, raised eyebrows and drew some ridicule coming just days after major global news agencies issued rare "kill" orders to take the princess' photo off their servers due to the digital doctoring. The global news director of France's AFP news agency said Kensington Palace was no longer a trusted news source, going so far as to compare Kate's photo to media presented by North Korea's state-run media outlets.

• AI expert says Kate photo scandal shows our "sense of shared reality" eroding

The last time Kate was seen in public was Christmas Day, before her still-unspecified abdominal surgery in mid-January.

Kensington Palace said then and has since stressed that she is not expected to return to her public duties until after Easter. "We are so used to having steady, dutiful royal family, even with the recent rifts, that when there are absences, what rushes to fill the void is speculation," said Nikkhah. "But it's not been a great week for them."

For Britain's royal family, Easter probably can't come fast enough.

• British Royal Family
• William Prince of Wales
• Prince William Duke of Cambridge
• Prince Harry Duke of Sussex
• Kate Middleton
• Catherine Princess of Wales

Ramy Inocencio is a foreign correspondent for CBS News based in London and previously served as Asia correspondent based in Beijing.

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Royals mocked by a king and compared to North Korea as Princess Kate saga rumbles on

LONDON — If Britain’s royal family thought the saga over Kate, the Princess of Wales, was going away, there was little sign of salvation Friday after a leading news agency compared the family to North Korea and another monarch offered gentle public ridicule.

Meanwhile, Prince William and Prince Harry both spoke Thursday evening at an awards ceremony in honor of their late mother, Princess Diana — an event somewhat overshadowed by the brothers’ ongoing feud when William left before Harry even started his video-link address.

The crisis over Kate’s health and edited photo has rocked the British royal family, but another of Europe’s sovereigns managed to find the funny side. At an event in the Dutch city of Zutphen on Thursday, the country’s King Willem-Alexander was told by a young girl that she had a photograph of him and his family.

“At least I didn’t photoshop it!” he said to laughter from the children’s parents.

That belies just how serious this crisis has become for the British family’s reputation.

It emerged Thursday that Agence France-Presse, one of the news agencies that issued a “kill notice” for Kate’s picture, no longer considers Kensington Palace a “trusted source.”

“Making a doctored photo available for distribution to the world’s media is a serious breach of trust,” news director Phil Chetwynd told NBC News in an email. “The palace was a known and trusted source for handout pictures” but “we cannot say they are a trusted source for handout pictures” following this week’s events, he added.

He said the news agency “still require further explanations” about what happened to the image and “we would hope we could rebuild this trust over time.”

The four agencies, AFP, The Associated Press, Reuters and Getty, all distribute photographs and stories to media companies worldwide.

Chetwynd said that “kill notices” were rare, and usually made for propaganda from “the North Korean news agency or the Iranian news agency, just to give you some background or context,” he said in another interview with the BBC.

Once the agencies realized “there were a lot of problems with the photo,” they worked together and asked the palace for the original, but decided to kill the picture after not receiving a response, he said.

In a statement posted to social media Monday , Kate said that “like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing” and gave her “apologies for any confusion.” There has been no further explanation for how or why the picture was altered, and the palace has confirmed to NBC News that the original picture will not be released.

“Understanding how badly Kensington Palace dealt with this does give us an understanding of why it subsequently turned into such a big deal,” NBC News royal commentator Daisy McAndrew said. “To have completely lost control of the public image of Catherine and William really is quite catastrophic.”

For some, the outrage is overblown. But the reason why it has caused such fallout is that it speaks to fundamental tensions between the palace, press and the public.

Even many royal supporters do so as part of an unwritten pact: The taxpayer funds the monarchy and in return the royals perform various public roles. These range from international soft-power ambassadors, participants in the occasional lavish wedding to lift the national mood, and fodder for the fashion and gossip pages.

The late Queen Elizabeth II understood this tacit agreement better than most, famously saying, “I have to be seen to be believed,” according to biographer Sally Bedell Smith. In short: Without its public presence, the royal family risks losing legitimacy.

King Charles III appears to be following this maxim, releasing regular photo updates through his recent cancer diagnosis. But Kate has not been seen in public since Christmas Day, and the edited photo has been the only sighting, save a few unclear, grainy shots of her inside cars.

No further details were offered Thursday night at the Diana Legacy Award at London’s Science Museum. William mentioned his wife in passing, saying that his mother’s legacy “is something that both Catherine and I have sought to focus on through our work.”

He left before Harry’s speech, delivered virtually from California.

The brothers have been mired in a high-profile falling-out following Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, leaving their lives as front-line royals for America while accusing the family of callous treatment.

“What should have been a really uplifting event,” McAndrew said, “actually turned into a story about the fact that Harry and William don’t speak to each other and no longer have a relationship.”

Also on Thursday, Meghan launched a new brand on Instagram , American Riviera Orchard, marking her return to the platform after deleting her social media accounts in 2018 before marrying Harry.

Back in Britain, William made a comment that, knowingly or otherwise, hinted at the maelstrom over his wife’s penchant for visual creativity.

“It’s really not that impressive,” he told children as he decorated biscuits while visiting a youth group in west London. “My wife is the arty one.”

Alexander Smith is a senior reporter for NBC News Digital based in London.

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Kate Middleton ‘looked like sad Princess Diana’ during Photoshop crisis: royal insiders

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Royal insiders fear Kate Middleton’s Photoshop scandal is taking a toll on her recovery from the abdominal surgery which has sidelined her from royal duties — and made her health the focus of intense speculation.

The Princess of Wales looked strained as she sat next to Prince William Monday, gazing out of the window, prompting comparisons in royal circles to photos of her late mother-in-law, Princess Diana.

Kate, 42, has been hounded by rumors about the truth about her health since undergoing major surgery for a mystery condition in January.

But they went into overdrive after she and Prince William posted a family photo on Instagram Sunday to celebrate British Mother’s Day, which turned out to be badly Photoshopped.

Kate took the blame herself Monday , apologizing and saying she had done the editing herself.

One well-placed royal source told Page Six, “It’s an awful lot to be under all of this public scrutiny when you are recovering from major surgery.

“The rumor mill — particularly on social media — has gotten out of control, but Kate is recovering well and she will be back by Easter.

“She just needs to be left in peace.”

Another palace insider mused, “I worry about all this attention on Catherine. She did not look happy at all in the car on Monday.” 

The insider added that it reminded them of photographs of Diana looking upset as she sat next to her former husband, King Charles, at the height of their marriage crisis.

One famous photo saw the couple sitting together on an official visit to Seoul, South Korea, in November 1992. the tension etched across their faces.

They announced their official split a month later.

Kensington Palace had stated that Kate would be expected back to public life at Easter after having her planned surgery and are continuing to stick to this while trying to quell rumors.

She was photographed last week near home in Windsor with her mother Carole Middleton behind the wheel, and then again on Monday with her husband en route to London.

But while William, 41, was heading to the annual Commonwealth Service, Page Six was told that Kate was heading to a “private appointment.”

Global PR and marketing expert Mark Borkowski said the entire affair has shown up how the royal family fares when Kate, the “box office” attraction, is out of commission.

“It does focus on William’s decisions about how he calls the shots on how they manage the press… this shows a complete disengagement with the media.”

Meanwhile, Kate missed another family event Tuesday when William joined mourners at the funeral of Thomas Kingston, the husband of his cousin Lady Gabriella Windsor.

The body of the financier, who was found dead last month aged 45, was carried in a procession that began at Kensington Palace, the family home of his widow, and ended at Ambassador’s Court at St James’s Palace.

A private family funeral was then held at the Chapel Royal. And while William was present, Kate remained at home.

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Princess of Wales apologizes for ‘confusion’ over altered Mother’s Day photo

LONDON — Catherine, Princess of Wales, said Monday that she had been the one who altered an official photo that was retracted by global news agencies over concerns that it had been doctored.

“Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” Catherine said in a post Monday morning. “I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day,” she wrote in a message on Kensington Palace’s social media account. It was signed “C,” for Catherine.

The photo in question was released by Kensington Palace on Sunday morning, in celebration of Mother’s Day in Britain. Catherine was shown sitting on a chair, surrounded by her three smiling children.

It was the first official photograph of the princess released since her abdominal surgery in January , and it seemed like an attempt to reassure Britons and quell wild rumors and conspiracy theories that have surrounded the princess since she suspended her public appearances.

It did not have that effect.

Why the health of Catherine, Princess of Wales, attracts fascination

Global news agencies — including Reuters, Getty Images, Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press — asked their clients Sunday evening to withdraw the image, with some citing a problem with the alignment of Princess Charlotte’s sleeve and wrist. Others on social media flagged what they said were oddities, such as the positioning of Prince Louis’s hands and the zipper on Catherine’s jacket.

Prince William and Catherine often release photos of their family on major occasions, such as Christmas or their children’s birthdays. Often it is Catherine, a keen photographer, behind the camera. But the palace said William took this photo earlier in the week at their home in Windsor.

The news release accompanying the photo asked that news outlets not alter the image “in any manner or form,” but it did not mention that the image had already been altered.

Media outlets worldwide, including The Washington Post, ran the photo. But on Sunday evening, the Associated Press issued a “kill notification,” an industry term, for anyone using the photo, saying that on “closer inspection it appears that the source has manipulated the image” — running afoul of standard journalistic practice.

The Post has since removed the image from its original story .

Britain’s Press Association, which retracted the picture on its service Monday morning, conveyed that the palace would not be issuing the original unedited photograph of Catherine and her children.

Her last public appearance was on Christmas Day, when she was photographed attending a church service in Sandringham. Kensington Palace announced in January that she would probably not resume official duties before April and that it would provide updates on her health only when there was “significant new information to share.” The palace also said Catherine was recovering at her home in Windsor.

The palace is typically tight-lipped when it comes to royal health, but the lack of recent photographs or updates nonetheless fueled weeks of speculation about her well-being and whereabouts.

Everyone’s asking: ‘Where is Kate?’ despite Kensington Palace assurances

Dickie Arbiter, a former spokesman for Queen Elizabeth II, assessed that sharing the manipulated photo was an “innocent, naive mistake” by Catherine, whom he credited for having “owned up to it.”

He said he doubted that the palace or Catherine, who is one of Britain’s most popular royals , would take a hit for the blunder. “I don’t think the public are offside at all,” he said.

Royal biographer Sally Bedell Smith said the photo had the potential to “create a rather large credibility problem.”

“What were they thinking?” she said. “Here’s a woman out of the public eye for more than 70 days. There’s mounting anxiety, speculation, conspiracy theories.”

If the intent is to calm people down, Bedell Smith said releasing the original, unedited photo “would go a long way to reassuring people.”

She noted that Catherine made headlines for how stunning she looked after giving birth to her children. “Maybe there is a culminated impact on her to have to meet that unrealistic standard. She is becoming middle-aged, 42, it would be better for her and rest of us to move along comfortably like Queen Elizabeth did, whom we watched age over time.”

Bedell Smith added: “I love to look at [Queen] Camilla, who looks exactly the age she is.”

Royal biographer Catherine Mayer blamed the royal communications team for steering the family in the wrong direction.

“Royal press management isn’t easy,” Mayer wrote on X , formerly Twitter. “No palace job is. You’re working for people with limited real-world experience & unlimited decision-making power. There is (or should be) a line between royals’ private lives & public role. But this doesn’t explain serial mistakes in royal comms.”

The picture was “unsettling in ways beyond those identified,” she wrote. “Yes, one idea of monarchy is that it should project an idealised vision of the population. Another is that they should reflect it. The glossiness of the image stands at odds with the latter, more superhuman than human.”

She added: “If the royals really want to model important values to the nation, they should start by overhauling their approach to media in favour of transparency & scrupulous honesty. They should stand against disinformation, not contribute to it.”

The British royal family has long been attuned to image projection — Queen Elizabeth II, who used to wear brightly colored outfits for her public appearances, once said that “I have to be seen to be believed.”

These projections have been especially important when the royals have not been making public appearances.

Even though King Charles III has largely been out of the public eye since Buckingham Palace announced he was undergoing treatment for cancer, the royal Instagram account has been buzzing with posts — since his diagnosis, the palace has posted images of the king holding Zoom chats with foreign leaders and greeting ambassadors behind closed doors. In a video montage, he is seen reading “get well” letters. On Sunday, the royal Instagram account posted a decades-old photo of Charles kissing his mother’s hand.

On Monday, the royal family took part in the annual Commonwealth Day ceremony, a major set-piece event in the royal diary. While Prince William and Queen Camilla attended in person, Charles’s address was delivered with a prerecorded video message.

Somasundaram reported from Washington. Jennifer Hassan in London contributed to this report.

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