At this point, the Princess Diana documentary field should have its own Emmy category. There’s Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, Prince William and Prince Harry’s emotional ode; The Story of Diana, a grand, sweeping overture of her life; and Diana—Her Story, the transatlantic doc with murky ethics.
And last night, another joined the fold: Diana: In Her Own Words, on the National Geographic Channel.
There are plenty more Diana docs on the horizon. But National Geographic’s stands out because it’s completely narrated by Diana herself: The audio is supplied from the “Morton tapes,” a series of secret interviews recorded by the princess and sent to journalist Andrew Morton.
Done in 1991, the tapes (which were the basis for Morton’s 1992 best-selling book, Diana: Her True Story) catch the princess at a troubled time: plagued by tabloid rumors, hounded by the press, her marriage irrevocably broken. Diana: In Her Own Words revisits these scandals, but with Diana’s explanations, painting an intimate and raw portrait of one of the world’s most famous women.
Below, her most riveting and revealing quotes.
“I felt I was a lamb to the slaughter. And I knew it.”
Only 19 years old when she married Prince Charles, Diana became a global celebrity overnight—and, according to her, was woefully unprepared and unsupported. On her wedding day, she felt more like a sacrificial lamb rather than a blushing bride.
“I remember crying my heart out on my honeymoon.”
On the outside, Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s honeymoon was a storybook one: They split their time between a yacht and the castle at Balmoral in the Scottish Highlands. Yet for Diana, it was misery. Overwhelmed by royal life and wrecked with insecurity over Charles’s feelings for Camilla Parker Bowles (Diana claimed to catch him wearing cuff links that Camilla gave him, and spotted a photo of her in his diary), she turned to bulimia to cope.
“I threw myself down the stairs. Charles said I was crying wolf, and I said I just felt so desperate, and I was crying my eyes out. And he said, ‘I’m not going to listen, you are always doing this to me, I’m going riding now.’ So I threw myself down the stairs. Bearing in my mind I was carrying a child.”
This moment—where Diana confesses that her depression was so severe that she threw herself down a set of stairs while pregnant with William—is one of the darkest of the documentary. Yet it’s also one of the most groundbreaking. Simply put, no one talked about this kind of stuff in the ’90s. They barely talk about it now. The fact that the Princess of Wales opened up about her mental health problems was game changing.
“I was ‘a problem.’ And they registered Diana as ‘a problem.’ She’s different; she’s doing everything that we never did. Why?”
Despite her blue-blood background, it’s been reported that Diana always felt like an outsider within the royal family. Yet it ran deeper than that: She felt like a “problem.”
This quote referenced Diana’s morning sickness, which made her struggle through some official events. But it soon became to mean more: It was about her bulimia, her anxiety, her loneliness, all of which she felt the royal family ignored instead of helped with.
“I remember saying to myself, ‘Right, Diana. It’s not good. You’ve got to change it right round, with this publicity . . . . You’ve been chosen to this position, so you must adapt to it and stop fighting it.’ And I knew I could do it, if I chose a different angle.”
Thanks to her natural warmth and charm, Diana’s nickname was the People’s Princess. In the documentary, she describes the day she decided to no longer be a meek sidekick, but a celebrity who could change the world. Soon after, she made headlines for her signature stigma-shattering move: shaking an AIDS patient’s hand without gloves.
“I said, ‘Camilla, I’d just like you to know that I know exactly what’s going on.’ And she said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ And I said, ‘I know what’s going on between you and Charles, and I just want you to know that . . . . Don’t treat me like an idiot.’”
Faced with damning evidence about Charles’s affair with Camilla, Diana finally confronted her at a private birthday party. Camilla denied it, but Diana held her ground—finally standing up to the other woman who wedged herself in Diana’s marriage.
“I am performing a duty as the Princess of Wales . . . but at least when I finish my, as I see it, my 12 or 15 years as Princess of Wales, I don’t see it as any longer, funny enough . . . I always knew I would never be the next queen, put it that way.”
This quote, where Diana admits she never saw herself as the queen of England, is sadly prophetic: She died six years later.
Still need another Diana doc dose? Diana: 7 Days That Shook the World is now streaming on Netflix, and the Smithsonian’s two-part epic begins on August 27.