5. Serena Scott Thomas in Diana: Her True Story (1993)
Serena Scott Thomas and David Threlfall in Diana: Her True Story. Photo: United Archives GmbH/Alamy Serena Scott Thomas, Christine’s sister, took a stab at Diana for this sleazy and wooden 1993 TV movie, playing opposite David Threfall’s incredibly aggressive Charles. It’s based on Andrew Morton’s book, but with the odd hint of Barbara Cartland’s racist behavior – perhaps fitting as Cartland was the mother of Diana’s stepmother, Raine Spencer. The film has one of Charles’s courtiers oddly grumbling about Diana’s short hairstyle conveying an “androgynous pansexuality”. Scott Thomas’ main character Sloaney never challenges Diana, and this drama, coming four years before her death, lacks the retrospectively applied tragic seriousness that now comes standard. Nor, like recent treatments, does it really distinguish between the girlishly innocent young Diana and the older, more worldly version. Scott Thomas could have cast better for this older Diana, with a decent script.
4. Naomi Watts in Diana (2013)
Naomi Watts in Diana. Photo: Allstar/Scope Pictures The normally excellent Watts fails horribly in this horribly embarrassing drama about Diana’s fraught private life at the time she was trying to have an affair with heart surgeon Dr Hasnat Khan, played by Naveen Andrews. She faithfully constructs the eyelash-raising gaze and estuary voice, but never quite nails Diana’s personality, at least in part because she’s landed with some awful, papery dialogue. “A doctor’s triumphs are only temporary. I learned it from Victor Chang,” Khan drones. “He was the man you studied with in Sydney,” Diana points out, as if reading the line from the optical board. Watts gives the part a certain glamor and style, but she’s at sea in an abysmal film.
3. Elizabeth Debicki in The Crown (5th series, 2022)
Dominic West and Elizabeth Debicki in The Crown. Photo: Photo: Keith Bernstein/Netflix Perhaps no other Diana actor conveys what Debicki does: Diana’s height. She was noticeably taller than Charles – so for their engagement photo she had to stand on a lower step. (Prince Philip is said to have barked, at news of the engagement, that at least it would “give some height to the family”.) Debicki is a naturally elegant, elegant performer who carries the couture creations and brings to Diana something that often forgotten: that touch of Spenderian aristocratic hauteur. Debicki rose to fame in BBC’s The Night Manager for her role as the battered wife of an arrogant man. He brings some of that same energy here.
2. Kristen Stewart in Spencer (2021)
Kristen Stewart in Spencer. Photo: Album/Alamy Stewart’s entertaining and studied portrayal of Diana in Pablo Laren’s hallucinatory film, based on her last weekend at Sandringham in 1991, is undoubtedly the most formally arthouse performance of Diana. Stewart is good in Diana’s shrugs of misery and protest. The film exaggerates her unhappiness with darkly comic stylings and flourishes – particularly when she rejects a maid to be alone: “I want to masturbate…” The film is a fun and absurd concoction, but one that takes itself too seriously as a work that it takes the Diana myth to the next level, although it is perhaps as naive as any treatment.
1. Emma Corrin in The Crown (Series 4, 2020)
Emma Corrin in The Crown. Photo: Des Willie/Netflix Whatever your views on The Crown, it was a humble streaming TV show and not a garlanded movie that gave us the best Diana. Corrin was surprisingly good as the young princess, perhaps because this wasn’t a painstaking, award-bait performance, just a completely natural one – in all the Diana Spencer ways – while also being terribly artificial. Corrin matched hair and clothes in a way that no other actor has. it was almost like a concert. The scenes on the Australian tour, with Diana exhilarated by public success and yet saddened by Charles’s criticism, are brilliant, as is the depiction of her growing sense that her rising celebrity status can overcome the mad royal property of Charles. Corrin is the queen of the Dianas.
