How strained was Diana’s marriage to Charles?

Netflix’s royal family drama “The Crown”, now in its fourth season, turns viewers into amateur historians. The acclaimed series takes great liberties with the historical record – but NBC News is here to help you separate fact from fiction. Be warned, however: spoilers ahead.

The fourth season of “The Crown” focuses largely on the troubled relationship between Prince Charles (Josh O’Connor) and Lady Diana (Emma Corrin), who married in 1981 and officially divorced in 1996 – just a year before his death in a car accident in Paris. “The Crown” depicts the couple’s explosive arguments and extramarital affair, painting a decidedly dark portrait of a union that many members of the public initially saw as a fairytale romance. Diana’s private struggles, in particular, are described in agonizing detail.

But how precise is the series on the world-famous couple?

‘Three of us in this marriage’

‘The Crown’ strongly suggests that Prince Charles had a romantic relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles (Emerald Fennell), his ex-girlfriend (and future second wife) – even during the first five years of his tumultuous and doomed marriage with Diana.

But in an interview with NBC News, a historian who has written several biographies of members of the British royal family took issue with this suggestion.

“He abandoned Camilla before marrying Diana,” said Sally Bedell Smith, author of “Prince Charles: Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life” as well as a biography of Queen Elizabeth II.

Smith referred to a 1994 television interview Charles gave to British journalist Jonathan Dimbleby in which the Prince of Wales only admitted his infidelity after his first marriage had “irretrievably broken down, having tried both of us.” . (The show suggests that the wedding slowly turned into a toxic trigger, with Charles becoming more and more poisonous.)

Charles reportedly resumed his relationship with Parker Bowles in 1986, five years after his marriage to Diana, according to an authoritative and comprehensive biography written by Dimbleby.

However, regardless of the exact timing of the affair, it appears Charles continued to rely on Parker Bowles as a close confidant even early in his union with Diana, causing tensions in his marriage. “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded,” Diana told the BBC in 1995.

“The Crown” also suggests that the brooding and ruminative Charles and the shy but charismatic Diana – separated by a 12-year age difference – were ill-suited from the start, a gap exacerbated by what the show presents as its cruel indifference. and tabloid press intrusions.

Additionally, the season premiere implies that Charles proposed to Diana in part because of pressure from her family members – particularly her great-uncle, Louis Mountbatten (Charles Dance), who was later murdered by members of the Irish Republican Army in 1979.

Clive Irving, author of “The Last Queen: Elizabeth II’s Seventy Year Battle to Save the House of Windsor,” said there was some truth to the show’s interpretation of the reasons for the marriage, although the wedding context was probably overestimated for effect.

Smith, for his part, agreed with the show’s assessment that Charles and Diana did not match well: “They were a misalliance. They were only together a dozen times before they got engaged.

Diana’s struggles

“The Crown” explores Diana’s difficult personal trials during the years of her marriage to Charles, alluding to mental health issues and describing her experience with bulimia. The portrayal of Diana’s private pain in the series appears to be based on various bestselling books and well-known interviews.

Diana’s personal trials were detailed in the 1992 bestseller “Diana: Her True Story,” by Andrew Morton – a reporter who later revealed that Diana was his main source of information about her unhappy marriage, according to a New York Times article published one month ago. after his death.

In her interview with the BBC in 1995, Diana spoke candidly about her postpartum depression following the birth of her sons, William and Harry, and said she had suffered from bulimia “for several years”.

“I was not well with postpartum depression, which nobody ever talks about, postpartum depression, you have to read about that afterwards, and that in itself was a tough time,” Diana said, according to a transcript. interview. “You would wake up in the morning feeling like you didn’t want to get out of bed, you felt misunderstood and just very, very low inside.

Diana’s portrayal in the series isn’t entirely grim, however. The fourth season shows how Diana became “The People’s Princess,” an inspiration to women around the world with her grace and refined style – as well as a gifted ambassador of the monarchy on trips abroad.

In one of the season’s most moving scenes, Diana warmly kisses a little boy with AIDS during a visit to a Harlem hospital – an actual event that happened during a three-day visit to New York in 1989, when she was 27.