Did people really love Princess Diana that much?

[canjest]

I just wondered as I knew she was well liked but videos like this show brown men crying!

www.instagram.com/reel/CnOCMtSKK_b/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

I think people didn't really think about her too much until she died then everyone lost their heads over her loss. It was weird.

The media blew it out of proportion. I remember the day she died - it was the day after we bought our first house. I can't remember anyone in real life even mentioning her death in conversation, let alone be traumatised by it. The whole thing just passed us by really, except for what we saw in the media, but then the media had been obsessed by Diana ever since she met Charles!

A lot of people clearly loved and admired her. I wasn’t one of them. The hysteria surrounding her death was ridiculously over the top. Nobody I know cried a single tear, we were bemused by it all and watched old sci-fi videos for a week straight to avoid the fawning TV coverage.

Kate is stunning but something about her is like a robot. Maybe that's not the right word.

She's almost too flawless for the role, like she's literally programmed for it

Yes.

If you look at videos of her, you will see how graceful, kind, and lovely she was. She was actually more intelligent than Charles, even though she had a self deprecating way about herself. Look at the interviews of them together. Diana is much more the well spoken and articulate one. Charles manages to put his foot in his mouth all the time, doesn’t know what to say, and seems to have no clue how he comes off as cold and unfeeling.

Pictures show Camilla shadowing Diana from the very beginning of the marriage. She got what she wanted, didn’t she. How young Diana was. Charles and Camilla were much older, calculating, and around the block many times and had no excuse. It’s a crime how Diana was treated.

I think Harry and Meghan commandeered Diana’s memory to make themselves look better. Years ago Harry said he didn’t even hardly remember his mother. He sure does act like he was her favorite child, it’s very low of him.

She was being vilified in the press up until the minute she died.

I thought she was a sad, pointless clothes horse, stuck in the bland princess role much like Kate is now.

"She was seldom out of the newspapers - because she was a beautiful woman who made a good clothes horse and increased sales in any publication that featured her, so the paparazzi attention was relentless."
^ This. I was 31 when she died I don't now anyone who cried or anyone who went to the funeral either and I lived in central London at the time. I felt sad for her sons loosing their mother at that age, but that would apply to any child/adolescent whose mother died.

I was 25 at the time and pregnant with my first child. I was pretty indifferent to Diana, but was shocked when she died. The Diana TV coverage was like wallpaper for the whole week leading up to the funeral and the crowds in London were just bizarre.

I was reading an article in a Sunday magazine on the day she died. It was a really nasty piece saying she was quite stupid and should never have married Charles as he was far too intelligent for her to hold his interest for long etc. But the main paper was going on about what a beautiful sainted woman she was.

Obviously the magazines aren't up to date, they're printed in advance, but the editors were obviously fine with the story in the magazine at the time. TBH, I wasn't fussed on her, I was never likely to meet her after all.

I believe some magnolia men, and even some Elephant's Breath (F&B) men wept too.

I know someone who did, and they're only on the neutral/ beige spectrum.

They loved the idea of her. Nobody knew the real Diana.

I remember the wedding and everyone fawning over how beautiful she was. Also the television coverage of the wedding was much more than it had been for anything before. It was huge, there were parties and school and everyone watched it.

But, everyone could see that it was a bad match. It was clear right from the engagement announcement that it wasn’t going to work. She was young and beautiful, she changed the direction of the royal family by being so much more hands on. It’s hard to understand now the impact of her actually touching someone with AIDS. She was seen as a saint and Charles was painted as the baddy.
This was until she started her relationship with Dodi. People were shocked by that, quite possibly for racist reasons. It was like watching a soap opera.

And then suddenly it ended. I remember clearly getting up and going into the kitchen, turning on the radio to hear ‘Prince Charles will accompany the body’ and assuming the Queen had died.

What you also need to remember is that rolling news was a new thing, but social media didn’t really exist. I popped to the corner shop and the woman just said ‘shocking isn’t it, I can’t believe it’. No preamble, no extra conversation, it was unsaid.
About 1pm some friends turned up on the doorstep to talk about how annoyed they were with it all and the coverage and did we want to go for a drink. It was all anyone was talking about in the pub too.

It was all there was on the news and in the news papers for days. And it whipped everyone especially, it has to be said, women of a certain age. The flowers left at every town hall were like nothing I’d ever seen before.

She had been loved, then reviled, but then loved again.

I was about the same age as your Mum and a journalist at the time so I not only watched all the footage I had to interview and talk to people for my job about it.

It was partly the shock of a sudden violent death of a young very famous person - who was also the mother of two young boys.

But it seemed to me that it triggered an empathy/emotional contagion in people that we commonly call 'being triggered' today - that phrase wasn't really used back then. A lot of people let the scale of this joint experience tap into how it would make them feel losing their own daughters, sisters, mothers etc.

They weren't crying specifically for their feelings about Diana but their feelings of loss and the frailty of human life in general.

Of course later the dedicated Diana fans used that grief-fest as a reason to make her into Saint Diana.

I think Princess Diana was interesting purely cause she wasn't afraid to stand for controversial types of causes for e.g Aids and the landmines in Bosnia,

She was also like a headstrong impulse teenager in relantships and going out with men who mother and her social class frowned up,
.
I think being married into the royal family was detrimental to her emotional well being like it was like royal system way of doing things,
Created arrested development and once she escaped out of that,
She became more of her own person, the eating disorders started to fade away she looked great as put on bit more weight curvaceous acctractive,

I think Princess Diana read into far too much into her step mothers mother romantic fairies stories books
Mills and boon,
Hence being acctracted to Former Prince 🤴 Big ears now king of 🇬🇧 uk

The press were just starting to turn on her, there was certainly a few sketchy affair stories in the offing but she’s very much become sainted since her death.
dont get me wrong, she was loved and did some great work. Her early untimely death definitely created saint diana. The bad stories were buried, people couldn’t say a bad word against her and she sadly didn’t live to make more mistakes (like we all do as humans).

I think it was shock of someone so vibrant going so suddenly that created the strange phenomenon. She was the first relatable Royal and the first to show emotions, less stuffy than we had seen of the others.

On the 30th August the tabloid headlines were taken up by her exploits with her latest boyfriend and long lens shots of her in swimwear. Bad Diana.

By September 1st the tabloids had lost their minds. Saint Diana.

Had she lived pretty sure the press would be less interested in a world of other celebs. I suspect Kate may have had competition for news headlines too. However I also think it is less likely that Harry would have left the country.

I was so shocked when she died. Not a grief hound, I wasn't crying, but I was young and the notion that a member of the royal family could die in an accident was just so shocking. If her wealth and fame and royalty and admiration couldn't protect her from death, then, well, anybody could die. It was just so shocking. People die all the time, but they were older, less well known, less touched with gold..

I remember in my school library (about ten years before her death) there was a hard backed book just filled with Diana pictures, just pictures of her at events showing her dresses she wore. I mean that's how much her image was everywhere, when she cut her hair shorter it was front page news and the tabloids were filled with multiple pictures of her.

I think it was the suddenness of her death and the fact that she was still so young that sent people bonkers.

I was 25 at the time and woke up with the news on the radio with Diana's death. It was such a shock. I felt sad and surprised I felt tearful for her two boys who have lost their mother.
I flew out on Holiday two days after Diana's death and I remembered Diana's picture was everywhere and everyone we met couldn't believe she had died.

No. In brief.

I loved her, I can’t watch old footage of her without crying.

She was pretty strongly disliked by many. Lots of the people who were boo-hooing when she died had been buying tabloids slagging her off days before.

In my recollection she was very popular at first and the wedding was a huge event. I was in my teens at the time and she was definitely very influential on the kind of look a lot of girls wanted, and even though we tend to look back on the whole thing with horror, the relationship and wedding was widely seen as very romantic. She was a "fairytale princess" and a lot of girls i knew aspired to be like her.
Later on, I think she became less popular and certainly in the years between the separation and her death I recall more negative publicity than positive. But her death was shocking. I'm not even particularly interested in the royal family but I did feel shocked and upset. Not to the level of actually doing anything about it - I didn't lay flowers, sign a book of condolences or anything - but the violent death of a young woman with relatively young children and the loss of someone who had been a major public figure through a lot of my adult lif, e til then did sadden me. But some people did get carried away, and her negative characteristics were very much swept under the carpet. But then that happens with lots of famous people when they die doesn't it? It was more extreme with Diana because she had such a high profile and because of her children. The way the royal family handled things probably contributed to the public response too.
I suspect that had she lived, a lot of people would not have the same view of her as they do now, but of course we will never know for sure.

I was astonished at the mass hysteria. And embarrassed for some of my friends who totally lost the plot.

It was a tragic death of a young woman who had lost her way. She married too young and her behaviour was becoming more and more out of control - stalking etc.

Very sad but nothing for brown men to cry about.

Joke going around at the time.

Q. What do Diana and Pink Floyd have in common.
A. Both had a hit with the wall.