Anyone watching The Crown and despising them for their behaviour to Diana?

[MyGazeboisLeaking]

Obviously it's not a documentary, but enough truth to reinforce what a poor, poor woman she was and how she never had a chance.

What was noticeable about Diana was how alone she was. Her father had already had a stroke, her stepmother was famously known as “acid Raine” and was more interested in raising her profile. Her mother “the Bolter” was extremely distant.

Then the royals moved her to the palace so she was totally isolated.

Her family are as much to blame for how things ended as the RF. Who, in their right mind encourages their 19 year old daughter to marry a 32 year old man she barely knows?

Diana didn't grow up in your usual suburban family, and her own family seemed rather dysfunctional anyway. People like the Spencers inhabit a very different world to the rest of us, so there is no point in trying to relate what happened to our own lives. As for her being so young, she is around the same age as I am, and at 19 I had been working for three years and certainly didn't consider myself naive.

It's such a disappointment. The first two series were excellent. Olivia Coleman is not a good choice but then neither are the test if them. Marion Bailey is terrible as the Queen Mother, whoever plays Prince Philip is playing him with an incredibly camp voice which he does not have. Princess Ann is awful and along with Andrew and Edward has no redeeming features. I don't know why stories have been twisted or why Diana is being painted as the poor innocent when she was highly manipulative and had several affairs and showed bizarre behaviours like ringing up one of her lovers home hundreds of times and hanging up.
Gillian Anderson speaks on dead slow as Margaret Thatcher. It's awful.

It’s fiction. Trashy TV designed for click bait.

Some sections may be factual. Only the people involved know which those are.

Diana was not some put-upon saint. She behaved terribly at various points, including ringing a married man at home, making it clear she was available and wanted him to cheat on his wife.

She clearly had some mental health issues of her own, from childhood into adulthood. The hero worship is bizarre, but in life you can get away with a lot if you have a pretty face and wear nice frocks.

If you read the biographies and watch "that" interview it seems fairly legit tbh. She was poorly treated imho and had an upbringing lacking love but then again she was hugely well connected aristocratic, rich and privileged too. A complex life.

Diana Spencer’s was a rather dim , highly privileged, borderline psychiatric, international clothes horse who seemed unable to use the common sense she was born with.

She knew a lot about Royal life and what she was getting into;

"Diana grew up in Park House, situated on the Sandringham estate.[10] The Spencers leased the house from its owner, Queen Elizabeth II. The royal family frequently holidayed at the neighbouring Sandringham House, and Diana played with the Queen's sons Prince Andrew and Prince Edward.[11]"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana,PrincesssofWales

"The Spencer family had been closely allied with the British royal family for several generations;[3] Diana's grandmothers, Cynthia Spencer, Countess Spencer and Ruth Roche, Baroness Fermoy, had served as ladies-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother."

Wikipedia

"Within the family, she was also known informally as "Duch", a reference to her duchess-like attitude in childhood."

"Diana's relationship with her stepmother was particularly bad.[16] She resented Raine, whom she called a "bully", and on one occasion Diana "pushed her down the stairs".

Wikipedia

I knew Diana , she wasn't the Saint she's made out to be. She was highly manipulative and knew what she was getting into. She was also not mentally stable before she got married, the fame didn't help her and she never accepted the role as future queen and what went with that and her mental health deteriorated further. Some aspects of the drama are accurate but others not. It's a dramatisation not a documentary

I think it's a little unfair to judge Charles based on the show, given that it's fictionalised him being unfaithful at a time when it seems he wasn't. I wonder what the point of making up something like that is - why have a show based on real people if you are going to actually invent things you know are false?

Mind you, that seems increasingly a common way to deal with what are supposedly reality based dramas.

I do think that into the early 80s you still had people getting married fairly young. I have two aunts who did - one at 17, and one at 18, both to men who were about 10 years or so older. Both still in those first marriages as well, unlike most of their siblings who married later, and neither what you'd call the submissive in the relationship.

And the 70s was the era of fairly young teen girls of 15 or 16 discovering rock n' roll and the sexual revolution - not that adults approved of that, but the idea that teenagers were children in the way many think of it now wasn't really so common. Lots of women had kids before 25.

@Maireas

She was 20 when they married. People grew up quicker then, most people left school at 16. She didn't seem ridiculously young at the time. She seemed thrilled to bits.

This.

She'd been living and working in London for 3 years by the time of her engagement.

She had a home of her own bought and paid for. No need for her to rush into a marriage with anyone if she did not want to.

From Wikipedia:

"After attending Institut Alpin Videmanette (a finishing school in Rougemont, Switzerland) for one term, and leaving after the Easter term of 1978,[26] Diana returned to London, where she shared her mother's flat with two school friends.[27] In London, she took an advanced cooking course, but seldom cooked for her roommates. She took a series of low-paying jobs; she worked as a dance instructor for youth until a skiing accident caused her to miss three months of work.[28] She then found employment as a playgroup pre-school assistant, did some cleaning work for her sister Sarah and several of her friends, and acted as a hostess at parties. She spent time working as a nanny for the Robertsons, an American family living in London,[29] and worked as a nursery teacher's assistant at the Young England School in Pimlico.[30] In July 1979, her mother bought her a flat at Coleherne Court in Earl's Court as an 18th birthday present.[31] She lived there with three flatmates until 25 February 1981."

I am not anti-Diana. I rather liked her and she did a lot of good in the world but stuff like "The Crown" twists a lot of stuff. She wasn't a saint.

I was 14 when she married and remember all the newsprint about her and the scandals and the times we lived in.

I think it's a shame that The Crown has distorted the facts so that so many gullible people believe that Charles was forbidden in marrying Camilla and had an affair with her all through his marriage. Camilla didn't want to marry Charles; she was in love with Andrew Parker Bowles. Charles didn't resume his affair with Camilla until his and Diana's marriage had "irretrievably broken down, us both having tried".

It’s a drama.

Tbh I felt she was portrayed in a negative light -
very stupid and kinda crazy.

None of them are coming across well, and it really reinforces how pointless the whole thing is. Quite republican, to my mind.

I had to look up the Phantom of the Opera incident, thinking it must be invented.....apparently not!

Bonkers.

Diana and her brother were damaged by their parents marriage breaking down and her mother being forced to leave the DCs (thanks Grandma) - the governess who recently said Diana had a good childhood arrived on the scene several years later.
I don't think you can underestimate the damage a mother having to leave can have on DCs. What annoys me is that her older sisters, away at boarding school so less affected and older, seem to have had such little presence in her life, they appeared to me to be part of the v wealthy upper class looking after themselves and were never there when Diana needed at least someone to have her back. It annoys me that they just carried on their lives, never took her side.

There was another family with dynastic ambitions who put forward 2 daughters and a niece as a mistress and wives to the King of England at the time.

It didn't end well for the Boleyn-Howard girls.

I have not yet watched series 4, but some of us thought the marriage was doomed from the beginning.
The age gap itself need not be a problem, if the couple have something in common.
But it seemed Diana was a townie, liked ballet and pop stars; Charles liked the country, opera and his mentor was the elderly Laurens van der Post.
Diana herself said they only met 13 times before they married, so it seems obvious she really loved the idea of love rather than Charles.
There was also a lot of pressure on Charles to get married, and he could not have loved her either because they hardly know each other.
I think her own family should have given her better advice, but then her parents were also divorced, and obviously were also enamoured with the idea if being linked with the Royal Family.

Mainly you compromise, but I think Diana and Charles were both as stubborn as each other so it failed.

I think it's no wonder Diana and Elton John hit it off. He probably recognised that she too was flamboyant, immature, self- centred and damaged.

Charles appears reserved, damaged and self- centred.

Not a match made in heaven tbh!

I've got a cousin who was abandoned by his mother at 2 and he was massively damaged by it. Says here the mother said she'd come back when she left when Diana was 5 but never did and Diana used to sit by the door waiting for her
her.womenworking.com/young-diana-waited-on-the-doorstep-for-mother-after-parents-split-but-she-never-came-charles-spencer

@ChardonnaysPetDragon

You do realise The Crown is not a documentary?

that

People comparing their own 19 year old daughter (now) to Diana (then) are making a false comparison. Some good points made by posters about socio cultural norms in 1981, but also the aristocratic Spencers living near Sandringham, the ambitions, the positioning, and the whole Charles situation. Just terrible the way it panned out though.

I may be wrong, but I have a vague recollection of Diana's sisters trying to talk her out of the marriage