Princess Diana was 5 feet and 10 inches. According to Yahoo! The "Spencer Special" was known to be a dive with almost no splash.
She also loved swimming and, after her marriage to Charles, regularly swam laps at the pool at Buckingham Palace. Diana was born at Park House on the royal family's Sandringham estate in Norfolk.
After the Spencers divorced in , Diana and her siblings lived at Park House until their father inherited the title of earl in and moved the family to Althorp House, Insider's Talia Lakritz previously reported. The house, which the Spencer family acquired in , is located on a 14,acre estate in Northamptonshire, England. It has 31 bedrooms, a ballroom, and " Painters' Passage " lined with family busts.
The soon-to-be princess struggled in school and eventually dropped out. While she was in boarding school, Diana failed her O-level exams twice before dropping out of school. She later enrolled at a finishing school in Switzerland but was only there for one semester before meeting Prince Charles and dropping out. Prince Charles and Princess Diana officially met when she was 16 years old and Charles was nearing According to The Sun , Prince Charles and Diana's older sister, Sarah Spencer, were rumored to be dating in , before the royal couple got together.
In fact, the older Spencer sister even reportedly takes the credit for introducing Charles and Diana. I'm Cupid," Sarah Spencer reportedly said at the time. Despite their almost year age difference, Prince Charles and Princess Diana's courtship moved quickly. However, according to Town and Country , many of their conversations took place over the phone and it's reported that the pair only met in person a dozen or so times before they married.
From the very beginning, Diana appeared to be a young woman totally in love. However, she still had her doubts about her soon-to-be husband. I thought, 'What a strange answer.
According to Brides , the ring was designed by crown jeweler Garrard but was chosen by the princess-to-be from a catalog, meaning that technically anyone could have purchased the sapphire and diamond ring. According to Vogue , the royal family didn't approve of this and didn't want commoners having the same access to jewels fit for royals. Today, however, the ring is priceless.
There has been remarkably little revisionism of Diana's life since her death. All her inconsistencies, failures and scandals were known before she died. The picture we had then — of a sometimes flawed, often selfish but affectionate, emotional, attractively spontaneous woman — is virtually the same picture we have now. But what would she really have been like on her 50th birthday?
Chances are, unrecognisable. It is inevitable that time would have changed Diana as memory can't; that her place within the wider world, and within her own domestic one, as the mother of William and Harry, ex-wife to Charles and ex-princess of the House of Windsor, would by now be something quite other.
First, what might she have looked like? Diana died before Botox, fillers and other cosmetic procedures became lunchtime normalities. For a woman with a history of bulimia, who was both vain and insecure about her looks, it seems likely that Diana would have rejected the ravages of age. Diana would undoubtedly have been attracted to the false promise of holding back time. She might well have ended up looking like the army of blonde, bland, TV presenters, models and Hollywood stars who seem to favour the same procedures.
With the new look may have come new men. Diana's roll-call of boyfriends shows above all else her search for someone to love her, someone who could absorb all her demanding, neurotic insecurity and impossible fame, and love her in spite of it all. Despite the efforts of Mohamed Al-Fayed to make the world believe that she had found that person with Dodi, it seems very unlikely. At the time of the crash, they had been together no more than a month, and already the clock seemed to be ticking, a countdown to the inevitability of separation.
Dodi was an international playboy, and hardly the stern material Diana needed. The notion that Dodi could play Onassis to Diana's Jackie Kennedy was definitely there, but then, Diana had a far more complicated relationship with the press than Jackie's chilly desire for distance. And of course, what started as seductively protective for Jackie quickly became stifling, as two characters without much in common beyond a physical attraction grew beyond that initial spark.
That Dodi and Diana would have gone a similar route seems likely. In fact, close friends have always maintained that the real love of Diana's life was Hasnat Kahn, a Pakistani heart surgeon, with whom she had a two-year affair that ended just a month before she began seeing Dodi.
Kahn — unlike Dodi who was raised to be a more secular Muslim, with plenty of Western values — was from a traditional Muslim family, one that expected him to marry into the same faith, and it was the irreconcilable differences of religion and lifestyle that seemingly drove him and Diana apart.
If so, she was clearly on the rebound for at least the beginning of her affair with Dodi. Would Diana have moved restlessly from one man to the next, in search of an unattainable ideal? Possibly, yes. In which case she would also have become gradually declasse and even ridiculous; a hardened veteran of too many love stories. Part of Dodi's attraction may well have been mischievous delight at the anticipated horror of the Royal family, who would naturally have reacted to the notion of a Muslim stepfather for the heir to the throne.
And who can blame Diana for wanting to tease them? At the time of her death, Diana was all but estranged from her former in-laws, certainly from her one-time father-in-law, Prince Philip, who was known to find her utterly tiresome. And yet her death changed even that, because it was Philip who stepped in when William, still reeling in shock, declined to walk behind the gun-carriage carrying Diana's coffin. It was Philip who gently insisted that he might regret his decision, and offered to walk with him, so that Diana's personal guard of honour was composed of her beloved sons, her ex-husband, and Philip, a man with whom she feuded in life but who was to do her this signal favour in death.
Diana's relationship with the press could only have become more fraught, as the media monster she helped create grew increasingly out of hand. By the time she died, the paparazzi followed her constantly, and she ignored or engaged, depending on her mood.
The new breed of reporters were disinclined to allow her to dip in and out at will, determined to follow through regardless of her changes of heart. Even a relationship with a modern-day Onassis may not have been enough to hold them at bay, in which case Diana's privacy would have been virtually worthless.
The charities that captured Diana's imagination were the big losers after death. Aids, leprosy, landmines, homelessness, drug addiction and terminal illness all received huge boosts from her involvement. That Diana had genuine, impulsive sympathy for the misfortunes of others is undoubted.
Her work for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines was posthumously rewarded when the campaign won the Nobel Peace Prize in ; it's a prize Diana herself could conceivably have won had time allowed her to fully mature into the force for good she so clearly was capable of being. And finally, the most important question — what of her sons?
How would the lives of William and Harry have been shaped by her continuing presence? She was of course only 36 when she died.
But her love life was basically a long line of disappointments, with Charles, James Gilbey, Will Carling and James Hewitt variously letting her down. The Palace could have launched their own guerrilla war against her, leaking tales of breakdowns and self-harm. She may have drifted out of her charity work and into the aimless life of the super-rich, a sort of playgirl hanging around on yachts, increasingly alienated from the British people.
However it may have panned out, it would have been a pleasure to have her around to see her collect her freedom pass. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later?
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