0. Diana reportedly slapped her father when she found out he had secretly remarried.
Diana and her siblings did not have a good relationship with their father’s second wife, Raine.
According to Diana’s friend Simone Simmons, the 14-year-old Diana slapped Lord Spencer across the face when he told them of his marriage to Raine.
1. Diana believed her former bodyguard Barry Mannakee, with whom she had been “deeply in love,” was murdered after their affair was exposed.
In secret video recordings, Diana said she thought Mannakee had been “bumped off” when he died in a motorbike accident in 1987, just a few months after being removed from her protection detail.
An official police inquiry later concluded his death was an accident.
2. Diana confronted Camilla Parker Bowles about her affair with Prince Charles, telling her “I want my husband.”
In secret tapes recorded for Andrew Morton’s biography, Diana described sitting down with Camilla and telling her she knew about the affair.
Camilla allegedly replied “You’ve got everything you ever wanted. You’ve got all the men in the world falling in love with you, and you’ve got two beautiful children. What more could you want?” to which Diana responded “I want my husband.”
3. Diana told journalist Max Hastings she wanted Prince William to become king instead of Prince Charles.
In the mid-1990s, Diana confided to Hastings, then editor of The Daily Telegraph, that she did not believe Charles was fit to be king.
“She said to me quite explicitly—’I don’t think Charles can do it,’” Hastings later recalled.
“The outcome she wanted to see was for Charles to stand aside as heir to the throne and for William to occupy the throne.”
4. Diana and Charles only met 13 times before getting married.
Their whirlwind courtship moved quickly and the couple had little time to really get to know each other before walking down the aisle.
“We met 13 times and we got married,” Diana later said in recordings.
5. Diana said Prince Charles insisted on having a mistress, telling her “I refuse to be the only Prince of Wales who never had a mistress.”
When Diana confronted Charles about his infidelity, he was unapologetic, she claimed.
Charles’ father Prince Philip had also allegedly told him he could go back to Camilla “after five years” if the marriage didn’t work out.
6. Freddie Mercury reportedly snuck a disguised Diana into a gay bar in London.
The Princess was close friends with the Queen frontman.
Actress Cleo Rocos described in her memoir how Mercury disguised Diana as a man and took her for a night out at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern gay bar, where she went unrecognized and even ordered drinks at the bar.
7. Diana consulted a spiritual healer named Simone Simmons regularly.
Simmons was an energy healer who became one of Diana’s closest confidantes in the last years of her life.
She later wrote a book about their conversations called Diana: The Last Word.
8. Diana took Prince William and Prince Harry to visit a homeless shelter.
She wanted to expose them to the realities of life outside the palace walls from a young age.
William later became the patron of Centrepoint, the same homeless charity his mother had taken him to visit.
9. Diana walked through a minefield in Angola to promote landmine clearance.
The famous photos of Diana in protective gear in an active minefield helped bring the issue to international prominence.
Shortly after her visit, the Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty was signed.
10. Diana shook hands with an HIV-positive patient without gloves, helping change attitudes about AIDS.
At a time when the virus was highly stigmatized and misunderstood, Diana made headlines around the world when she shook hands with an AIDS patient at a London hospital in 1987. The gesture helped combat the belief that HIV/AIDS could be contracted through casual contact.
11. Diana performed a surprise dance to “Uptown Girl” as a birthday present for Prince Charles.
She secretly learned a dance routine to the Billy Joel song with dancer Wayne Sleep.
At a private gala, she slipped away from Charles, changed into a silver dress, and surprised him and the audience by performing the number on stage.
12. Diana took up roller-blading in Kensington Palace gardens in the 1990s.
She was photographed by paparazzi skating around the gardens wearing knee and elbow pads, as depicted in a scene in Season 4 of The Crown.
13. Diana’s private phone call with James Gilby (nicknamed “Squidgygate”) was published after being intercepted.
In the intimate conversation, Gilby affectionately called Diana by the pet name “Squidgy.”
The scandal was one of many embarrassing leaks of Diana’s private life.
14. Diana introduced teenage Prince William to his celebrity crushes Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, and Naomi Campbell.
Knowing her son had a crush on the supermodels, Diana surprised him by inviting them over to the palace.
“I was probably a 12 or 13-year-old boy who had posters of them on his wall,” William later recalled.
“I went bright red and didn’t know quite what to say.”
15. Diana was considering marriage to surgeon Dr. Hasnat Khan after her split from Charles.
She had a discreet two-year relationship with the doctor, whom she reportedly called “Mr.
Wonderful.”
The couple discussed the possibility of marriage before the romance ended in the summer of 1997.
16. Diana’s sapphire engagement ring was later used by Prince William to propose to Kate Middleton.
After Diana’s death, her sons William and Harry each selected mementos from her jewelry collection.
Harry originally picked the sapphire ring, while William chose a gold Cartier watch.
But the brothers swapped items so William could use the ring to propose to his future bride.
17. Diana’s sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale was dating Prince Charles when Diana first met him.
Sarah and Charles had a brief romance in 1977. Diana was reintroduced to Charles while he was visiting the Spencer family home during that courtship.
18. Diana’s wedding train was 25 feet long.
At the time, it was the longest train in royal wedding history.
The dress, made of silk taffeta and antique lace, was designed by Elizabeth and David Emanuel.
19. Diana wore her family’s Spencer Tiara for her wedding rather than a royal tiara.
Most royal brides, including Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle, have worn tiaras on loan from the Queen for their weddings.
But Diana opted to wear the Spencer family’s heirloom tiara instead.
20. Diana worked at a kindergarten before becoming a royal.
The future princess held various jobs after dropping out of school at age 16, including working as a dance instructor, housecleaner and nanny.
At the time she began dating Charles, she was an assistant at the Young England kindergarten.
21. Diana fell in love with Prince Charles after seeing him as a “sad man” at her family home.
Diana was touched the first time she saw Charles as an adult because he seemed troubled.
“The first impact was ‘God, what a sad man,’” she later told biographer Andrew Morton.
“He came with his Labrador.
My sister was all over him like a bad rash.”
22. Diana asked the Queen for help with Charles’ affair, but was told “Charles is hopeless.”
In a private meeting, Diana pleaded with Queen Elizabeth II to intervene and stop Charles’ relationship with Camilla.
“I said, ‘What do I do?’
… and she said, ‘I don’t know what you should do.
Charles is hopeless,’” Diana recalled to her voice coach.
23. Diana was already Lady Diana Spencer before marrying Prince Charles.
As the daughter of the 8th Earl Spencer, she inherited the aristocratic title and was known as Lady Diana even prior to becoming Princess of Wales.
24. Diana spilled perfume on her wedding dress shortly before the ceremony.
According to her makeup artist, Diana tried on her dress on the morning of the wedding and accidentally spilled some perfume down the front.
To cover it up, she tucked her dress and held her hands over the spot as she walked down the aisle.
25. Diana and Charles both expressed doubts about their relationship before the wedding.
Diana later described the wedding day as “the worst day of my life.”
Charles also privately told friends he was in a “confused and anxious state of mind” in the hours before the ceremony.
26. Diana was the first British citizen to marry the heir to the throne in over 300 years.
While royal brides had traditionally come from foreign royal families, Diana was the first “commoner” to marry the heir apparent since Anne Hyde wed the future James II in 1660. 27. An estimated 750 million people in 74 countries watched Diana’s wedding on television.
The wedding of the century captured the world’s attention, with tens of thousands lining the streets of London and hundreds of millions tuning in on TV.
The BBC alone had 27 cameras filming the event.
28. Diana’s wedding cost an estimated $48 million (around $137 million today).
The extravagant wedding had an estimated 3,500 guests, including First Lady Nancy Reagan, Princess Grace of Monaco, and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Adjusted for inflation, the final price tag was over $100 million.
29. There were 27 wedding cakes at Diana’s reception.
The official cake was a 5-foot tall, 225 pound fruitcake decorated with the Windsor royal coat of arms and topped with roses, lilies of the valley and orchids.
But there were an additional 26 cakes donated by cake-makers from around the UK.
30. Diana omitted the word “obey” from her wedding vows.
In a first for a royal bride, Diana and Charles agreed she would not promise to “obey” him as part of the traditional vows.
Diana instead vowed to “love him, comfort him, honor and keep him.”
31. Charles forgot to kiss Diana after exchanging vows at the altar.
Possibly a sign of wedding day jitters, Charles and Diana walked down the aisle after being pronounced husband and wife without stopping to kiss.
They later made up for it with their famous kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace.
32. Diana’s dress designers hid an 18-karat gold horseshoe in the gown’s label for good luck.
On the morning of the wedding, Elizabeth and David Emanuel secretly attached a tiny diamond-studded horseshoe charm inside Diana’s dress as a token of good luck.
She didn’t know about the hidden charm until after the ceremony.
33. Diana met the Queen before she knew Charles, due to her aristocratic background.
Diana first met Queen Elizabeth when she was a child, long before her relationship with Charles began.
“I’ve known her since I was tiny so it was no big deal,” she later said of their early acquaintance.
34. Diana struggled in school and dropped out at age 16. She attended boarding school but had difficulty with academics, twice failing her O-level exams.
After leaving school, she attended a finishing school in Switzerland, but dropped out after one term.
35. Diana’s last phone call before her death was to journalist Richard Kay.
On August 30, 1997, the evening before she died, Diana called Kay from Paris to discuss what would be in the next day’s newspapers and “find out what was going on in the Press.”
It was the last time they spoke.
36. Diana hired a voice coach to help improve her public speaking skills.
In the mid-1990s, Diana began working with voice coach Peter Settelen to boost her confidence and become a better orator as she took on a more public role after her separation from Charles.
Settelen later sold tapes of their private sessions to TV networks.
37. Diana’s wedding dress had a hidden “something blue” sewn into the waistband.
Keeping with bridal tradition, a tiny blue bow was stitched inside the band of Diana’s antique lace and silk taffeta gown by designers Elizabeth and David Emanuel as the “something blue.”
38. Diana was distantly related to Winston Churchill and actress Audrey Hepburn.
The Spencer family had nobility on both sides, and Diana’s ancestry connected her to many famous faces.
She and Churchill were distant cousins.
She was also related to Hepburn, who like Diana became known as a style icon.
39. Diana grew up in a 100,000 square-foot home called Althorp House.
The Northamptonshire estate dates to the 16th century and has been the ancestral seat of the Spencer family for over 500 years.
It encompasses 13,000 acres of land with a stately 100,000 square-foot manor house.
40. Diana’s grandmothers worked as ladies-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.
They served the Queen Mother (Elizabeth II’s mother) for decades, long before Diana was born.
Lady Cynthia Spencer, Diana’s paternal grandmother, was a close confidante and lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother for over 50 years until her death in 2002. 41. Diana aspired to be a ballerina when she was young but grew too tall.
Ballet was one of her great passions growing up.
She dreamed of being a professional dancer but shot up to 5’10” as a teen, too tall for a ballerina.
Still, she continued to love and support ballet as an adult, becoming a patron of the English National Ballet.
42. Diana invented her own signature diving move called the “Spencer Special” while in school.
She was an accomplished swimmer and diver as a student.
The “Spencer Special” was said to create barely any splash on impact with the water when she dove.
43. Diana regularly swam laps in the pool at Buckingham Palace.
Swimming continued to be a favored form of exercise for her as a member of the royal family.
The palace pool was her usual spot for a regular workout.
44. Diana and Charles were distantly related, being 16th cousins once removed.
Unbeknownst to many at the time of their wedding, the royal couple were actually distant cousins through King Henry VII, who ruled in the early 16th century.
45. Diana’s nickname growing up was “Duch” because she acted like a duchess.
Even as a young girl, Diana’s regal poise earned her the slightly tongue-in-cheek moniker “Duch” (short for Duchess) from her family.
She was known for her perfect posture and grace.
46. Diana’s wedding was the first royal wedding held at St. Paul’s Cathedral since 1501. While Westminster Abbey was the more traditional spot for royal nuptials, Charles and Diana opted for the larger venue of St. Paul’s to accommodate more guests.
The last royal wedding there was between Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon.
47. Diana’s favorite breakfast before working out was baked beans, grapefruit, coffee, and orange juice.
Her personal chef Darren McGrady said Diana requested this specific pre-workout meal at least three times a week.
The carb-heavy combo fueled her morning exercise routine.
48. Diana’s body is buried on a small island in a lake on the Althorp estate.
After her funeral at Westminster Abbey, Diana was laid to rest in a private burial on her family’s estate, on an island known as “The Oval.”
The site is not accessible to the public, but visitors can pay respects at a memorial by the lake.
49. Diana was related to eight U.S. presidents.
Through various branches of her family tree, Diana was distantly related to George Washington, Calvin Coolidge, Rutherford B. Hayes, Millard Fillmore, Grover Cleveland, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush.
51. Diana’s wedding dress designer created a backup dress in case the original design was leaked to the press.
To throw off the rabid press interest in Diana’s dress, Elizabeth Emanuel made a second dress with a more pronounced neckline and fuller skirt as a decoy.
The duplicate dress was never completed but was made to look like a viable option in case of leaks.
52. A slice of Diana’s wedding cake sold at auction for over $1,000 in 2014. Even decades after the wedding, memorabilia from the royal nuptials continued to fetch high prices.
A single slice of the official fruitcake in its original presentation box sold at auction in Los Angeles for $1,375. 53. Diana was the first royal to give birth in a hospital rather than at home.
Breaking with the longstanding royal tradition of home birth, Diana delivered both Prince William and Prince Harry at the private Lindo Wing of St. Mary’s Hospital in London.
Kate Middleton followed in her footsteps, also giving birth there.
54. Diana chose her sons’ names herself, disagreeing with Charles’ preferences.
According to Andrew Morton’s biography, Charles wanted their firstborn to be named Arthur and their second son to be Albert.
But Diana insisted on William and Henry (Harry), the names she had her heart set on.
55. Diana took her sons to visit people dying of AIDS (though she told them it was cancer).
Diana was committed to educating William and Harry about the realities of the world, including the AIDS crisis.
Too young to understand the disease, she told the boys the patients were suffering from cancer instead.
56. Diana had to be sewn into her wedding dress on the day due to weight loss.
The stress of the engagement caused Diana to lose a dramatic amount of weight in the months before the wedding.
Her waistline shrank over 5 inches, requiring last-minute alterations to her dress and the seamstress to sew her into the gown on the big day.
57. Diana’s wedding ring was not custom-made but chosen from a catalog.
Unlike most royal brides before her, Diana did not have her wedding band custom designed.
Instead, she selected a simple gold band from the Garrard jewelry catalog, so that it would match her engagement ring.
58. Diana believed the press was her “best friend” when she was first engaged to Charles.
In retrospect, Diana said she was naive about her relationship with the media in the early days of her engagement.
“I thought the media was my friend,” she later told biographer Andrew Morton. “I was wrong.”
The constant hounding by paparazzi would become a major source of stress and paranoia for Diana.
59. Diana requested a young bridesmaid so it would be less obvious if she cried during the wedding.
According to bridesmaid India Hicks, Diana insisted on having a 5-year-old in her bridal party.
“She said, ‘I need a 5-year-old, so if I cry she won’t know it’s odd,’” Hicks later recalled.
“We all understood it was in case she needed an excuse for overflowing emotion.”
60. Diana’s honeymoon was spent on the Royal Yacht Britannia.
After the wedding, Charles and Diana boarded the royal yacht for a 14-day Mediterranean cruise with stops in Tunisia, Sardinia, Greece and Egypt.
They finished the honeymoon with a visit to Balmoral Castle in Scotland.
61. Diana called a suicide hotline for help during her marriage troubles.
At her lowest point grappling with bulimia and depression over Charles’ infidelity, Diana called a 24-hour suicide hotline under a pseudonym.
According to the counselor she spoke to, Diana said she “felt like the whole world was collapsing in on her.”
62. Diana wrote personal thank-you notes to her wedding dress designers and seamstress.
To show her appreciation for their hard work, Diana sent handwritten thank-you notes to Elizabeth and David Emanuel and to Barbara Daly, the dressmaker who sewed her into the gown.
The designers kept the notes as mementos.
63. Diana visited her hometown homeless center, The Passage, at least 16 times.
Located near Kensington Palace, Diana made frequent low-key visits to the shelter to serve breakfast to the homeless residents, often bringing William and Harry with her.
She became the organization’s patron in 1992. 64. Diana auctioned off 79 of her dresses for charity a few months before she died.
The Christie’s auction of Diana’s most iconic gowns raised over $3 million for AIDS and cancer charities.
“Yes, of course it is a wrench to let go of these beautiful dresses,” she said at the time.
“However, I am extremely happy that others can now share the joy I had wearing them.”
65. Diana had a secret second wedding dress in case of emergency.
What’s a royal wedding without a scandal?
Diana’s dress designers, the Emanuels, created a secret second dress in case the design of her primary dress was leaked to the press before the big day.
The alternate dress reportedly had more lace embroidery and a larger skirt.
66. Diana hand-picked her wedding tiara.
Unlike most royal brides who borrowed tiaras from the queen’s collection, Diana opted to wear the Spencer family tiara, an heirloom passed down through generations on her father’s side.
The diamond tiara dates back to the 1700s.
67. Diana laid her wedding bouquet at the grave of the Unknown Warrior.
In another wedding-day break with royal tradition, Diana did not toss her bouquet after the ceremony.
Instead, she stopped to lay the flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior as she departed Westminster Abbey—a tribute to her great-uncle, who was killed in World War I.
68. Diana watched reruns of her wedding video when she couldn’t sleep.
In the early days of her marriage, when Charles’ busy royal schedule left Diana alone at night, she stayed up watching recordings of her fairytale wedding day, according to her biographer Andrew Morton.
The viewings were a source of comfort amid her loneliness.
69. Diana sent handwritten thank-you notes to well-wishers after the wedding.
In the weeks following the wedding, Kensington Palace was inundated with over 47,000 letters and cards of congratulations.
Diana reportedly spent hours each day writing personalized responses to many of the well-wishers.
70. Diana chose her wedding perfume because it was the “strongest” scent.
For her wedding day fragrance, Diana selected Quelques Fleurs by Houbigant Paris.
“She always wore the strongest perfume,” her makeup artist Mary Greenwell later recalled, “and that was it.”
