When Diana, Princess Of Wales, died in a car crash in 1997, it seemed like the entire world mourned. Though Diana had divorced her husband, future King Of England Prince Charles, a few years earlier, she’d remained in the public eye, whether by her own volition or not.
“Before we made this movie,” says Stewart, “I didn’t have a very involved perception of her. I knew that she was somebody who was loved and that we lost too soon, and then in going through her life and the way other people experienced her and what I could glean from videos and pictures and things that she said herself… it is cryptic and there are so many layers to trying to interpret what her inner life may have been because it’s not like she had journals to read. “
Calling Diana an “ironically unknowable person,” Stewart says she thinks the late royal’s legacy endures not just because of the popularity of her children Harry and William, but also because “there is multiplicity in the way that we talk about her in art. She does not go away. She’s just on our cultural psyche, and is very, very much present in that.”
Stewart also told us that she viewed Diana as “a very human subject,” but that she also thinks she was “a wonderful person” with “an unbelievable empathy… that is rare.”
