“This is the first time that the two of us have ever spoken about her as a mother,” Prince Harry says in the first few moments of “Diana, Our Mother,” a documentary about the late Princess of Wales that airs on HBO on Monday night. Hearing this, one assumes, at first, that Harry means that he and Prince William, his older brother, have never before publicly discussed their relationship with their mother, who died when the princes were twelve and fifteen. By the end of this irreproachably circumspect film, however, a viewer might wonder whether Harry’s words were intended more literally: Could it be that the princes have never sat down together and talked about their mother’s influence upon their lives? “Diana, Our Mother” makes it seem entirely possible. “The first time I cried was at the funeral,” Harry tells his interviewer. “And probably since then, maybe only once.” With what passes in the English upper class—and, arguably, among the English at large—as profound self-knowledge, Harry continues, stammering over his words. “So there’s a lot of grief that still needs to be”—he whistles, and makes a downward flushing gesture with his arms—“Let out.”
It will be twenty years this August since Diana met her death in the back seat of a Mercedes in a grim Seine-side tunnel in Paris. This unfortunate anniversary provides the occasion for all manner of commemoration, and this film is only the first of several that will mine different aspects of her life and death in search of a new angle upon what might be considered an exhausted subject. Later in the summer, for those with the appetite, will come reëxaminations of her death—was it an accident, or a conspiracy?—and remembrances of the day of her funeral, which was reportedly watched by two and a half billion people worldwide.
“Diana, Our Mother” begins with, and returns to, the conceit of the princes leafing through recently discovered family albums—which Harry says he has been reluctant to look at until now. These include images never before seen in public, of the unfailingly photogenic Princess holding a freckled young Harry in an embrace on the beach, and of the two princes dressed as British bobbies, or in their school uniforms. But, despite this appearance of intimacy, this film does not add much to the already well-known lore of Diana. It does not even seem to aspire to. It reiterates her commitment to charitable work, and her skillful leveraging of her immense charisma on behalf of the causes she supported, reproducing the celebrated photograph of the Princess shaking the hand of an AIDS patient at the Middlesex Hospital in 1987, a time when fear of the disease, as yet untreatable, led many to shun the suffering. The gesture, like so many the Princess made, was frank, open, and full of feeling: the characteristics that made her beloved, albeit with an often unacknowledged assist from her physical beauty, which met the dictionary definition of English Rose.
There are reminiscences of Diana from her younger brother, Earl Spencer, who, unlike his ageless sister, has turned incipiently jowly, like the best of his illustrious ancestors. (Winston Churchill was a member of the Spencer family.) And there are testimonials to her charm from family friends, such as Harry Herbert, who confesses to being smitten by her the first time he laid eyes on her. Herbert, the documentary does not take the trouble to explain, is the younger brother of the Earl of Carnarvon, whose family seat is the immense Jacobean pile in Hampshire, Highclere Castle. That’s Downton Abbey to you. The extraordinary nature of Diana’s background is hinted at by Prince Harry, who calls her “a normal twenty-year-old—Lady Spencer,” with a rueful acknowledgement of her privilege, and his own.
Inevitably, the documentary alludes to Diana’s unhappiness in her marriage, which is evidenced by photographs taken on a state trip to Korea at the end of 1992. But it does not mention the other myriad events that rocked the royals that year. There was the publication of “Diana: Her True Story,” written by Andrew Morton, with, it was later revealed, the active coöperation of the Princess, which blew the lid off her supposedly fairy-tale marriage. There was also the leaking of recorded phone conversations between Diana and her paramour, James Hewitt, as well as the separation of Charles’s younger brother, Prince Andrew, from Sarah Ferguson, after six years of marriage. All this led the Queen to refer in a speech to her “annus horribilis,” which is as close as the current British monarch gets to confessional mode. Things got worse the following month, when the so-called Camillagate tapes were widely published, revealing Charles’s wish that he could be Camilla Parker-Bowles’s tampon, a strangely touching and imaginative intimacy. By then, the Palace had announced an “amicable separation” between Charles and Diana.
What “Diana, Our Mother” does offer is a very guarded glimpse of the two people most afflicted by her death, her sons, who were obliged to stand with their heads bowed as her cortège passed by, a wreath lying atop it with the unbearable inscription “Mummy.” Dressed informally—William wears a blue blazer and a windowpane shirt unbuttoned at the neck, while Harry wears a casual cornflower-blue shirt—and speaking in the dialect known as Estuary English, which has become the vernacular both of the upper and middle classes since their parents’ generation, the princes remember her with poignant affection. “The best mum in the world,” Harry calls her, with his Adam’s apple bobbing frantically, a tribute any son might pay the mother he lost too young.
The princes speak of Diana’s influence upon their lives: indeed, one gets the sense that their willingness to participate in a project like this documentary is inspired by Diana’s example. William credits her with “showing what feelings meant, and how important it was to feel,” and the filmmakers do a creditable job of suggesting that, in his own charitable commitments, William has inherited some of the instinct for naturalness that was his mother’s special gift. Indeed, much of the documentary is dedicated to showing the princes at work on the causes that their mother supported first: Prince Harry, who served ten years in the British Army, is seen campaigning against land mines, as well as rather awkwardly rubbing shoulders with one of nature’s monarchs, Rihanna, while championing H.I.V. awareness. Prince William consorts easily with residents of a homeless center, and speaks with feeling with parents who have been bereaved. Presumably, the princes’ coöperation with the filmmakers was given on condition that their causes would be prominently included, a quid pro quo of the sort that their mother utterly mastered.
It is only in glimpses that the extraordinary circumstances of Diana’s maternal life, and of her sons’ filial experience, are shown. Much has been made in the British press of the princes’ accounts in this film of their last conversations with their mother: a phone call from Paris the morning before the crash, while William and Harry were on holiday at Balmoral Castle, the Queen’s estate in the Scottish Highlands. Both confess that they were eager to get off the phone to return to playing with their cousins. “If I’d known now what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have been so blasé about it,” William says. Harry acknowledges that he can’t remember the content of the conversation. “But all I do remember is probably regretting for the rest of my life how short the phone call was,” he says.
But the film also makes clear, without saying so explicitly, how curtailed the princes’ time with their parents was, as a matter of course. Diana is recalled as sending saucy greeting cards to her sons, who were absent at boarding school. After their parents’ separation, the princes were, like all children of divorce, shuttled between homes. Unlike most children of divorce, those homes were numerous, and their parents’ larger obligations to the nation or the Commonwealth were manifold. “I never enjoyed speaking to my parents on the phone, and we spent far too much time speaking on the phone rather than speaking to each other, because of—just the way the situation was,” Harry says, with another eloquent, empty gesture of the hands.
What Harry doesn’t say in this interview is that he has, in fact, talked about the pain of his bereavement, not with a television journalist looking for a moist-eyed scoop—a parcelling out of pain for public consumption—but with a mental-health professional. In April, Harry spoke with remarkable frankness to Bryony Gordon, a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and the host of the podcast “Mad World,” which focusses on mental health. In the interview, he explained that he, Prince William, and Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, had founded their first joint charitable endeavor, “Heads Together,” committed to raising awareness of and finding treatment for unresolved mental-health issues in the homeless, the young, and in military veterans. “Everybody is gagging to talk about it,” he said.
He, too, has sought professional help, he said. “I can safely say that losing my mum at the age of twelve, and therefore shutting down all of my emotions for the last twenty years, had had a quite serious effect not only on my personal life, but also my work as well,” he told Gordon. “I have probably been very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions, when all sorts of grief and sort of lies and misconceptions and everything are coming at you from every angle.” He went through what he described as “two years of chaos,” in his late twenties, before being coaxed by his brother and other friends into talking about his loss. Speaking of the necessity for openness, he said, “What we are trying to do is to normalize the conversation, to the point where anyone can sit down and have a coffee and say, ‘You know what, I’ve had a really shit day, can I just tell you about it?’ ”
Harry’s statements to Gordon were lauded by mental-health professionals as offering a tremendous step forward in a culture where, as the prince himself pointed out, the tradition of the stiff upper lip prevails. Sir Simon Wessely, the President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, remarked to the Guardian, “He has a reach across the world that people like me can only dream of.” Gordon told Harry that his acknowledgement of his own struggles would mean the world to young people struggling with depression. “And I am not just blowing smoke up your arse,” she added, an assurance that most members of the Royal Family have probably never received.
Harry’s contribution to lifting the stigma from mental-health issues may not yet be measurable, but it is surely profound; and if his remarks were not quite on the scale of Diana’s shaking of hands at the Middlesex Hospital in 1987, they were as close as any senior member of the Royal Family has come since then to expressing his mother’s uncalculating gift for empathy. That admission was also far more open, and far more heartfelt, than anything either prince says in “Diana, Our Mother,” where their light chat over family photos seems contrived to mask a depth of feeling. Harry’s podcast remarks, on the other hand, suggest what might be easily surmised of the princes’ lives: that loss, and what comes after the loss, is Diana’s true legacy to the sons she left behind.