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Diana's 10th death anniversary:

Diana still alive in death

LEGACY LIVES ON: Ten years after her high-speed death in a Paris tunnel, Princess Diana shows no sign of retreating into the shadows - her most enduring legacy the ability, even now, to engage, capture and divide public opinion.


Diana: England’s Rose

Admirers, critics and the staunchly indifferent are all united by the impossibility of completely ignoring the woman whose name and image remain a pervasive and instantly recognisable cultural reference point, in Britain and across much of the world.

A perennial stream of conspiracy theories, tell-all memoirs, docudramas and official investigations into her death have all kept Diana on the public stage over the years, with the occasional turn in the spotlight.

And with the coming 10th anniversary of the August 31 car crash in the Pont de L'Alma tunnel next to the Seine that killed her and her lover, Dodi Fayed, the media glare that was partly blamed for her death is back with a vengeance.

As it did many times while she was still alive, Time magazine put the late princess on the cover of its latest issue and ran a series of commemorative articles under the title "Why Diana Mattered".

A slew of 15 new books, many of them sympathetic biographies, have been published around the world, while documentaries on Diana's life and her fateful last night are springing up in Britain's television schedules.

Most are retrospectives, others assess her legacy, including her impact on the royal family, which came under fire for being out of touch with the British people during the outpouring of public grief that followed her death.

The events between the crash and Diana's high-profile funeral a week later are widely seen as having forced the royals to ditch their stuffy traditionalism and emulate her easy style and common touch.

Meanwhile, a photographic exhibition documenting her life as a royal wife, mother, charity worker and global style icon is running at the National Portrait Gallery in central London.

Cultural commentators have been working overtime to feed the hunger for opinion on the woman who then prime minister Tony Blair famously eulogised as "the people's princess," with their appraisals running the gamut from adoration to disgust.

"Authentically compassionate and caring," was the verdict of recent Diana biographer and former New Yorker and Vanity fair editor Tina Brown, while the Australian academic and feminist, Germaine Greer, labelled Diana "a devious moron."

Assessments of Diana have long been divided into two broad camps: one that applauds her for shaking up the monarchy, raising AIDS awareness and campaigning against landmines, and another that condemns her as a cynical media manipulator and self-obsessed socialite.

The 10-year anniversary has also prompted the editors of the three biggest-selling British tabloids at the time to concede that they had helped create an atmosphere in which the paparazzi, who were pursuing Diana when her car crashed in Paris, were out of control.

"I felt huge responsibility for what happened and I think everyone in the media did," former News of the World editor Phil Hall admitted on the ITV television documentary "Diana's Last Summer."

Her death sparked legal action against some of the pursuing photographers, a French judicial inquiry and a three-year investigation by British police into claims that the 36-year-old royal was killed in a shadowy secret service plot.

The claims - some maintained by Fayed's father Mohammed, owner of London's Harrods department store, others still swirling around the Internet - will be aired again at a coroner's inquest into Diana's death later this year.

As a tourist attraction, Diana still draws some 300,000 people each year to Kensington Palace in London where she lived, while one million flock to the nearby Diana Memorial Fountain in Hyde Park.

In July, a memorial concert at the city's Wembley Stadium organised by Diana's sons, princes William and Harry, was attended by 63,000 people, broadcast live to 140 countries and watched by 500 million viewers.

And, for the first time since her death, Diana's final resting place at her family home at Althorp, central England, will be open to the public on the anniversary. All tickets have already been snapped up.

Prince Harry, who was 12 when he walked through central London behind his mother's coffin at her funeral, admitted in a recent television interview that he was still haunted by the circumstances surrounding his mother's death.

"Whatever happened in that tunnel, you know, no-one will ever know. And I'm sure people will always think about that," Harry, now an army officer, told NBC television in the United States. "I'll never stop wondering."

AFP

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