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 |