Diana

Fashion icon, humanitarian and global superstar - the people's princess appeared to have it all but her reality was far from a fairytale. On the 25th anniversary of Diana's death, Kylie Walters looks at the life of the royal rebel who shook the monarchy to its core

- Kylie Walters

The very public life of Diana, Princess of Wales ended just as it had started 16 years earlier: with hundreds of thousands lining the streets and millions globally tuning in to watch. The 20-year-old’s 1981 wedding to Prince Charles was cause for great celebration, but her final journey, at 36, through the streets of London, with her two young sons made to walk – heads bowed – behind her coffin, threatened to bring down the 1200-year-old British institution she had helped revitalise.

In the years between, Diana’s life had swung from dizzying highs to brutal lows. The great tragedy of the woman who would become the most loved and photographed of her generation is that she spent her days crippled by feelings of loneliness and inadequacy.

“The public wanted a fairy princess,” Diana told her biographer, Andrew Morton, in 1991. “Little did they realise that the individual was crucifying herself inside because she didn’t think she was good enough.”

Diana Frances Spencer started life as the aristocratic girl next door to the British royal family. She was born on July 1, 1961, at Park House, a small mansion within Sandringham estate, which the Spencers rented from Queen Elizabeth.

Diana’s happy, blue-blooded country childhood was shattered at age five when her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, “decided to leg it”, as Diana put it, leaving her father, John Spencer, for another man. A bitter divorce followed, with her father winning custody of the four children: Diana, older sisters Sarah and Jane, and younger brother Charles. The trauma would have lifelong repercussions on Diana’s relationships.