Why are we endlessly fascinated with Princess Di? Here’s what ‘Spencer’ gets right and wrong
More than 23 years after her death, Princess Diana is newly ubiquitous in pop culture.
In the last year, we’ve gotten the long-awaited Diana season of “The Crown,” which swept the Emmys in September; a Diana musical on Broadway (and Netflix), which appears less likely to win awards; fresh controversy over Diana’s 1995 tell-all conversation with Martin Bashir; Oprah Winfrey’s equally jaw-dropping interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex that felt like history repeating itself.
Now we’ve got “Spencer,” a biopic (of sorts) following the former Lady Diana Spencer as she unravels over the course of a particularly miserable Christmas holiday at Sandringham, the queen’s Norfolk estate, in 1991. It is directed by Pablo Larrain, who with his film “Jackie” showed he has a knack for shedding new light on lonely yet impossibly privileged women who’ve been widely mythologized.
And, well, it certainly is a new version of Diana — one that already has monarchists in the U.K. clutching their pearls (if not spitting them out into their soup).
Perhaps it’s a good thing to be ruffling so many feathers? And why do people care so much about Diana’s image decades after her death? Los Angeles Times writers and
