The Crown season six: who are the real-life figures set to feature in the new series of the Netflix show?

Season six of The Crown – the last-ever return of the blockbuster Netflix show – is finally being released this evening.

The new series starts in the Nineties, one of the most difficult periods of modern British royal history. Season five gave us Diana and Charles' divorce, the Windsor Castle fire, scandalous interviews and tabloid photographs – but season six is set to address everything from Diana's tragic death in 1997 to William's romance with Kate Middleton in the early Noughties.

Based on real events, and real people’s lives, the TV dramatisation has come under fire for blurring the lines between history and fiction – even causing controversy in some quarters about its portrayal of the real people in this recent history.

So which real-life characters will make an appearance in the latest series, and what stories is the show likely to tell? Here’s our guide...

The showdown continues

Prince Charles

Series six begins in 1997, as Diana accepts Mohamed Al-Fayed's invitation to stay with him in his villa in the south of France.

The Nineties had been a scandalous period for the Palace, and Prince Charles was not immune from this. A full transcript, for example, of his 1989 call to Camilla, in which he said he would like to live inside her trousers and would like to come back in another life as “a Tampax”