Friday, 22 Nov 2024

How Elton John exposed critical character weakness in Princess Diana

Diana was considered to be one of the most photographed women in the world during the Nineties. Ever since her engagement to Prince Charles had been announced, she had become a global icon, known for her compassion and widely believed to be a great influence on fashion at the time. When her marriage subsequently began to crumble, it was a source of great speculation – and she began to lean on many of her high-profile friends for support.

She reportedly told George Michael all the “grim” details about how the divorce made her feel, and allegedly once snuck out to a gay bar in disguise with Freddie Mercury.

However, it was the singer Elton John who was her closest friend.

In his 2019 autobiography, ‘Me: Elton John’, he revealed how they fell out not long before her tragic death in 1997 – and how that dispute exposed a critical flaw in his close friend.

He wrote: “She was a very dear friend for years, and then, completely unexpectedly, we fell out.

“She was surrounding herself instead with people who told her what she wanted to hear, or who would listen and nod when she came out with some of the more paranoid theories she’d developed about the Royal Family since her divorce.

“I knew from personal experience that wasn’t a healthy situation.”

Diana was known to be quite distressed towards the end of her marriage with Charles.

The two of them officially separated in 1992, and spent several years sniping at one another through media channels, but they did not divorce until 1996.

Diana made it clear in her scandalous 1995 Panorama interview that she did not want to divorce her husband, but the interview itself actually pushed the Queen to instruct the royal couple to make their split official.

The divorce settlement was also thought to have been a difficult time for the ‘People’s Princess’.

The Sun revealed in August 2017 how the Princess of Wales had told George Michael, in July 1996, that her divorce had been “pretty grim”.

She added: “Not a very loving, compassionate family, this one I’m leaving.”

While Diana walked away with a lump sum of £17 million with £400,000 per year, she was stripped of her official title Her Royal Highness, an adjustment which she struggled with.

Elton explained in his autobiography how their fallout continued for some months: “I didn’t speak to her again until the day Gianni was murdered.”

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Gianni Versace was a mutual friend and he was brutally assassinated in 1997.

Elton continued: “She was the first person to call me after John Reid rang and told me he was dead.

“I don’t even know how she got hold of the number; we hadn’t had the house in Nice for long. She was just down the coast, in St-Tropez, on Dodi Fayed’s yacht. She asked how I was, if I’d spoken to Donatello.

Then she said: ‘I’m so sorry. It was a silly falling out. Let’s be friends.”

Diana tragically died not long after the conversation, from injuries sustained in a car crash in Paris.

Emma Corrin is expected to play Diana in the fourth series of the Netflix drama, The Crown.

The show will cover her tricky marriage with Charles and his ongoing affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles.

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