Princess Diana has long been considered an icon. But in The Crown’s season-four episode “Fairytale,” series creator Peter Morgan sees Diana’s mammoth-icon quotient and raises it—with a sequence in which a teenage Diana (played by Emma Corrin), bored and lonely in Kensington Palace, roller-skates down the gilded, gallery halls with Duran Duran blasting on her Walkman.
But did Diana really roller-skate down the queen’s halls like a punk princess in pink gingham? (Not that anyone would have likely cared—two-time Buckingham Palace intruder Michael Fagan helped himself to wine, gave himself a self-guided tour, and tried out the thrones before going into the queen’s bedroom and having a morning chat.) Or was this simply a vivid, fictional encapsulation of how the late Diana brought her pop-music-listening and fun-loving personality to the palace?
Incredibly, according to The Crown producer Oona O’Beirn, Diana really did skate down those halls.
“It’s true!” O’Beirn told Vogue, revealing that the show’s research team also found evidence that Diana “rode her bicycle around [inside the palace] the night before she got married, but we didn’t manage to get that in [the episode].” Speaking about the technical difficulty of skating down palace halls, O’Beirn added, “It’s hard to do on some of those carpets. I think she probably stuck to less interesting bits of the palace, but we wanted to set it in the bits of the palace we’d already seen. It reminds you that Diana was only 19 at that time.”
In a separate interview, Emma Corrin, who plays Diana, said she is choosing to believe that the roller-skating scenario happened in real life.
“I think she [really] did do that,” Corrin told Sky News. “Do you know what, it was that kind of thing, it was the roller-skating, the sense of fun that she obviously had before she became royal and that she kind of maintained, that I think was quite rare.”
“Roller-skating through Buckingham Palace is a great example,” she added. “Also, the dancing…and how much that meant to her, and how she used that as a kind of form of expression. I really loved discovering that.”
While there aren’t photos of the actual Diana on four-wheel roller skates, there are paparazzi photos of Diana zooming through Kensington Gardens on roller blades—which ran in the News of the World along with the headline “Princess of Wheels.”
As for that bicycle story, Tina Brown wrote about it in her Diana biography The Diana Chronicles. Per the Queen Mother’s page William Tallon, Diana was wandering around Clarence House the night before her fairy-tale wedding to Charles in search of company.
“She seemed at such a loose end that Tallon invited her into his office for a chat with himself and an equerry,” wrote Brown. “He remembers he asked her, ‘Well so shall we all have a drink?’ And the equerry ‘poured me a stiff one, and an orange juice for Lady Diana and she was very happy. Then she saw my bicycle standing against a wall and she got on it and started to ride round and round, ringing the bell and singing, ‘I’m going to marry the Prince of Wales tomorrow.’ Ring ring. ‘I’m going to marry the Prince of Wales tomorrow!’ Ring, ring.”
“I can hear that bicycle ringing now,” added Tallon. “She was just a child, you know, just a little girl.”
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