The 8 Most Heartbreaking Moments in HBO’s Princess Diana Documentary
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To celebrate Princess Diana on the 20th anniversary of her tragic death, her sons Princes William and Harry have done something they’ve already vowed to never do again—publicly share their personal memories of the woman they suddenly lost when William was 15 and Harry was just 12. In the HBO documentary Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, airing Monday evening, the royals allow cameras to capture them as they flip through the childhood photo albums Diana herself assembled for the boys over 20 years ago. The result is a loving and remarkably intimate portrait of Diana which William and Harry hope will endear and introduce the People’s Princess to an entirely new generation. Ahead, the most intimate moments and heartbreaking revelations.
Their Favorite Memories of Diana
Harry confesses that whenever he is asked to share a memory of his mother, “All I can hear is her laugh in my head, and that sort of crazy laugh of where there was just pure happiness shown on her face. One of her mottos to me was, you know, ‘You can be as naughty as you want, just don’t get caught.”
William reveals how Diana loved naughty greeting cards, and took great joy in sending them to her son at boarding school. He also recalls how Diana once surprised him by arranging for Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, and Christy Turlington—the very supermodels whose images were wallpapered on his bedroom wall—to be at home when he returned from school.
“I was probably 12 or 13 at the time,” William says of the surprise. “I went bright red, didn’t really know what to say, and sort of fumbled, and I think I pretty much fell down the stairs. . . I was completely and utterly sort of awestruck. That was a very funny memory that’s lived with me forever about her, loving and embarrassing and being the sort of the joker.”
Their Final Phone Call
The film’s more heartbreaking moments arise when William and Harry, for the first time publicly, discuss their final phone call with their mother—received when the boys were on holiday with their father’s family. When she called from Paris, the boys had not seen their mother in weeks, but were so engrossed in a game with their cousins that they did not have much time for their mother on the phone.
“I can’t really necessarily remember what I said, but all I do remember is. . .you know, regretting for the rest of my life how short the phone call was,” Harry says. “I have to sort of deal with that for the rest of my life. Not knowing that that. . .was the last time I was going to speak to my mum, and how differently that conversation would have panned out if I’d had even the slightest inkling that that. . .her life was going to be taken that night.”
“Harry and I were in a desperate rush to say ‘goodbye, see you later, can I go off?’” William adds. “If I’d known what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have been so blasé about it. That phone call sticks in my mind quite heavily.”
Harry Recalls What it Felt Like to Get a Hug From His Mom
"She would just engulf you and squeeze you as tight as possible,” Harry says in the documentary. “And being as short as I was then, there was no escape; you were there and you were there for as long as she wanted to hold you. Even talking about it now I can feel the hugs that she used to give us and, you know, I miss that, I miss that feeling, I miss that part of a family, I miss having that mother. . .to be able to give you those hugs and give you that compassion that I think everybody needs.”
Harry Meets Two People Who Interacted With His Mother More Recently Than He Did
In the documentary, Harry meets two landmine victims, Zarko Peric and Malic Bradaric, whom Diana met on her last mission to Bosnia—after she bid farewell to her boys so they could spend the summer holiday with their father. Noting the strangeness of this timeline, Harry tells Peric and Bradaric, “Well, you saw my mother more recently than I did, I guess.”
William Reflects on His Good Fortune To Have Been Diana’s Son
“Losing someone so close to you is utterly devastating, especially at that age,” William remarks. “There’s not many days that go by that I don’t think of her. I have a smile every now and again when someone says something, and I think that’s exactly what she would have said, or she would have enjoyed that comment. So they always live with you people, you know, you lose like that.”
“I give thanks that I was lucky enough to be her son and know her for the 15 years that I did,” he continues. “She set us up really well. She gave us the right tools, and has prepared us well for life not obviously knowing what was going to happen.”
William Reveals How He Has Posthumously Introduced Diana to His Young Children
In one of the documentary’s most emotional moments, William is asked how he keeps Diana’s memory alive for his children.
“I think [by] constantly talking about Granny Diana,” William answers. “So we’ve got more photos up ‘round the house now of her, and we talk about her a bit and stuff. And it’s hard, because obviously Catherine didn’t know her, so she cannot really provide that level of detail. So I do regularly, putting George or Charlotte to bed, talk about her and just try and remind them that there are two grandmothers, there were two grandmothers in in their lives, and so it’s important that they know who she was and that she existed.”
As if that were not heartbreaking enough, William continues by joking about what it would be like if Diana were around today.
“She’d be a nightmare grandmother. She’d love the children to bits, but she’d be an absolute nightmare. She’d come in, probably around bath time, cause an amazing amount of scene—bubbles everywhere, bath water all over the place—and then leave.”
William Reveals That He Felt His Mother’s Presence During His 2011 Wedding
“When it came to the wedding, I did really feel that she was there,” he says. “You know, there was times when you look to someone or something for strength and I very much felt she was there for me.”
Even Though Harry Had Only 12 Years With Her, He Still Considers Her the Best Mother
“She was our mum,” Harry notes. “She still is our mum. As a son I would say this, she was the best mum in the world. She smothered us with love, that’s for sure. There’s not a day that William and I don’t wish that she was—we don’t wish that she was still around, and we wonder what kind of a mother she would be now, and what kind of a public role she would have, and what a difference she would be making.”
This story originally appeared on Vanity Fair.
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