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The True Story of Princess Diana's Vacation on Mohamed Al Fayed's Yacht in Saint Tropez

The trip features in the final season of The Crown .

"Everything about that trip to St. Tropez was heaven," Prince Harry shared about the vacation he and Prince William joined his mother for aboard the vessel in his memoir, Spare . Here, some of the most memorable photos of Princess Diana with her sons and the Fayeds on the Jonikal in July 1997.

Princess Diana on board the Jonikal yacht, where she first got to know Dodi better.

Princess Diana was friendly with Mohamed Al Fayed, who had been in royal-adjacent circles for some time due to his ownership of Harrods department store.

Diana brought her two sons, Prince William (head down, center) and Prince Harry (right), on vacation with her.

"We'd been with Mummy weeks earlier when she first met him, in St. Tropez," Harry writes in Spare —the 'him' refers to Dodi. "We were having a grand time, just the three of us, staying at some old gent's villa."

At the time, Diana had recently broken up with British Pakistani heart surgeon Dr. Hasnat Khan, who could not handle the media attention surrounding their relationship. Her friends later shared that they believed her fling with Dodi was to make Hasnat jealous.

Diana pictured with her bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, who would later be the sole survivor of the crash that killed Princess Diana and Dodi.

Princess Diana waved to Trevor ashore in Saint-Tropez.

The Princess looked happy to be spending time with her sons.

Harry writes, "There was much laughter, horseplay, the norm whenever Mummy and Willy and I were together, though even more so on that holiday. Everything about that trip to St. Tropez was heaven. The weather was sublime, the food was tasty, Mummy was smiling."

Paparazzi snapped Diana giving her youngest, Prince Harry, a big hug.

Diana, ever the style icon, had some great swimwear moments on this vacation, including this neon set.

She also rocked a leopard-print one piece.

Princess Diana was beginning to navigate her not-quite-royal, but definitely not normal, life post her divorce from Prince Charles .

At the time, Dodi was reportedly dating American model Kelly Fisher —and she said that she was actually on the yacht in Saint Tropez with the Fayeds and Princess Diana.

Princess Diana made sure the vacation was fun for her sons; here, she rode on a jet ski with Prince Harry.

"Best of all," Harry remembers in Spare, "there were jet skis. Whose were they? Don't know. But I vividly remember Willy and me riding them out to the deepest part of the channel, circling while waiting for the big ferries to come. We used their massive wakes as ramps to get airborne. I'm not sure how we weren't killed"

Wearing life jackets, the royal mother-son duo zoomed around in the water together.

Princess Diana smiled as she swam in the sea off the coast of France.

Emily Burack (she/her) is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, culture, the royals, and a range of other subjects. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma , a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram .

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Diana's last day: Dodi's yacht, a Ritz suite, a diamond ring and relentless photographers

Diana, divorced from Prince Charles after he cheated on her, was the mother of the future king of England and the most photographed woman in the world

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By Michael S. Rosenwald

The last day of Princess Diana’s life began on the top deck of her lover’s yacht, with croissants and fresh jams.

Diana and her beau, Dodi Al Fayed, sipped their coffee marveling at the breathtaking Emerald Coast in Sardinia. Diana took hers with milk. Fayed took his black. There were kiwis, too.

“They were in a good mood,” his butler remembered later. “They were always laughing, holding hands.”

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Their romance was a whirlwind — passionate, thrilling, scandalous. Fayed, the son of Harrod’s department store owner Mohamed Al-Fayed, was a rich playboy. Diana, divorced from Prince Charles after he cheated on her, was the mother of the future king of England and the most photographed woman in the world.

That Saturday — Aug. 30, 1997 — promised to be a moment of change. The princess knew it. She snuck a call to Richard Kay, a friend who covered the Royals for the Daily Mail, and told him, as he later wrote, “she had decided to radically change her life.”

“She was going to complete her obligations to her charities,” Kay continued, “and then, around November, would completely withdraw from her formal public life.” Diana had not told Kay why, but he had a hunch: “They were, to use an old but priceless cliche, blissfully happy. I cannot say for certain that they would have married, but in my view it was likely.”

In the 20 years since she’s been gone, there have been countless revisions to this love story. Her friends and relatives: They weren’t in love! His friends and relatives: They were in love!

Get a dash of perspective along with the trending news of the day in a very readable format.

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Last week, in the Daily Mail, Kay published an article with this headline: “Was Diana about to dump Dodi?” In it, he quoted Diana’s private secretary saying she’d planned to return home after becoming bored with Fayed.

“It’s very much a personal view,” the secretary said, “but I don’t think she would have seen Dodi again once she got back.”

Whatever the case, Fayed wanted to propose that fateful night. It was summer. As they were on holiday, Britain announced plans to invite the Irish Republican Army for peace talks. Conspiracies theories about the suicide of Vincent Foster, President Bill Clinton’s lawyer, were spreading. Israel and Lebanon were sparring with one another.

Fayed’s primary concern was the six-figure diamond ring waiting in Paris. People close to Fayed said the couple picked it out a week earlier even though they had been dating less than a month.

The danger of their relationship wasn’t its brevity. To royal watchers, to Buckingham Palace, and no doubt to the British tabloids whose photographers were hounding them, the threat was something the couple apparently had not yet considered, even as rumours swirled that Diana was already pregnant.

“For the mother of the future king of England to bear the child of a Muslim Arab, a child who would be the half sibling of the heir to the throne, would be embarrassing in the eyes of the royal family and the ruling Establishment,” former Time magazine reporters Tom Sancton and Scott MacLeod wrote in their book, Death of a Princess .

Fayed’s calendar that day had just one entry — at 6:30 p.m., he was to pick up the ring at a store near his father’s hotel in Paris, The Ritz. They left the boat for Fayed’s plane around 11:30 a.m., taking along the butler and a masseuse for Fayed’s painful back.

As soon as they landed in Paris, Fayed saw the paparazzi out his window.

“Dodi did not want this special occasion ruined by a bunch of a shutter-happy cowboys trying to corral them on motorcycles and shoving lenses in their faces,” the ex-Time reporters wrote. “As soon as the door opened, cameras started clicking.”

The aggressiveness of the photographers — and their sheer numbers — would increase as the day progressed.

Diana and Fayed arrived at The Ritz in the late afternoon. She went to the salon for a hair appointment. He went to the jeweler. The couple then rested in the hotel’s Imperial Suite before going to Fayed’s apartment to get dressed for dinner. She checked in with her children, who were in Scotland with Prince Charles and the queen.

“On that Saturday evening, Diana was as happy as I have ever known her,” her friend Kay wrote in the Daily Mail. “For the first time in years, all was well with her world.”

They left for Fayed’s apartment around 7 p.m., trailed by photographers. More were waiting at the building’s front door when they arrived. Fayed fumed. There was an ugly shoving match.

Once inside, Fayed pulled his butler aside, telling him about his plan to propose that night.

“The ring was on the nightstand in his bedroom,” author Christopher Anderson wrote in “The Day Diana Died.” “Dodi had checked to make sure they had several bottles of Dom Pérignon on ice for the big moment.”

But dinner was a bust.

The first restaurant they tried — Chez Benoit, a cozy, casual bistro not far from the city centre – was quickly overrun by photographers. They split and headed for The Ritz, ducking into the dining room hoping to be left alone.

The princess ordered vegetable tempura. Fayed ordered grilled turbot.

“No sooner had they ordered,” the ex-Time reporters wrote, “they began to feel the indiscreet stares of other diners.”

The couple left and had the food delivered to the Imperial Suite. Fayed’s plan was in shambles. They had to get back to the apartment. But how? The hotel was swarming with photographers.

Fayed devised a plan: The couple’s driver and bodyguards would make a big show out front, appearing to get their caravan of Mercedes sedans ready to leave. Meanwhile, the Princess and Fayed would slip out the back door, in a borrowed car driven by a hotel security officer.

What happened next was the subject of lengthy investigations and conspiracy theories that live on today. The couple did get away. But the driver, it turned out, was drunk.

As the couple sped off, the photographers out front got tipped off about the escape, quickly catching up on their motorcycles. Their driver darted in and out of traffic, wrecking spectacularly inside the Pont de l’Alma tunnel near the Eiffel Tower.

Fayed died instantly. Diana died at the hospital.

Her death startled the world.

An up-and-coming anchor named Brian Williams broke into regular coverage on MSNBC to announce the news to Americans in the early morning hours of Aug. 31.

“I’ve just been handed from the Reuters news service what has been marked ‘bulletin,'” Williams said, speaking slowly. “It says, ‘Princess Diana has died.'”

She was 36.

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Inside the Superyacht Princess Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed Spent Their Final Vacation On

A look at the vessel that saw the beloved royal’s last vacation.

It was hot gossip, this adventure that the princess took abroad after having finalized her divorce from then Prince Charles less than a year before—something that was hinted at at the end of season 5 of The Crown as Queen Elizabeth is pressed to endorse a vacation a-sea with Fayed and her grandchildren, Prince Harry and Prince William. Diana was famously photographed sitting on the passerelle of this boat. Years later, in real life, Harry described the trip in his memoir, Spare , with fond recollection. “Everything about that trip to St. Tropez was heaven,” he wrote.

While the series was filmed on a lookalike super yacht in Mallorca , the real boat was equally lavish. The 208-foot ship was commissioned by Dodi’s father, former Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed, who brought on naval architect Vincenzo Ruggiero to design it in the late 1980s. It was built by Italian shipyard Codecasa and launched in 1990. The steel and aluminum super yacht boasted nine staterooms that altogether accommodate up to 18 people, in addition to a crew of 26. Amenities included a Jacuzzi, swim platform, sun deck, formal dining room, a bar, and office space. Mohamed had named the yacht Jonikal (it has subsequently been called Sokar and is currently called Bash ) .

Shortly after Diana’s and Dodi’s deaths, Mohamed gave the interior a redesign by H2 Yacht Design and a refit that included extending the hull. He attempted to sell the yacht on a number of occasions, ultimately parting with it in 2014 to an anonymous buyer. The new owner carried out further work, including machinery upgrades, a repaint, and fresh teak decks. In 2021, the yacht came into the hands of Bassim Haidar , the founder of Intercomm and GMT, who gave it a further $9.7 million refit after a reported bridge deck fire—and its current name Bash . It’s now back to turn-key condition after an 18-month remodel completed in April 2023 by marine engineering and management company Capax and boat interior company Bobic Yacht Interiors . It features a beauty salon, massage area, high-tech gym, and a spacious main salon.

In May, Robb Report reported that Bash is available for charter in the Mediterranean starting at $278,000 per week, plus expenses. In June, Haidar listed Bash for $16.8 million, according to Boat International .

There was a second motor yacht named Cujo, which Diana and Fayed also took earlier that summer. It was built in Italy in 1972 for John von Neumann, who commissioned the Italian Baglietto shipyard to build the world's fastest motor yacht. She was given two 18-cylinder engines that allowed it to go as fast as 42 knots. Fayed had bought the boat from his cousin, Saudi businessman and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. In August, the Mediterranean Sea reclaimed Cujo, as the 62-foot artifact of Diana’s life hit an unidentified object off Beaulieu-sur-Mer on July 29 and sprang a leak, Vanity Fair reported. The seven people on board were rescued by teams from Antibes and safely returned to shore.

An imitation of Jonikal will feature in The Crown season 6, a set that was intended to visually illuminate the tension between Diana and the royal family. “Diana’s south of France adventure was bright and lovely pastel colors, and her world even in Kensington Palace is optimistic and warm, compared to the queen’s residence at Balmoral, which is very static, with gloomy light and drab colors,” set decorator Alison Harvey tells ELLE DECOR.

Filming on the yacht off the island of Mallorca (a St. Tropez stand-in) required many moving parts with few do-overs. “We brought in the drapes, the artwork, many furnishings,” Harvey explains. “Everything was set in the early ’90s, so we thought hard about the colors and textures that we brought in.” Harvey’s team had just half a day to dress the yacht, and then it was off to sea. “There was no getting on or off after that,” Harvey says, adding that they were “subsumed by the logistics of what we had to achieve and the time we had to do it.”

However painstaking the process, the yacht scenes will offer an intriguing context—though largely fictitious—for the iconic photographs that exist of those final weeks leading up to Diana’s death.

Rachel Silva, the Assistant Digital Editor at ELLE DECOR, covers design, architecture, trends, and anything to do with haute couture. She has previously written for Time, The Wall Street Journal, and Citywire.

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‘The Crown’: The Story Behind That Princess Diana Yacht Photo

Perched on the edge of a diving board in a blue swimsuit, the famous paparazzi shot caught the former royal in a moment of reflection

It’s telling that the lead image in the promotion of the final series of The Crown, a show ostensibly about Queen Elizabeth II and her ascendent line of heirs, is not of HRH. Instead, it’s an iconic shot of the person who's really at the centre of the Netflix show's sixth season: the late Princess Diana.

The photo in question has become embedded in popular culture since it was taken on Diana’s last holiday before her death. The ex-royal sits, pensively, on the diving board of a superyacht, looking out to sea in a turquoise swimsuit. But what is the true story behind one of the most famous images of the Princess Of Wales?

The backstory

In July 1997, Diana was on a Mediterranean holiday with her boyfriend at the time, Dodi Al Fayed, son of the then-Harrods’ boss, the late Mohammed Al Fayed. Diana and Dodi – and the Princes William and Harry – all spent time together in Castle St. Therese, Al Fayed’s 30-bedroom villa in St. Tropez in the South of France.

But Diana was called to Milan on 22 July, where she attended the funeral of her friend Gianni Versace, who was murdered by a fan on the steps of his Miami home on 15 July.

The author and friend of Diana, Tina Brown, later wrote: “The murder of the flamboyant fashion star Gianni Versace... while Diana was on Al Fayed's yacht, was a meteor shower in the exploding sky of her final summer.”

With the weight of the death of her friend still on her mind, in early August, Diana travelled alone to Sarajevo to publicise the fight against landmines in the country. Here, she came face to face with some horrific tales of mutilation of the people, and spent time working with rehabilitation groups of survivors.

By early August, after an emotionally turbulent few weeks, Diana was back on holiday with Dodi, this time on his yacht, known as Jonikal.

But on 10 August, pictures of Diana and Dodi kissing in Sardinia were published in the Sunday Mirror , and all hell broke loose; especially when it was claimed Diana could possibly be engaged, or even pregnant. In the trailer for series six, Imelda Staunton’s Queen is shown the front-page splash and told: “Interest in the princess’ private life is unlikely to die down any time soon”, and it’s likely that in real life Diana would have received a stern phone call from the palace.

From this point onwards, it only intensified the swarms of paparazzi clamouring for pictures of the pair on holiday. Video footage from the trip shows dinghies filled with men with long-lens pictures surrounding the yacht, desperate to catch another money-spinning shot of the couple together – with figures going as high as £1 million a photo.

On 24 August, Diana, dressed in just the teal swimsuit, took a walk out to the diving board of the yacht and sat down on it. She would have had a lot to process from the past few weeks.

She would also have known the press were desperate for pictures of her and Dodi together – perhaps she told him to stay below deck to protect him while she gave photographers a shot to appease them.

But according to one paparazzo in the documentary Sex & Power , the romance was just for show: “No-one knows this, so it’s ­actually quite interesting. [The crew member] said, ‘They don’t share the same bedroom, he calls her ma’am, is ­incredibly deferential and respectful. But as soon as she goes outside to wave to the paps, she’s bending over and kissing him and hugging him’... The truth [of their romance] is the opposite.”

Was this then another posed shot designed to reset the narrative, or was it simply a candid picture of the troubled princess in genuine thought? Whatever the case may be, the photo's melancholy pull is still being felt.

The first half of The Crown series 6 streams on Netflix from November 16.

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Here Are The Real Photos Of Diana On Vacation That Inspired Those Scenes In The Crown

The Princess of Wales did indeed have a little chat with paparazzi on a boat.

The sixth and final season of The Crown got off to an emotional start by depicting Princess Diana’s final weeks before her death in August 1997. At the time, Princess Diana was newly dating Dodi Fayed, son of Harrod’s owner Mohamed Al-Fayed and famously spent time on Al-Fayed’s yacht in the south of France that summer with 12-year-old Prince Harry and 15-year-old Prince William. She was being constantly followed by the paparazzi, and is seen confronting photographers in The Crown in an effort to get them to leave her sons alone so they could enjoy their holiday. Which, according to photos taken of the princess at the time, appears to be at least somewhat based on a real event.

Season 6, Part 1 of The Crown saw Princess Diana (played by Elizabeth Debicki) vacationing off the coast of Saint-Tropez with her sons, Prince Harry and Prince William (played by Fflyn Edwards and Rufus Kampa, respectively), on Al-Fayed’s yacht. If The Crown is to be believed, Prince William in particular was struggling to have a good time on his holiday because of the constant presence of the paparazzi. And so, Princess Diana decided to throw on a swimsuit and jet over to the photographers to pose for some shots in an effort to get them to leave.

The Crown’s version...

“Enjoying your holiday?” a member of the paparazzi asks Princess Diana in The Crown when she is seen approaching them on a boat, and she replies. “Yes, we’re having a lovely time, apart from one little thing, you lot. Seriously, how long are we going to have the pleasure of your company? The attention is starting to freak out the boys.”

She offered the paparazzi a “surprise” if they would leave her sons alone as they snapped photos of her. And while we don’t know if the real Princess Diana offered them a surprise, she absolutely did confront them that summer.

How it looked in real life...

A year after Princess Diana’s death in a car crash in Paris, journalist and biographer Sally Bedell Smith wrote about the royal’s relationship with the paparazzi for Vanity Fair — in particular, that fateful summer in the south of France. “On a holiday in July 1997 with her boyfriend Dodi Fayed and his family in Saint-Tropez,” Bedell Smith wrote at the time, “she first eluded paparazzi by crawling along a balcony and hiding behind a towel, then surprised a contingent of British tabloid reporters and photographers ... by addressing them from her motorboat in a fetching leopard-print bathing suit. ‘You will have a big surprise coming soon, the next thing I do,’ she teased, and implied that she was thinking of living abroad.”

This wasn’t the only moment that the Netflix series recreated from Princess Diana’s holiday that last summer. Princess Diana was also seen in a super colorful swim suit, hanging out on the beach with her sons. A scene The Crown pulled off perfectly.

In real life, most of the photos from that moment were taken with Princess Diana spending time with her sons on the yacht, even wrapping her son Prince Harry up in a big hug while wearing the iconic swimsuit.

Princess Diana was also photographed sitting on the diving board of Al-Fayed’s yacht, all alone in a bright blue bathing suit. Looking, some might say, quite lonely.

Like the series showed, Princess Diana in 1997 was also seen wearing a bright blue one-piece swimsuit, staring off into space.

While The Crown has certainly done an impeccable job of recreating real-life photos of moments from the lives of royals, it’s important to remember that these are dramatized and fictionalized versions of real events. No matter how spot-on they might look to us.

This article was originally published on November 20, 2023

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Boat of the Week: Meet ‘Cujo,’ the 80-Foot Yacht Where Late Movie Producer Dodi Al-Fayed Once Wooed Princess Diana

The couple spent some of their final summer cruising around saint-tropez aboard this fast, military-looking yacht., howard walker, howard walker's most recent stories.

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For a few brief weeks back in the summer of 1997, Cujo was the most famous boat in the world.

Not because of her intimidating military lines, or blistering 40-knot performance. It’s because Diana, Princess of Wales, hung out aboard in Saint-Tropez with the boat’s owner, and romantic partner Dodi Al-Fayed.

Countless paparazzi shots show the once future Queen of England on Cujo‘s narrow sidedecks, soaking up the Mediterranean sun. By the end of August that year, both Diana and Dodi would be dead after that fatal car wreck in Paris.

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Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed spent some of their final summer cruising around Saint-Tropez aboard Cujo .  Courtesy Patrick Bar-Nice Matin/AP Images

Yet this rakish 80-footer was a headliner long before Diana stepped on board. Her first owner was Austrian Johnny Von Neumann, an entrepreneur, playboy and passionate sports-car racer who became the largest Porsche-VW distributor in the US.

In 1972, Von Neumann commissioned the Italian shipyard Baglietto to build him a boat with one goal: It had to go fast—faster than any other motoryacht on the water. To deliver, the shipyard installed twin 54-liter V-18 turbo diesels delivering a combined 2,700 horsepower.

Flat out, Cujo —said to be an ancient Indian word meaning “unstoppable force”—could easily top 40 knots, or 46 mph. Von Neumann blasted up and down the Cote d’Azur for a few years before ordering an even faster Baglietto—this time with jet turbine power. He sold Cujo to arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi who, at the time, was reckoned to be the richest man in the world.

The fast, military exterior gives way to an almost old-fashioned cockpit with wood cabinets and leather seats.  Courtesy Simon Kidston

Khashoggi eventually passed the boat on to his nephew Dodi Al-Fayed, who immediately sent her to the CARM shipyard in Lavagna, Italy, for a full refit.

Back in Saint-Tropez, and moored in her reserved spot on the town’s main quay outside the famed Le Sénéquier restaurant, Fayed would invite many of his Hollywood friends for a cruise. During the summers, everyone from Clint Eastwood, Tony Curtis, Bruce Willis and one-time girlfriend, Brooke Shields, were seen aboard.

Following Dodi and Diana’s death, Cujo quickly fell into disrepair. Decommissioned in 1999, she was hauled out at the CARM yard and spent several years in storage.

The main salon is smaller than many contemporary 80-foot motoryachts, but few other boats its size have the same 40-knots-plus top end.  Courtesy Simon Kidston

The boat was eventually rescued by Dodi’s cousin Moody Al-Fayed, who spent over $1 million bringing her back to life. Part of the work included uprating those massive diesels to deliver 1,650 hp each.

Now fast forward to February last year. After two summers of cruising Cujo around Sardinia and Italy’s Amalfi coast, Moody decided to sell. Strangely, he entered the boat in the Retromobile classic car auction in Paris.

That’s where well-known British car collector, buyer, seller and restorer Simon Kidston appeared. Kidston had spied Cujo in the Retromobile auction catalog, read that it was being sold by his old school-friend Fayed, and decided to bid.

The 1972 Baglietto has innovative features like the amidships helm and social area, and two sunbeds on the foredeck.  Courtesy Simon Kidston

“On the day of the auction, I was tied up with clients so asked a colleague to go down and take a look. I told him that if it was going cheaply, put in a bid for a bit of fun,” Kidston tells Robb Report .

“The bidding opened at just 150,000 Euros—that’s around $165,000. My colleague bid 160,000 Euros,” says Kidston. “Trouble was, no one else bid. The hammer went down and I had bought a boat. The feeling was a mix of excitement, tinged with terror.”

Unfortunately, just as Simon took delivery of Cujo at Lavagna, where she was moored, Europe was starting to lock down with the coronavirus pandemic.

The internal helm station is outfitted with modern electronics, but in a nod to its historic past, the wheel is definitely old school.  Courtesy Simon Kidston

But he did get to take her out during a video shoot in and around Portofino  for his YouTube channel Kidston Productions, where the boat meets up with Simon’s own ’70s Lamborghini Miura supercar. Entitled A Portofino Affair, the footage of Cujo at speed is breathtaking.

“She has immense presence,” said Kidston. “No boat of its size commands that kind of attention when she comes into a harbor.” Especially an Italian harbor when nervous local boat owners think she’s with the financial police.

“As you’d expect, those engines have tons and tons of performance,” Kidston adds. “We’ve seen 41 knots. But they have a very different sound than I was expecting; instead of a roar from the exhausts, there’s this amazing whistle from the turbos.”

The diesel engines were upgraded from the original 2,700 to 3,300 horsepower.  Courtesy Simon Kidston

While Kidston and his family had planned to cruise the Med this summer, the car enthusiast received an offer he couldn’t refuse.

“A young member of a prominent Italian business family—he’s 30 years old—had seen Cujo in Lavagna, fallen in love with her and asked if she was for sale,” he says. “He took delivery last week, just in time for his birthday.”

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See Inside the Superyacht Princess Diana Shared With Dodi Fayed

By Katherine McLaughlin

Since her untimely death in August of 1997, Princess Diana’s last summer spent with Dodi Al-Fayed has been described in various ways: a passionate love affair, a fake publicity stunt, a temporary fling, a rouse to infuriate another suiter, or the beginning of a lifelong commitment. Although the stories change, the setting remains: a summer tour through the Mediterranean aboard a multi-million dollar superyacht. Later this year, nearly 25 years to the day, the 208-foot vessel will launch for sale again. 

The yacht is full of glossy and dark wood paneling. 

Originally named Jonikal , then Sokar , and most recently Bash , the luxury vessel was first owned by Mohamed Al-Fayed, former owner of Harrods and father of Dodi Al-Fayed. During the fateful summer, Al-Fayed hosted Princess Di and her two sons aboard the Jonikal . After the couple’s tragic death, Mohamed Al-Fayed attempted to sell the yacht numerous times before it was finally bought in 2014. It was most recently purchased by Bassim Haidar in June of 2021, who is selling it just over a year later as he reportedly has plans to upgrade to a larger vessel. “She is in the yard being refitted, and will be launched for sale in September,” said John Wood, director at Seawood Yachts. 

Coffered ceilings add a dramatic, yet timeless feel. 

Bash , as the yacht is currently named, was designed by navel architect Vincenzo Ruggiero in the 1980s and built by the superyacht building firm Codecasa before launching in 1990. The vessel can hold up to 18 people across nine staterooms in addition to rooms for 26 crew members. Among many notable features, Bash includes a jacuzzi, swim platform, sun deck, a formal dining room, main saloon, a bar, and office space. Full of dark wood paneling and coffered ceilings, the interiors are reminiscent of the Arts and Crafts style of the early 1900s. 

The vessel includes nine staterooms in addition to plenty of space for the crew. 

Powered by Wärtsilä engines, the yacht has a cruising speed of 15 knots and top speeds of 20 knots. Even though an exact price hasn’t been advertised just yet, the last time the boat was sold, it was listed for $10,000,000. 

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How 'The Crown' Star Elizabeth Debicki Recreated Princess Diana's Infamous Yacht Photos (Exclusive)

The images of Princess Diana reportedly sold for £500,000 a week before the car crash that took her life.

For The Crown hair and makeup designers, excellence lies in accuracy. The award-winning team spoke to ET about Elizabeth Debicki 's transformation to become the beloved Princess Diana , most notably for scenes that recreated now-infamous paparazzi photos. 

"When you’re trying to do real-life transformations, you really rely on somebody’s very recognizable silhouette," Cate Hall, The Crown 's hair and makeup designer, told ET. "So even if it's Elizabeth Debicki’s face, you put the wig on and it's the right shape and it says 'I am Diana.' And that in combination with her performance and voice and costume does the job." 

First look images for The Crown season 6 tease a recreation of infamous paparazzi photos of the late Princess of Wales in a blue bathing suit at the end of a diving board, which, per Vogue , sold to tabloids for £500,000 just a week before the devastating car crash that took her life. 

Hall and her team spent long hours perfecting Debicki's wig for shots like these. "We probably had at least four, four-hour fittings before we were even close to going, 'OK, this is what we're going to do,'" Hall said. She added that Debicki also dyed her eyebrows for the look, and stuck to a strict schedule of spray tans, nail routines and daily hair and makeup changes. 

She continued, "In terms of fittings, I would say she's probably spent upwards of 30 hours in the hair and makeup chair while we do stuff." 

Debicki took over the iconic Diana role in  The Crown 's fifth season, after  Emma Corrin  played the princess' early years in season 4. In the first part of this week's season 6, Debicki will portray Diana's final days, including the devastating car crash that took her life. 

"An immense, immense responsibility," Debicki told ET last week on how the cast and crew approached the princess' death. "It's difficult to describe, it was something that we thought about, that we carried with us, that woke us up in the night." 

Debicki continued, "We tried our very best to do [the story] properly." 

Dominic West will return as Prince Charles in season 6, with Olivia Williams as Camilla Parker-Bowles. Khalid Abdalla is back at Dodi Fayed, and Salim Daw will return to play his father, Mohamed Al Fayed. Imelda Staunton plays the queen, Lesley Manville plays Princess Margaret and Jonathan Pryce plays Prince Philip. 

Season 6 of  The Crown: Part 1  is now streaming on Netflix.  Part 2  will release Dec. 14. 

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The 30 Most Iconic Photographs of Princess Diana

By Elise Taylor and Gia Yetikyel

Every July 1—the birthday of Diana, Princess of Wales —photographs of the late royal emerge across the news, social media, and pop culture platforms, a visual ode to the royal and public figure who touched the lives of so many. After all, during her life, Diana was known for her impactful image-making: a photo of her shaking hands with an AIDS patient in London, for example, helped de-stigmatize the disease during the height of hysteria around it, while a picture of her walking through a landmine field in Angola helped raise worldwide awareness for the human rights issue. Then, there are the pictures that epitomize glamour and, well, scandal: take the little black frock Diana wore out after Prince Charles admitted to an affair on national television, cemented now in pop culture as the “revenge dress.” (It even has its own Wikipedia page .) Or consider her wedding dress, complete with puff sleeves and a 25-foot train.

Even 26 years after her death, new photos of Princess Diana continue to emerge: on March 4, 2022, two white-gloved curators hung a rarely-seen portrait of the late Princess of Wales , by David Bailey, on the walls of Kensington Palace. The black-and-white portrait is striking in its minimalism, showing simply the profile of Diana staring steadfastly ahead. A new view of the Princess, added to the cultural canon.

Now, with the sixth and final season of The Crown airing on Netflix, viewers have been brought up to the early 21st century of the royal family’s history, including the tragedy of Diana’s death. Split between two volumes, this season continues to follow Queen Elizabeth II’s reign while exploring Prince Charles’s relationship with Camilla Parker-Bowles following his divorce from Diana, as well as the latter’s romantic involvement with Dodi Fayed. (The second half of the season, to be released in December, will also introduce the early days of Prince William and Kate Middleton’s romance.)

Beyond being a style icon, Diana was known and loved for her ability to connect with the public. The people’s princess remains adored through her fashion ensembles, public service, and steadfast strength. Below, in addition to Bailey’s portrait, we revisit some of the most famous snaps taken of the late Princess of Wales.

Lady Diana Spencer at age 19, the age she was when she and Prince Charles started dating .

Lady Diana Spencer in November 1980, two months after her relationship with Prince Charles was revealed by the press.

Lady Diana Spencer, startled after stalling her new red Mini Metro outside her Earls Court flat in London just days before her engagement to Prince Charles was announced. 

Prince Charles III and Lady Diana Spencer at Buckingham Palace on the day they announce their engagement in February 1981.

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‘The Crown’: Behind the Photo of an Embrace That Changed Princess Diana’s Life

In the show, Mohamed al-Fayed sends the photographer Mario Brenna to capture shots of Diana and al-Fayed’s son, Dodi, on vacation. The portrayal is inaccurate, Brenna says.

By Alex Marshall

Reporting from London

It’s summer 1997, and Princess Diana is flirting with Dodi Fayed, a globe-trotting playboy, on the Jonikal, a yacht floating on sparkling Mediterranean waters.

Diana, teasingly, says that she likes men who have lips that are “just the right temperature.”

“Are mine the right temperature?” Dodi replies.

“I don’t know,” Diana says: “Need to check.” Then, the couple kiss, blissfully unaware that just a few meters away, Mario Brenna, a slick Italian photographer, is on a boat, with a long-lens camera trained on the couple.

A few days later, Brenna’s shots of the princess and her new beau are on the front pages of newspapers worldwide.

This is a central scene in the sixth and final season of Netflix’s royal drama “The Crown” — the first batch of episodes premiered on Thursday — and a moment that signaled the start of a tabloid frenzy around the couple that many blame for their deaths on Aug. 31, 1997, in a car crash in Paris as they were chased by photographers.

Yet the depiction is far from accurate, according to Brenna, speaking in what he said was his first interview with an English-language newspaper.

For a start, “The Crown” has Mohamed al-Fayed — Dodi’s father, and a retail and hotel tycoon who died this year — appearing to hire Brenna to take the shots, in an effort to push Diana and Dodi’s relationship into the public eye, and cajole the pair to marry.

In an email, Annie Sulzberger, the head of research for the show — she is also the sister of The Times’s publisher, A.G. Sulzberger — said that “there are a few theories about how Brenna managed to find the Jonikal moored somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea,” but the one the team found most credible was that one of al-Fayed’s employees leaked the boat’s location to Brenna.

But Brenna said the idea that al-Fayed hired him was “absurd and completely invented,” and that no one leaked information about the yacht’s whereabouts to him. Every summer at that time, he was in Sardinia so he could take paparazzi shots of famous people, he said, and coming across Diana and Dodi was simply a “great stroke of luck.”

On Aug. 1, 1997, Brenna said he approached Diana’s yacht on a fast moving inflatable boat after mistaking a blonde woman making a telephone call on its upper deck for an old acquaintance. As he got closer, he was stunned to realize it was the princess.

Bruno Malka, Brenna’s agent at the time who helped sell the images to Paris Match magazine, said in an email that he thought Brenna was familiar with the yacht, “without knowing it was Diana and Dodi” onboard that day. Brenna was successful, Malka added, because he had spent so many years working in the region.

After spotting the couple, Brenna said he spent the next few days stalking the boat, including climbing a cliff to get a better view. From that elevated position, about 400 meters away from Diana, he took several photos of Diana and Dodi in an embrace. The shots were almost blurred, Brenna said, because the heat haze meant he struggled to get the pair in focus.

Still, he knew immediately he’d secured “a historic photo.” He’d also captured an image that “solved my personal and family problems,” he said, at a time when he had recently divorced and so “was not swimming in wealth.”

He unloaded the rolls of film from the camera, then buried them to make sure they didn’t get exposed to the sun as he tried to take more images, and also as he feared a competitor might have seen him at work and try to steal his camera and so obtain the images every other photographer in the Mediterranean had been hoping to get first.

On Aug. 10, the Sunday Mirror, a British tabloid, splashed Brenna’s image on its front page . “The Kiss,” the headline read. Soon, Brenna said, he was selling the pictures worldwide. In the following six-to-eight months, he said, he made about 1.7 million pounds, or $2.1 million, from his photos of the couple.

Brenna’s pictures — and the prices news outlets paid for them — sparked a frenzy. In 2013, Jason Fraser, a British photographer who helped Brenna sell his images, told The Daily Mail that after they were published, over 2,000 photographers arrived in the Mediterranean hoping to get their own snaps of Diana and Dodi. “I felt the whole thing was spinning out of control,” Fraser said. Weeks later, the couple died.

In “The Crown,” Brenna (portrayed by Enzo Cilenti) explains his methods to camera. To capture celebrities misbehaving, the fictional Brenna says, you have to take risks. Paparazzi also have to act like “hunters … killers.”

Brenna said in the email interview that he did not share this opinion of his work (“I do not identify with the term ‘killer,’”) and that he was never contacted by anyone from “The Crown” to learn about his experiences (Netflix did not respond to a request for comment).

After Diana and Dodi’s death, al-Fayed sued Fraser, the British photographer, for taking photos of Diana and Dodi on a boat, saying it was an invasion of privacy. Brenna said he did not face any such action, adding his images were legal as they “were taken outdoors, in a public place.” And he regretted the privacy crackdown that happened since, with governments and stars trying to stop the paparazzi from taking photos: “There is still the right to report,” he said.

Today, Brenna lives near Lake Como, in Italy, where he said he’s photographed celebrities including George Clooney, Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé, even as the dawn of social media had impacted his profession significantly, including its financial rewards.

Brenna said he and his family enjoyed the success of the photos throughout August 1997. But then, Diana died. When he heard the news, Brenna said, he “couldn’t believe it” and cried, not least because he had two children himself and so could understand what her death would mean for Diana’s boys. He made a decision “not to speak or disclose anything about the incident until William and Harry reached adulthood.”

The mere thought that his images “could have contributed to fueling the hunt for Diana and Dodi obviously saddens me,” Brenna said. But he did not think his work added significantly to the furor around the princess.

“If it hadn’t been me,” he added, “someone else would certainly have captured those images.”

Alex Marshall is a European culture reporter, based in London. More about Alex Marshall

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Charles Spencer Shares a Rare Photo of Princess Diana and Their Mother, Frances Shand Kydd

By Erin Vanderhoof

Later this month, Princess Diana’s younger brother Charles Spencer is releasing a memoir about his childhood, A Very Private School , which has a focus on the boarding school he began attending at a young age. In preparation for the book’s release on March 12, the earl has been taking a walk down memory lane by sharing old photographs on his social media accounts . On Saturday, he shared one rarely-seen photo that shows him posing with Diana and their late mother, Frances Shand Kydd. 

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In his caption, Spencer comments on the family’s joyful appearance. “My mother, Diana and I, in c. 1967. I would have been 3, and Diana 5 or 6. I love how happy each of us looks,” she said. “At this stage of my life, my mother nicknamed me 'Buzz'—because she saw me as having the endless energy of a rather happy—and busy—bee.” 

The family’s apparent happiness would prove to be short-lived. During the summer of 1967, Frances would leave Charles and Diana’s father, John Spencer, and after the divorce she lost custody of the children and later remarried Peter Shand Kydd. She wrote about the complications that the separation would provoke in diaries later republished by journalists Max Riddington and Gavan Naden in their 2003 biography, Frances: The Remarkable Story of Princess Diana’s Mother .  

“Johnnie and I would agree on an arrangement for the children, our respective lawyers would advise that this should be documented and, by the time they’d used their professional languages, a friendly agreement seemed to be complicated beyond all measure,” she wrote. “And this would invariably result in an argument. Not surprisingly, it would then be the children who suffered.”

In addition to the photograph of the trio in 1967, Spencer has been sharing photos from other significant moments in his life, including one that shows his sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale at the age of 11 and another from Nelson Mandela’s 2001 visit to his Althorp estate to pay his respects at Diana’s grave. He also shared a youthful portrait of his grandmother, Cynthia Spencer, looking remarkably like Princess Diana. It was drawn by John Singer Sargent in 1919.

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The Kate Middleton Photo That Was Too Good to Be True

By Jessica Winter

It’s such a lovely photograph—if only it were real. The occasion is Mothering Sunday, the U.K. equivalent of Mother’s Day, which fell this year in March. Mom sits at the center, big toothpaste smile, and she’s having a great hair day. She’s pulling her two little ones close to her on either side, and her oldest boy is just behind, beaming affection, his arms slung around her. They all seem to be laughing at whatever the photographer—Dad—is saying or doing. It’s sweater weather, and they look so cozy in their knits (that fluttery scalloped collar under the girl’s cardigan! A dream!). This picture is why people have kids; it’s why people scroll Instagram wondering why everybody else’s family is nicer than theirs. If there was something faintly uncanny about the photo—did Mom’s head seem to float on a different plane? Was her neck somehow foreshortened, or was that just the cowl-neck on her sweater?—maybe it was just the sense of otherworldly perfection.

Because the mom in the picture is Catherine, Princess of Wales, who has been recuperating from abdominal surgery and been out of the public eye since Christmas, and because the credited photographer is William, the future King of England, the image was released to news agencies and posted to the British Royal Family’s social-media accounts, pointedly dated “2024.” Sweet as the picture was, something possibly ghoulish haunted the motivations behind its publication. The moment it hit the Internet, it scanned as a proof of life for a princess who had become indefinitely invisible without much explanation, leaving a void that people filled with rampant speculation and conspiracy theories . The audience for the photograph was large, and they peered at it closely. Perhaps inevitably, they thought they saw strange things: not just touch-ups of hair or skin, but serious tampering.

Amateur analysts should always tread lightly when it comes to digital photos, which are typically full of noise and junk. Once, many years ago, a snapshot of my cat wandered onto the Internet and became a lower-tier meme—“ Invisible Motocross ”—inspiring passionate discussion across an anonymous Venn diagram of cat-culture scholars and forensic-photography sleuths about how the distribution of light and shadow behind my cat and the way her furry outline cut against the background proved, without a doubt, that the photo was a fake. (My rebuttal: If I knew how to use Photoshop, I would have edited in a nicer living-room backdrop. That apartment was such a shithole!) Stare at any meaningful image for too long and you will eventually end up in the back yard with Lee Harvey Oswald , taking measuring tape to shadows, trying to strike that strange backward-leaning pose, looking like somebody’s patsy.

The Middleton-Windsor photograph , alas, was not an Invisible Motocross situation. What tears it is a spot not far below Kate’s collar—a seeming delineation between what appear to be two discrete images. This digital boundary cuts the zipper on Kate’s jacket in two and blurs the bottom half. It’s like a pattern mismatching at the seam of a poorly stitched garment, and, once you see it, you start seeing all the other torn and puckering seams in the image: the way Princess Charlotte’s wrist looks too big for her sleeve, which seems to be melting into her skirt; the way that strange snippets of hair fall on and blend into various shoulders. Soon, in an extraordinary and humiliating wave of repudiation, news agencies including the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Reuters, and Getty all issued kill notices for the picture, forbidding its distribution on their channels. “ AT CLOSER INSPECTION IT APPEARS THAT THE SOURCE HAS MANIPULATED THE IMAGE ,” the A.P.’s notice explained, going on to say that an unedited version of the photo would not be forthcoming. On TikTok, an impressively resourceful sleuth dug up video from a 2023 charity event, in which Kate and her children seemed to be in the same outfits that they wore in the supposedly new, post-surgery picture.

Damage control begat more reason for damage control. Despite the Royal Family’s famous dictum “Never complain, never explain,” an apology was issued: “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.” The statement was signed “C,” for Catherine, even though William was the credited photographer, and thus ever so slightly more plausible as the Kensington Palace employee who is responsible for doing touch-ups on official photographs.

A furious Daily Mail editor declared that Kate had been “thrown under a bus” by Kensington Palace—forced to take the fall for a major institutional lapse: “I think it’s disgraceful, I think it’s very ungentlemanly of Prince William to put the onus on her. For goodness sake, he’s the one who took the photograph.” On social media, video circulated of an interview with Prince Harry, professional royal defector, talking about the family’s propensity for naming scapegoats in times of P.R. crisis. (As many have pointed out, it may be impossible to exaggerate the media tsunami that would have erupted if Meghan Markle, whom the U.K. press always cast as the Wicked Witch of the West against Kate’s diaphanous, do-no-wrong Glinda, had distributed a doctored photo of herself with Archie and Lilibet.)

At a certain point, the attempted crisis management began to look almost intentionally self-sabotaging. A grainy image emerged of William and Kate in the back seat of a car leaving Windsor Castle; Kate is turned away from the camera, in one-quarter profile. Almost immediately, a savvy royal watcher found a 2016 image of Kate, which appears to map onto the paparazzi snap with suggestive precision. The photographer who claimed credit for the car picture, which was syndicated through an agency called GoffPhotos, denied to the New York Post that any editing shenanigans had taken place. But the discovery of the older picture intensified the ghostliness of the new one, casting Kate, in her demure chignon and pillbox hat, as a gothic apparition that you can’t be sure you really see, like the lady in the lake in “ The Turn of the Screw ” or the woman in the doorway of the grand house of Tony Soprano’s afterlife. Suddenly there was a chill in the air, a shiver down the spine.

The most plausible explanation for Kate’s absence remains the simplest, and it is also the one that was announced in the first place, back in January: she is recovering from major surgery. What Kensington Palace did not disclose at that time was how hopelessly naïve it appears to be about technology, social media, and its global public’s sophisticated understanding of them both. As David Yelland, a former editor of the U.K. tabloid the Sun , said on a podcast he co-hosts, “I think this is a twentieth-century organization, maybe even a sixteenth-century organization, trying to play twenty-first-century games.” Some of their failings, however, are timeless. “The royal body exists to be looked at,” the novelist Hilary Mantel wrote in a controversial and brilliant 2013 essay for the London Review of Books . If Kate is not seen, she ceases to exist; she seems to die, and throws her public into a confused quasi-mourning that demands deft and elegant intercession. (There was a whole movie about this!) Nobody at any time, neither a subject of Elizabeth I nor a TikTok influencer in 2024, would ever be satisfied by a smudged glimpse of maybe-Kate’s ear and cheekbone—which is all that the GoffPhotos picture had to offer—as evidence of the royal body’s good health.

The rap on Kate was always that, despite her abundant beauty, charm, and high-heeled indefatigability—maybe in part because of it—she was boring, especially in contrast to Diana, her husband’s mother and eternal Princess of Wales, who possessed all of Kate’s gifts and more: vulnerability, unpredictability, a certain irresistible too-muchness. Mantel, in her London Review of Books essay, called Kate, not without empathy, “a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own.” Mantel went on, “She appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture. Diana was capable of transforming herself from galumphing schoolgirl to ice queen, from wraith to Amazon. Kate seems capable of going from perfect bride to perfect mother, with no messy deviation.”

The time line of Diana’s fascinating transformations can be tracked in indelible, often appealingly imperfect images: the teen-age day-care worker unaware of the sun shining through her translucent skirt; the demure bride floating on plumes of taffeta; the doting young mother nuzzling her boys in casual photos taken en plein air; the supermodel in the revenge dress; the jet-setting divorcée getting papped on a playboy’s yacht. Kate could never achieve the iconic stature that Diana built from these images, and likely she never wanted to. (It is not terribly reductive to say that Diana died in the midst of doing what Kate is struggling to do now: deal with the press.) But, aside from her wedding to William, in 2011, the ongoing uproar over these recent photographs is the most captivating episode of Kate’s entire public career, and all because of a spectacularly failed attempt to present the perfect image. ♦

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Princess Charlotte is Princess Diana's double in touching childhood photo with Charles Spencer

The late princess of wales bore a striking resemblance to her granddaughter  .

Charles Spencer took to Instagram to share a sweet unearthed photo of his childhood featuring his late sister Princess Diana and the likeness to Princess Charlotte is uncanny.

The Earl, 59, shared a black and white photo from 1967 on Saturday where the late Princess of Wales was seen at the age of six in a capped-sleeve white linen top and shorts with a pair of flip flops on with her brother. 

Charles was seen at the age of just three in an adorable plaid top and shorts with socks and sandals sitting on a swing in the garden at what we can assume is their childhood home - the Althorp estate in West Northamptonshire. 

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Charles and Diana's mother, Frances Kydd, was also seen in the photo at the age of 31 in a white top and pencil skirt. The siblings grinned at the camera with Princess Diana looking just like her granddaughter Princess Charlotte. 

"My mother, Diana and I, in c. 1967. I would have been three, and Diana 5 or 6. I love how happy each of us looks, the doting brother wrote. "At this stage of my life, my mother nicknamed me 'Buzz' because she saw me as having the endless energy of a rather happy - and busy - bee."

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Earl Spencer has been known to post heartwarming childhood photos from his and Diana's younger years. One which garnered over 32,000 likes saw a young Diana with her arm around her little brother wearing a sweet pink and white gingham dress and Mary-Janes.

Diana and her brother were rarely photographed in public after she became royal. They were however spotted in a rare public embrace at the Birthright charity ball in 1985 where Diana stunned in a red thigh-split midi dress with a deep V-shaped cutout on the back and ruching across the stomach. 

The world will always remember Earl Spencer for his speech at Princess Diana's 1997 funeral, but Diana was one of four. The late Princess also had two older sisters Lady Sarah McCorquodale and Lady Jane Fellowes. 

Prince William and Prince Harry publicly greeted their aunts at the unveiling of a statue of their mother at The Sunken Garden in Kensington Palace in 2021 on what would have been her 60th birthday.

While Diana's older sisters have lived out of the public eye since their sister's death, Charles has been a vocal advocate for Diana's legacy. The late Princess was buried at the Althorp estate where her brother built a garden temple memorial and a museum to celebrate her life and the impact she had had on others.

DISCOVER:  Charles Spencer's wife Lady Karen shares rare photo of 'magical' library at Althorp House 

The museum was opened to the public in 1998 and all profits go towards Diana's Memorial Fund, a charity Charles Spencer set up to continue to fund her humanitarian work in the UK and overseas. The charity closed in 2012. In July 2020, it was reported that the money was donated to William and Harry's independent charities.

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Princess Charlotte is Princess Diana's double in sweet photo – with identical family feature

K ing Charles' former wife, the late Princess Diana , tragically passed away in 1997 in a car accident in Paris, and years on, her granddaughter Princess Charlotte is often compared to the 'People's Princess'.

The only daughter of the Prince and Princess of Wales, eight-year-old Charlotte bears a striking resemblance to Diana, and in one unearthed childhood photo, the pair look so similar.

The photograph of Diana was taken in 1971 when she was 10 years old. Dressed in a cream top and a black hat, pretty Diana smiles for the camera during a summer holiday to Itchenor in West Sussex.

Diana was always a natural beauty and, in this photo, her light brown hair falls over her brown eyes and her complexion is stunning.

Then we look at the snap of Princess Charlotte at a similar age and immediately we see how alike she is to her grandmother. The girls share the same eye colour and lip shape, however, the greatest likeness is their noses… they are exactly the same!

The picture of Charlotte was taken at the Wimbledon tennis championships in July 2023. The young royal watched the men's final between Carlos Alcaraz and Novak on Centre Court along with her mother Princess Kate, who is a huge tennis fan.

Charlotte is similar to her late grandmother in other ways too, sharing her passion for sport. Diana adored swimming and dancing and Charlotte's parents have previously revealed that their daughter enjoys dancing, gymnastics and horse riding.

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In fact, while chatting to English National Ballet director Tamara Rojo about Diana's passion for dancing, mum Kate said of her then two-year-old daughter: "She absolutely loves it."

Just this week, Charles Spencer took to Instagram to share a sweet photo of his childhood featuring his late sister Princess Diana and once again, Charlotte is her double.

The Earl shared a black and white photo from 1967 where the late Princess of Wales was seen at the age of six in a capped-sleeve white linen top and shorts with a pair of flip flops on with her brother. 

Charles and Diana's mother, Frances Kydd, was also seen in the photo at the age of 31 in a white top and pencil skirt. The siblings grinned at the camera with Princess Diana looking just like her granddaughter Princess Charlotte.