12 Facts about Princess Diana (the eternal and dear Lady Di)

Princess Diana is synonymous with strength and purity and an example of a strong woman to be followed. She changed many standards of the royal family and her lifestyle inspires people to this day, including the royal family itself. However, we don’t just want to talk about Diana, Princess of Wales, but also about Diana Francis Spencer — a woman who isn’t very well known beyond her royal image.

We, from incredible.club, we are going to explore in this post another side of Lady Di, more human and dramatic. Two facts intertwined throughout her life: the desire to make others happy and her own inability to be happy. Tune in to learn more about the controversial princess who broke standards beyond British royalty and was loved around the world!

At the opening of the first hospital for people with AIDS, Princess Diana made a point of taking off her gloves and shaking hands with all patients. This gesture was intentional: Lady Di wanted to fight the stigma and myths that existed about people with AIDS at the time. Subsequently, she often visited sick children and always donated funds to help these medical centers. She also never shied away from communicating face-to-face with HIV-infected people.

According to Princess Diana herself, her parents divorced in her childhood. The girl stayed with her father, who received custody of the children and, because of this, she did not receive her mother’s attention and affection throughout her life. However, Lady Di once admitted that she did not love her mother and that she considered her an alcoholic.

Diana Spencer wasn’t rich enough not to work. The entire legacy of Earl Spencer was transmitted to the family’s male lineage and that’s why Lady Di, who at the time was not yet married, unlike her sisters, accepted any service to turn around. She cleaned friends’ houses, gave dance lessons to teenagers, worked as a nanny assistant and a kindergarten teacher. These were some of the jobs that Diana had before getting married.

After 13 dates with her future husband, the engagement decision came. After Charles’s thoughtless comment about the alleged “waist swelling”, Lady Di became anxious and worried about her weight and ended up developing an eating disorder, bulimia. By the time of the wedding, the princess’s waist had shrunk by about eight inches; she literally “melted from February to July”. Another factor that influenced Diana’s condition was jealousy: she saw Charles secretly exchange gifts with her first love, Camilla — who would later become the prince’s wife.

Diana herself called the honeymoon a great opportunity to sleep and this is even understandable, since during the day she and her husband had to discuss books and listen to the naval orchestra sitting in elegant and tight clothes. But Lady Li’s main problem at that point was her lack of moral strength: at night, she had nightmares about Camila, her husband’s lover—whom he hadn’t forgotten even during their honeymoon. Furthermore, bulimia peaked during this period and the princess began to look scrawny.

In one of the cities in Angola, a few days before the arrival of the princess to a field that was still not completely clean, teenagers were playing soccer and triggered the explosive mines, resulting in death. It was in this field that Lady Di, wearing a bulletproof vest and a protective mask, gave a speech in support of the mine clearance movement.

After the wedding and honeymoon, it became obvious: Charles and Diana, who was 13 years younger than the prince, had nothing to talk about. The princess had specific and limited tastes in literature and was not interested in her husband’s hobbies. She even went so far as to ridicule her devotion to them. And, in terms of love, Lady Di admitted that the prince “had no needs”: for 7 years, they were alone only three times a week, which seemed insufficient to her. And towards the end of the relationship, things got worse.

In addition to fighting prejudice against people infected with HIV, Diana also worked to dispel the stigma of leprosy patients. She first visited them at Mother Teresa’s leper colony in India and hugged them all. She later became a sponsoring ambassador for The Leprosy Mission.

The unhappy marriage and suspicions that her husband was having a relationship with another woman led Princess Diana to try to find out what true love is. Rumors involved many men as her alleged lovers: from a riding instructor to a heart surgeon. The most famous would be the romance with bodyguard Barry Mannakee – who was fired shortly before suffering a motorcycle accident and dying at the age of 39. Diana believed that the death of her “beloved” had been orchestrated and went so far as to say that it was the hardest blow she had ever suffered in her life.

Despite having to deal with difficulties in her own life, Princess Diana always had plenty of love to share with others. She visited children with cancer 3 times a week, dedicating about 4 hours to be with them.

The development of a picture of postpartum depression by the princess was the reason for royal ridicule: from then on, everyone had a reason to say that Lady Di “wasn’t right in the head”. By her own admission, she started self-harming as a way of not feeling emotionally drained through physical pain. Other than that, the couple’s gradual separation can also be attributed to problems related to depression.

In his memoirs, Paul Burrell, the princess’s butler at the time, said that immediately after the divorce, Lady Di sold 20 pieces of her royal wardrobe to a thrift store, thus obtaining money to restart her life after the ill-fated marriage. It is also not surprising that she did this; after all, many of her jewels and clothes were “confiscated” by the royal family.

By the way, after the divorce, Lady Di lost her title of “her royal highness”, precisely as a result of the separation. Since then she has been called just Diana, Princess of Wales. This was the woman we came to know in her short life after the end of her marriage, a devoted and passionate mother for her children and yet forced to bow down to them in her presence. Diana was even briefly able to find love before tragically dying in a car accident on August 31, 1997.

What do you know about Princess Diana? In your opinion, was the princess’s fate particularly tragic? How many people like her are capable of giving so much affection to others without receiving anything in return? Tell us your opinion in the comments section.