By Daniel Arkin - NBC News
The Netflix series '
The Crown
', in its fourth season, takes several liberties to portray the British monarchy.
Here we seek to unravel reality from fiction (although, warning the reader, some details of the plot are revealed).
The fourth season of '
The Crown
' is especially focused on the troubled relationship between Prince Charles (played by Josh O'Connor) and Princess Diana of Wales (played by Emma Corrin), who married in 1981 and formally divorced in 1996, a year before '
Lady Di
' passed away in a car accident in Paris.
'
The Crown
' portrays the strong fights between the couple and love affairs, a saddening image in contrast to what was initially thought of as a fairy tale.
The
private battles Diana
are displayed in great detail.
But how realistic is what is seen in the series about the couple?
A marriage of three
The season of '
The Crown
' suggests that Prince Charles was
involved with Camilla Parker Bowles
(played by Emerald Fennell), a socialite who had been Charles's girlfriend and is now his second wife, from the early years of their marriage. with Diana.
Although a historian who has written several biographies on the members of the British monarchy denied that this was the case in real life.
Diana Spencer and Charles' wedding on July 29, 1981.AP / Associated Press
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"He gave up Camilla before he married Diana," Sally Bedell Smith told NBC News, the sister network of Noticias Telemundo.
Smith is the author of such books as '
Diana In Search of Herself
', '
Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life
' and a biography of Queen Elizabeth II.
Smith noted that in a 1994 interview that Prince Charles gave to British journalist Jonathan Dimbleby, the monarch admitted that there was only
infidelity since the marriage to Diana had "
irrevocably
fallen apart
after we both tried not to."
(The Netflix series portrays it as the marriage gradually unfolding until it was at a dead end, and toxic, in which Charles behaved more and more harmful).
Charles reportedly resumed his relationship with Parker Bowles in 1986, five years after marrying Diana, according to a very comprehensive and authoritative biography written by Dimbleby.
However, regardless of when the affair began, it does appear that Charles remained close to Parker Bowles from the first days of his marriage to Diana, which caused tensions.
"We were a married couple of three, very crowded," Diana told the BBC in a 1995 interview (which is now being investigated on the belief that the Princess of Wales agreed to give her under deception).
Princess Diana and Prince Charles during an official visit to Japan in May 1986.AP
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'
The Crown
' also suggests that Charles, somewhat grumpy and very pensive, and Diana, very charismatic if somewhat embarrassing,
were a bad match from the start
, and that their differences (including the 12 years of age that separated them) became more profound by what the series shows as a cruel indifference to him and the constant meddling of the tabloids.
In fact, the first episode of the new season even suggests that Charles only proposed to Diana due to pressure from his family, especially his great-uncle Louis Mountbatten (played by Charles Dance), who was later murdered in 1979 by members. of the Irish Republican Army (the IRA, in English, which sought to stop Northern Ireland from being part of the United Kingdom to integrate with Ireland).
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Clive Irving, author of '
The Last Queen: Elizabeth II's Seventy Year Battle to Save the House of Windsor
', said that there are truths as to what the series shows of the marriage, but that the context behind the marriage was surely exaggerated for effects. dramatic.
Historian Smith said that she does agree with the presentation made in the series about how disparate Diana and Charles were.
“
They were a bad alliance
.
They were only together about twelve times before they got engaged, ”Smith said.
The battles of Lady Diana
The season of '
The Crown
' explores the personal difficulties Diana experienced during her marriage to Charles, such as mental health problems and her
experience with bulimia
.
Those parts of the series are based on various interviews she gave and on bestselling books.
Among them the 1992 one titled '
Diana: Her True Story
', written by Andrew Morton.
The journalist revealed years later that his source of information about the unhappy marriage had been Diana herself, as he told The New York Times.
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The princess spoke very openly about her
postpartum depression
after the birth of William and Harry in her 1995 BBC interview, in which she also commented that she was bulimic "for several years."
“I was wrong with postpartum depression, a topic that nobody ever wants to discuss, about postpartum depression;
you find out what it is until later and that made you go through a bad time ", said Diana," you wake up every day without wanting to get out of bed, you feel like nobody understands you, and in general you are very bad with yourself. "
A crowd surrounds Diana Spencer during a visit by the princess to Grimsby, England, in 1983.
However, not everything in the season of '
The Crown
' shows Diana at her worst.
The series also recounts
why she earned the nickname '
The People's Princess
'
, how she inspired women around the world with her charisma and style, and how she was an excellent ambassador for the monarchy during her travels abroad.
In one of the most moving scenes, Diana hugs a boy with AIDS during a visit she made to a hospital in Harlem in 1989 (when there was still a lot of stigma and misinformation about how HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is transmitted) .
That really happened when Diana went to New York at the age of 27.