Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were in a “near catastrophic car chase at the hands of a ring of highly aggressive paparazzi” after attending an event in New York, their representatives have said.
According to People magazine, the spokesperson for the royals revealed that it was the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, and Markle’s mother Doria, were being driven back to a friend’s private residence, where they staying during their visit to New York. Along the way, a dozen cars began chasing after them, running over red lights, and trying to take photographs of the couple and Doria in the car.
“Last night, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex and Ms. Ragland were involved in a near catastrophic car chase at the hands of a ring of highly aggressive paparazzi. This relentless pursuit, lasting over two hours, resulted in multiple near collisions involving other drivers on the road, pedestrians and two NYPD officers. While being a public figure comes with a level of interest from the public, it should never come at the cost of anyone’s safety.”
The two were in New York to attend the Ms. Foundation 2023 Women of Vision Awards: Celebrating Generations of Progress and Power at the Zeigfield Ballroom in Manhattan. Markle had been honoured as this year’s Women of Vision Award.
Prince Harry’s mother, the late Lady Diana, passed away in a car crash in 1997 in Paris, when paparazi were relentlessly chasing after her car.
In a mental health documentary ‘The Me You Can’t See’ , Harry spoke about how trauma from watching his mother’s death is the reason why he chose to step back from his royal role, to prevent his wife Meghan from going down the same path:
“My mother was chased to her death when she was in a relationship with someone who wasn’t white, and now look what’s happened. You’re talking about history repeating itself? They’re not going to stop until she dies.”
It’s incredibly triggering to potentially lose another woman in my life,” Prince Harry added about Meghan.
In an interview with Independent Urdu, Humayun Saeed opened up about playing Dr. Hasnat Khan in Season 5 of ‘The Crown’ and talked about the controversial kissing scenes between him and Elizabeth Debicki, which had been slammed by social media users in Pakistan on the double standards male and female actors are subjected to.
Saeed had played Dr Hasnat Khan, a Pakistani born British heart surgeon who had a romantic relationship with the late Lady Diana from 1995 to 1997, and was described by the Princess as “the love of her life.”
Addressing the controversy now, Saeed said that he didn’t face extreme public scrutiny like he had expected from Pakistanis:
“I am well aware that in our society such things aren’t acceptable for us, but my scene and the way we executed it was done in a tasteful manner. And there was not a lot of backlash from Pakistanis on that scene, because it wasn’t like the way they had thought.”
Previously, Saeed had revealed in the talk show ‘The Fourth Umpire’ that the kissing scene was not real, and it was staged to look like it was real.
Talking about how he took on the role of Hasnat, who is a private individual and has not publicly discussed his relationship with Diana, Saeed revealed:
“It was not necessary that I imitate his every single move. While we were shooting for ‘The Crown’, there were two or three options on how we should develop his character. We knew that he was very successful in his career, but in his relationship with Lady Diana he was very shy so we decided to capture that. Maybe in reality he wasn’t that shy in his relationship, but we decided to capture that.”
The Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton, is well known for her strict adherence to royal customs while making public appearances for the Crown. However, during an Easter outing on Monday, the 41- years-old duchess stunned on-lookers by choosing to wear red nail polish, instead of a neutral color.
The event was the first time Middleton and her husband Prince William had made their appearance as the newly-inaugurated Prince and Princess of Wales, a title previously held by Prince Charles, who is now the King after the demise of Elizabeth II. The couple were joined by their three children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis.
Rules about dressing and appearance etiquette are extremely strict which members of the Royal Family must adhere to at all times. Women resist from wearing bright nail polish and can only stick to neutral shades when attending public events.
The late Queen wore bright colours in public in order to stand out from the crowd. Tiaras can only be worn by married women in the Royal Family, not single women or children.
The Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle had drawn backlash in 2018, when she attended the Fashion Awards, where she was spotted flaunting a black manicure, which broke royal protocol.
Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, becomes King Charles’s Queen Consort, in a remarkable journey to public acceptance after she became a hate figure for her perceived role in the break-up of his marriage to princess Diana.
For years, Camilla was vilified as the marriage-wrecker who shattered Britain’s fairy-tale royal love story.
Diana famously complained in a bombshell BBC television interview in 1995 that “there were three of us in this marriage” — her, Charles and Camilla, his long-time lover.
She even reportedly called her love rival a “rottweiler”.
After Diana died in a Paris car crash in 1997, Charles and Camilla gradually began to appear together in public and in time became accepted as a couple.
They married in 2005 and she, over time, won plaudits as the future king’s loyal wife.
The couple were seen side-by-side as they looked at flowers left by mourners for Charles’ father Prince Philip.
The popular Netflix series “The Crown”, charting the lives of Britain’s most famous family, albeit with a heavy dose of artistic licence, rekindled interest in their affair.
Charles was portrayed as very much in the driver’s seat, pursuing the older Camilla, played by Oscar-winning writer, director and actress Emerald Fennell.
In real life Camilla has carved out her own role, participating in the Booker literary prize ceremony and even the final of television ballroom dancing talent contest “Strictly Come Dancing”.
She campaigns to raise awareness of osteoporosis a condition from which her mother, Rosalind, suffered — and has an Instagram book club.
Marking 70 years on the throne earlier this year, the queen announced she hoped Camilla would be known as Queen Consort when Charles becomes king, resolving a long debate over her future title.
A YouGov poll in May 2022 found only 20 percent would like to see her become “queen”, while 39 percent favoured the title of “Princess Consort”.
YouGov ranked Camilla as the eighth most popular royal in the second three months of 2022, with 40 percent viewing her positively.
Born Camilla Rosemary Shand in London on July 17, 1947, Camilla had a traditional upbringing among Britain’s monied upper classes.
The granddaughter of the 3rd Baron Ashcombe, Roland Cubitt, she was educated in London, went to finishing schools in Switzerland and France, and spent her home life on a country estate in Sussex, in southern England.#photo1
Self-confident and attractive, she first met Prince Charles as a young woman at a polo match in the early 1970s, and they later became close.
However, believing Charles would never propose, she married British Army officer Andrew Parker Bowles in 1973. Royal guests included the queen’s sister, princess Margaret, and the monarch’s daughter, princess Anne.
The couple had two children: Tom Parker Bowles, whose godfather is Charles, is now a food writer, while Laura Lopes is an art curator.
Mutual feelings with the prince remained, nonetheless, with Charles allegedly continuing to see Camilla even after his high-profile marriage to Diana at St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1981.
The romance was fully rekindled later that decade as the royal marriage crumbled, which was luridly chronicled in leaked recorded phone conversations to the tabloid press.
Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles divorced in 1995, a year before Charles and Diana.
After Diana’s death, Charles and Camilla kept their relationship discreet, but it gradually became apparent they were effectively living together as husband and wife.
Following months of careful planning, the couple made their first public appearance together in 1999 and after that became increasingly open about their relationship.
They were married in the royal town of Windsor on April 9, 2005, in a civil ceremony followed by a religious blessing at St. George’s Chapel, with Queen Elizabeth II present.
Both divorced, there was controversy over whether they could have a church wedding, especially given Charles’ future role as supreme governor of the Church of England.#photo2
But the wedding — delayed by a day to allow the prince to attend pope John Paul II’s funeral — drew a cheering crowd of 20,000 into the streets leading to Windsor Castle.
As a married couple, they settled into a life of royal duties, overseas tours and holidays at Balmoral, the royal estate in northeast Scotland.
Camilla — known as the Duchess of Rothesay in Scotland — remained the archetype of the tweed-wearing, horse-loving British country aristocrat.
She has two Jack Russell terriers, rescue dogs Beth and Bluebell, and is a keen flower arranger.
Over time, Camilla has also been widely accepted by the royal family, including Charles and Diana’s two sons, princes William and Harry.
In 2005, Harry rejected the image of her as a “wicked stepmother”, describing her as a “wonderful woman and she’s made our father very, very happy, which is the most important thing.
“William and I love her to bits.”
Prince Charles’s behaviour with the two
Prince Charles’ relationship with Princess Diana when out in public was noted to be different in comparison to his behaviour with Camilla.
When the Prince of Wales is joined by the Duchess of Cornwall, he is snapped smiling and laughing with her, something which body language expert Inbaal Honigman shared was different when he was with Princess Diana.
Speaking to Express about Charles’ interaction with Camilla verses with Diana she said: “Prince Charles is regularly seen embracing his wife Camilla.
“The pair are often observed with their arms interlocking, looking each other in the eye, smiling full into each other’s faces, and generally seeking each other’s closeness, that the collective consciousness sees him as this guy.
“The warm, tactile, even romantic husband who is devoted to the lady beside him.
“Often photographed facing the same way as each other, or indeed facing one another, the married couple are clearly in love, and feel comfortable in each other’s presence, as they share royal duties, and the odd private moment.”
“A glance back at his photos with his first wife, the late Princess Diana, reveal a very different Prince.
“Official images and some personal press shots from the early years of the young couple’s married life, show a blushing Diana and an often discontent Charles in absolute disarray towards one another.
“There’s always a good few feet of social distancing between them, and they rarely face the same way.
“In the starkest of photographs, they’re facing squarely away from one another, both standing stiff with their arms by their sides.
“But even on the occasions when they’re not searching for something to look at on opposite ends of the room, they are not in harmony – if they both look ahead, it’s never in the same direction.
“Their facial expressions don’t match. They both look like they wished they were elsewhere, with somebody else.
“Partly, this disparity between 80s Prince Charles and his military stance, and modern era granddad Charles, all warm and loving, may be down to social protocols around the royals changing.
“It could be that back in his first marriage, the Prince was under clear instructions to not hold hands, to not look too happy – and during those days, there was no room for flexibility even with his young wife.
“These days now, the royals are accepted as people in their own right, and the Prince shows his spontaneity and natural wit without any negative repercussions.”
Inbaal continued: “Another consideration is maturity – many people only develop their romantic sides as they age.
“There is every chance that the apparent antipathy between Prince Charles and Princess Diana in the early days, expressed in their body language of opposites, was a result of social reasons, not emotional incompatibility,” she added.
Comedian and actor Aadi Adeal Amjad has taken a jibe at A-list actress Sajal Aly by making a sarcastic post on her recent statement.
The Beinteha star took to his Instagram stories to state that he rejected Netflix’s The Crown due to a bold scene with actor Humayun Saeed.
The Punjab Nahi Jaungi star has been roped in to play Dr Hasnat Khan, Princess Diana’s love interest in Season five of the hit Netflix series The Crown.
The Yeh Dil Mera diva opened up on rejecting a Hollywood film in a recent interview, stating that she turned it down due to a particular intimate scene in the film. The Mom star termed it as a very bold scene and even the idea of using a body double didn’t convince her.
“If an actor is lucky, he or she gets offered more international work but, regardless, I would never turn my back on my own industry. All the international work that has come my way has been because those filmmakers had seen my work in Pakistan. And when I go abroad, I do so as a Pakistani. I want to keep contributing and giving back to my industry with the work that I do.”
Princess Diana’s love life was no secret. From her marriage to Prince Charles to her alleged affairs, her love life always remained tabloid fodder. But, amid all the buzz there was one guy who caught Diana’s full attention– Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan.
Diana’s two-year romance with Dr Khan is still one of the most talked-about affairs. But who is Hasnat Khan?
Khan met Diana in 1995 when the Princess of Wales visited London’s Royal Brompton Hospital to meet a friend’s husband, who was recovering from heart surgery. According to Vanity Fair, Diana was instantly attracted towards him and told her friends that time, “Isn’t he drop-dead gorgeous?”
According to Diana’s butler Paul Burrell, Khan was not sporty, not handsome, and not even wealthy enough to be Diana’s lover. However, the Princess of Wales loved him because of his nature.
Diana described Khan as ‘Mr Wonderful’ and some believed he was her soulmate. Burrell said she begged Khan to marry her and he was even asked to find a priest for the marriage ceremony. She even visited Khan’s parents in Pakistan.
“When you think of the kind of men Diana must have met or been with or seen — here is a man who is completely and totally selfless. She said she’d never met anybody like him,” a friend of Diana told Vanity Fair.
Diana and Khan’s romance was a hush-hush affair. She used to leave messages for him at the hospital using the alias Dr Arman. They even avoided the media by meeting at unusual places and at times Diana wore a black wig to escape detection, The Guardian reported.
According to the ABC News‘ documentary ‘The Last 100 Days of Diana: the People’s Princess’ ended her relationship with Khan because he refused to go public.
“I think Hasnat was very much in love with Diana, but had really reached the end of his tether because Diana pushed him and pushed him and pushed him to go public and say we’re a couple, and he wouldn’t,” Tina Brown, the author of The Diana Chronicles, said.
“Even after two years, the relationship wasn’t leading to a meaningful progression or conclusion and that was the main stress on both of us,” Khan told Daily Mail in 2013.
Khan tried to call Diana on the night she died in a car accident. Richard Kay, Diana’s friend, revealed in The Last 100 Days of Diana about Khan’s phone calls to her.
“I think he was worried about her. I think he was worried, as were a lot of her friends, about what she’d got herself into,” Kay said.
Environmentalist activist and former cricketer Wasim Akram’s wife Shaniera Akram reacted to the news about Lady Diana’s close friend Jemima Goldsmith leaving the English Netflix show ‘The Crown’.
Goldsmith told The Sunday Times that she pulled out after Diana’s story was not handled “as respectfully or compassionately” as she had hoped.
“It was really important to me that the final years of my friend’s life be portrayed accurately and with compassion, as has not always happened in the past,” she added.
“In 2019, Peter Morgan asked me to co-write on the fifth series of ‘The Crown’, particularly those episodes which concerned Princess Diana’s last years before she died,” she said. “After a great deal of thought, having never spoken publicly about any of this before, I decided to contribute.”
“I requested that all my contributions be removed from the series and I declined a credit,” Jemima told the British Newspaper.
On the contrary, a spokesperson for ‘The Crown’ claimed that Jemima has never been contacted as a writer on the series.
“Jemima Khan has been a friend, fan and a vocal public supporter of ‘The Crown’ since season one. She has been part of a wide network of well-informed and varied sources who have provided extensive background information to our writers and research team, providing context for the drama that is ‘The Crown’,” he added.
Australian Actor Elizabeth Debicki is set to play Lady Diana in the next series which is expected to premiere in November 2022.
Journalist Martin Bashir tricked princess Diana into giving an explosive BBC television interview in which she lifted the lid on her troubled marriage to Prince Charles, an independent investigation concluded on Thursday.
Retired senior judge John Dyson said Bashir commissioned faked bank statements that falsely suggested some of Diana’s closest aides were being paid by the security services to keep tabs on her.
Bashir then showed them to Diana’s brother Charles Spencer, in a successful bid to convince him to arrange a meeting between himself and Diana and earn her trust.
Dyson said he was “satisfied” that Bashir showed fake bank statements “so as to deceive Earl Spencer and induce him to arrange the meeting with Princess Diana”.
“By behaving as described… Mr Bashir acted inappropriately and in serious breach” of the corporation’s own editorial guidelines on “straight dealing”, Dyson added.
Questions have long been asked about how Bashir convinced Diana to talk on the BBC’s flagship Panorama programme in November 1995, which was watched by a record 22.8 million people and won a string of television awards.
In it, she famously said, “there were three people” in her marriage — her, Charles and his long-time mistress and now wife, Camilla Parker-Bowles — and also admitted adultery.
Diana’s friend, Simone Simmons, told The Sun that the interview had “destroyed her pyschologically” and “made her paranoid”.
Bashir, now 58, was little-known at the time of the interview but went on to have a high-profile career on US television networks, and interviewed stars such as Michael Jackson.
He returned to work for the corporation as religion editor until he stepped down last week, citing ill health, just hours before Dyson’s report was submitted to BBC bosses.
Earlier, a 1996 internal inquiry by future BBC chief Tony Hall and another senior figure, Anne Sloman, cleared Bashir of wrong-doing.
But Dyson called that probe “flawed and woefully ineffective”.
Hall, now chair of the board of trustees at Britain’s National Gallery, admitted that the probe “fell well short of what was required”, and said he was “wrong to give Martin Bashir the benefit of the doubt”.
Meanwhile, BBC director-general Tim Davie said the corporation accepted Dyson’s findings completely and offered a “full and unconditional apology”.
The broadcaster also said it was handing back the awards the programme won for the interview.
Bashir also apologised, saying the faking of the bank statements was “a stupid thing do and was an action I deeply regret”.
But he maintained it had “no bearing whatsoever on the personal choice by Princess Diana to take part”, and he was still “immensely proud” of the interview.
Davie equally said the princess was “keen on the idea of an interview with the BBC”. Her estranged husband had spoken to commercial channel ITV in 1994, and also admitted adultery.
However, he added that “the BBC should have made greater effort to get to the bottom of what happened at the time and been more transparent about what it knew.”
Diana and Charles formally divorced in 1996. She died aged 36 in a high-speed car crash while being chased by paparazzi photographers in Paris the following year. Charles married Camilla in 2005.
After Emma Corrin’s brilliant performance in the fourth season of Netflix’s The Crown, Hollywood star Kristen Stewart is all set to step into the role of the ‘People’s Princess’, Diana, in an upcoming film titled Spencer.
As per details, Stewart was roped in for the role in June 2020. The film is helmed by Pablo Larraín.
In a first look unveiled on Wednesday, January 27, the Twilight actress embodies Princess Diana in a red blazer and a black hat with a veil. Stewart is also sporting Di’s signature short blonde hair.
Here’s a first look at Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in #Spencer, Pablo Larraín’s imagining of the weekend Princess Diana decides to leave her marriage to Prince Charles. pic.twitter.com/LSn4C7cF0h
According to Deadline, the film will be “a drama that shapes up to be a hot package for the virtual Cannes Market. The Steven Knight-scripted film covers a critical weekend in the early ‘90s when Diana decided her marriage to Prince Charles wasn’t working, and that she needed to veer from a path that put her in line to one day be queen.”
“The drama takes place over three days, in one of her final Christmas holidays in the House of Windsor in their Sandringham estate in Norfolk, England.”
Timothy Spall, Sally Hawkins and Sean Harris are also part of the cast.
Spencer has begun principal photography. It will be shot in both Germany and the UK. Spencer is scheduled to release in Fall 2021, ahead of Diana’s 25th death anniversary in 2022.
The Culture Secretary of the United Kingdom Oliver Dowden has suggested that each episode of The Crown should begin with a disclaimer stating that the show is not factual.
“It’s a beautifully produced work of fiction, so as with other TV productions, Netflix should be very clear at the beginning it is just that,” Dowden said in an interview. “Without this, I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact.”
He added that will write to Netflix this week to express his view.
The fourth season of The Crown follows the life of the royal family during the late 1970s and the 1980s, which means many of the main characters’ real-life counterparts are still living. Charles and Princess Diana’s rocky married life and the Charles-Diana-Camilla love triangle is one of the main storylines in the season. It is pertinent to add here that the creators of the show have clarified that creative liberty has been taken while making the show. This season also shows Margaret Thatcher’s years in office as prime minister.
Meanwhile, Dowden is not the only one who thinks that The Crown should be classified as a work of fiction. Earl Spencer, brother of the late Princess Diana, has also said that he believes the series should warn viewers that it takes artistic license with actual events.
“I think it would help The Crown an enormous amount if, at the beginning of each episode, it stated that: ‘This isn’t true but it is based around some real events,’” Spencer had said in an interview.
Season 4 of The Crown is now streaming on Netflix.
