Playing Princess Diana

Stepping into the beaded shoes of the 20th Century’s most controversial princess was a huge responsibility for The Crown’s new star Emma Corrin. She tells Juliet Rieden why she thinks Diana never really stood a chance.

- Juliet Rieden

Emma Corrin was on a train in early 2019 when she received the call that would change her life. It was her agent. “She’s normally very together and calm,” notes Emma, only here “she sounded really weird”. Evidently The Crown had called and asked if Emma could stand in to play Diana in the read-through for the auditions for Camilla. This was not an audition at all, they stressed, and Emma would be paid for her time; it was merely a request for help.

But both Emma and her agent spied an opportunity. “It was worth giving it a good shot,” says Emma, who had just graduated from Cambridge University. She immediately embarked on background research and got to work on Diana’s “distinctive voice”. Although she hadn’t formally trained at drama school, Emma had acted since primary school and at university, alongside her academic studies, she played Juliet in a Shakespearean production that toured Japan.

Twenty-four-year-old Emma was a baby when Diana died but she had always played a part in her life. “I don’t have any living memory of her, but I had a huge awareness of her before I was cast in The Crown and those feelings are mainly ones of appreciation and love,” she says. “I saw her as this person who broke the mould. I was very inspired by the empathy that she displayed and her incredibly warm and generous spirit. It was unlike anything we’d seen in a person in the royal family and I think I grew up in awe of her strength.”