The Crown Season 6: Is Elizabeth Debicki's Portrayal Of Princess Diana Accurate?

Seven years after Netflix first debuted its historical drama "The Crown," the story — which focuses on the British royal family from the mid-20th century onward — is coming to a close. Season 6's second round of episodes will arrive on December 14, 2023, but viewers are still reeling from the first four installments, which dropped on November 16. Given that the first half of the season focuses on Princess Diana's (Elizabeth Debicki) final days in 1997 and ends with the high-speed paparazzi chase in Paris that ended her life, audiences are wondering how much of the story is real, and how much has been fictionalized for narrative convenience.

Much of Diana's portrayal is accurate; in real life, she and her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, died from injuries sustained during the crash inside the Pont de l'Alma tunnel, and their driver did have two drinks at the Ritz hotel before attempting to evade the photographers that were chasing them. But it was always going to be a struggle to accurately portray the magnitude of the death of the People's Princess without veering into sensational or sentimental territory, and in light of this, many critics feel that Season 6 has been the show's weakest offering yet. This assessment has a lot to do with creative liberties taken by creator Peter Morgan, the most glaring of which is the choice to include scenes featuring magical realism. Diana and Dodi (Khalid Abdalla) both return to the story after their deaths as ghosts intended to provide closure and mend fences with those they've left behind.

"The Crown" played fast and loose with reality this season, but there are elements of the story that are verifiably true. Prince Charles (Dominic West) did throw a 50th birthday party for his now-wife Camilla Parker Bowles (Olivia Williams) and he did hire Mark Bolland (Ben Lloyd-Hughes) to help generate positive press for the couple after their affair was revealed.

Princess Diana's life and death provoked an intense amount of media coverage, and the show uses costuming to help ground the events and characters, effectively blurring the line between fiction and reality. Diana indeed wore a Tiffany blue one-piece bathing suit while on vacation in the Mediterranean with Dodi Fayed, but the dialogue and the specifics included in their yacht holiday are largely speculative.

Similarly, there is evidence that Dodi and Diana picked out a diamond ring together and that Dodi went to Repossi in Paris and purchased the ring the day before he and Diana died. But there is no proof that he ever actually proposed to her, nor that the two intended to get married.

Season 6 of "The Crown" goes out of its way to paint Dodi's father, Mohamed Al-Fayed (Salim Daw), as a social-climbing villain intent on exploiting Diana to increase his own social access and power. But while the show suggests that Al-Fayed starts the paparazzi furor over Diana and Dodi by hiring a photographer to follow them around — thus suggesting that he was culpable for their tragic deaths — the truth is that the British press had been following Diana for two decades before she ever met Dodi.