The 2013 film Diana begins the evening that Diana, Princess of Wales died in a Paris car accident. Diana, played by Naomi Watt,s is walking around her hotel suite alone. Over the course of the film, which covers incidents from the last two years of the Princess’s life, she is often shown on her own. She goes jogging on the Kensington Palace grounds, drives around London in her butler’s car, rehearses her BBC interview in front of the mirror and makes a few attempts at cooking/reheating dinner in the palace kitchen.
There’s a element of truth to this approach. In his book, On Royalty
The affair with Khan so dominates the film that there is little sense of the person Diana was before they met. Although there are allusions to her parents’ divorce, her love for her sons and her own failed marriage, she seems curiously incomplete before beginning of the affair. Despite the actual Diana’s years of charity work on behalf of AIDS victims, the fictional Diana has difficulty finding her way around a hospital and goes “snooping” to learn more about how she help patients in need. She tells Khan that her royal duties have resulted in her knowing a little bit about every subject but there is little evidence of this knowledge in her actions. Diana’s bodyguards and the paparazzi come and go in the film. Neither are onscreen when her relationship with Khan breaks down and the film portrays Diana shouting “Ha-a-a-sna-a-t” in front of his apartment in the middle of the night.
Apart from a brief last meeting with William and Harry before going on vacation with Dodi Al Fayed, members of the royal family do not appear onscreen and are rarely mentioned. Unfortunately, the script perpetuates the historical Diana’s own view that “the palace” was conspiring against her. The fictional Diana complains that the royal family is keeping her from her sons, only allowing her to see them every fifth week. While laws dating from the reign of King George I dictated that the Queen had custody of her grandchildren, William and Harry actually spent equal time with each parent after the marriage ended. It was not the royal family but the boarding school education of the two princes that limited Diana’s time with her sons.
The makers of Diana missed an opportunity to explore why millions believed that they had suffered a personal loss when the Princess of Wales died in 1997. The film is so focused on her affair with Khan that all other aspects of her life including her charity work, motherhood and relationship with the royal family do not receive the attention they deserve. The stilted script with lines like, “I am a heart surgeon, you are the most famous woman in the world” provide few clues about how Diana really behaved behind closed doors. With talented actors such as Watts and Andrews, Diana should have been a much stronger film.
by 
, “I was treated like nobody else’s business. Nobody asked me when it was suitable for William – 11 o’clock could not have been worse. Endless pictures of the Queen Mother, Charles and William. I was excluded totally that day.” Diana’s biographer, Tina Brown dismissed Diana’s account in 
, writing, “The christening was a dynastic ceremony involving all the Royal Family, not a “Mommy and Me” class.”
David Cohen, a psychologist and the author of 
Cohen concludes that Queen Victoria’s upbringing was particularly different from the parenting norms of the early nineteenth century as eighteenth century enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau encouraged greater freedom for children. In contrast, the “Kensington system” devised by Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent and her comptroller, John Conroy, strictly regulated all aspects of the princess’s life, refusing to allow her any time alone. Cohen’s psychological approach to royal history informs some interesting insights about past royal parents. Cohen speculates that Prince Albert’s difficulty assimilating into British court society may have contributed to his strictness with his son, the future Edward VII. The Prince Consort may have wanted to ensure his son’s success in an environment that he himself did not entirely understand.
Cohen’s original approach to the material and unique insights, however, are undermined by a number of factual inaccuracies in the text. For example. the Gloucester affair of 1654, when the exiled Queen Henrietta Maria attempted to convert one of her sons to Catholicism concerned her youngest son, Henry, Duke of Gloucester not her second son, the future James II as Cohen states in the text (p. 78-79). Inaccuracies of this kind should be corrected for future editions of the text and the inclusion of genealogical tables would clarify the birth order of large groups of royal siblings for general readers. There are also a number of surprising omissions from the bibliography. Cohen does not appear to have consulted 
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