'The Crown' Imagines A Scene Where A Young Kate Middleton Meets Princess Diana
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The Crown, a fictional television show, is no stranger to taking creative liberties. In part one of season six, the love story and oft-speculated-about engagement of Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed was portrayed with its own creative bend. And part two is no different—this time there are two Princesses of Wales involved. In episode seven of the final season, the show imagines a young Kate Middleton shopping with her mother, Carole Middleton, and meeting Princess Diana and Prince William selling copies of the Big Issue on the streets of London.
To be clear: Kate never met Diana.
In their engagement interview, Kate spoke about the late Princess Diana, saying, "Obviously I would have loved to have met her and she's obviously an inspirational woman to look up to." A few years later, Prince William expressed feelings that he wished his mother would have met his wife. "I would love her to have met Catherine and to have seen the children grow up," he said in 2017. "It makes me sad that she won’t—that they will never know her."
In The Palace Papers, Tina Brown writes that the young prince and Kate did cross paths. "Kate did get a glimpse of the nine-year-old Prince when he came from Ludgrove for a hockey match against St. Andrew’s School, and she attended a tea afterward. The breathless press later tried to reproduce a Diana-like narrative of the ten-year-old Kate pining for her prince forever after, but Kate brushed that off at the engagement interview. Her heart had yearned for the Levi’s guy on a poster on her dorm wall, she insisted briskly, not William."
There is a nugget of truth in The Crown's scene, however, but it has nothing to do with Kate—rather, William has sold The Big Issue, a magazine which supports homeless people, on the streets of London, and has channeled his mother in his work around ending homelessness. During her lifetime, Diana would purchase copies of the magazine.
"Lady Diana used to come to me, privately, on her own, and buy the paper," vendor Frank McGucken recalled. "I used to see her on a regular basis in Beauchamp Place when she was on her way to the gym in Chelsea Harbour. She had it all. But she had respect for homeless people. She used to give me a beautiful smile.”
It's unclear if Diana and William ever handed out copies of the magazine, but William did visit homeless shelters with his mother as a young boy. "I was 11 when I first visited a homeless shelter with my mother, who in her own inimitable style was determined to shine a light on an overlooked, misunderstood problem," William wrote in an essay for the Big Issue. "In the 30-odd years since, I've seen countless projects in this space grow from strength to strength, including charities of which I have had the honor of being Patron."
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