For the people! Princess Diana left a grand legacy in her wake. The relatable royal prided herself on devoting time to her extensive charity work and her two children, Prince William and Prince Harry.
Diana married into England’s royal family in July 1981, when she and Prince Charles exchanged vows in a lavish ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral. The couple dealt with their fair share of strife throughout the 15-year marriage but welcomed William in June 1982 and Harry in September 1984.
The pair separated in December 1992 and finalized their divorce in August 1996. Diana eventually moved on with Dodi Fayed.
The Princess of Wales died in August 1997 after a car crash in Paris after being chased by photographers. Fayed and the driver of the vehicle, Henri Paul, were also killed. William and Harry were 15 and 12, respectively, at the time of their mother’s death.
Grief hit the boys hard, which made their focus on mental health initiatives even more important as they expanded into their own activism as adults. “I think when you are bereaved at a very young age, anytime really, but particularly at a young age — I can resonate closely to that — you feel pain like no other. And you know that in your life it’s going to be very difficult to come across something that is going to be an even worse pain than that,” William explained on A Royal Team Talk: Tackling Mental Health in May 2019. “But it also brings you so close to all those other people out there who have been bereaved.”
The Duke of Cambridge added: “The British stiff upper lip thing, that’s great and we need to have that occasionally when times are really hard. There has to be a moment for that. But otherwise, we’ve got to relax a little bit and be able to talk about our emotions because we’re not robots.”
In June 2021, Diana’s younger son paid tribute to his mother by naming his daughter, Lilibet “Lili” Diana, after the Princess of Wales. “Lili is named after her great-grandmother, Her Majesty The Queen, whose family nickname is Lilibet,” Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, said in a statement. “Her middle name, Diana, was chosen to honor her beloved late grandmother, The Princess of Wales.”
Stewart Pearce, Diana’s former voice coach, told Us Weekly at the time that the late royal would have been delighted by the couple’s decision to name Lili in her honor. “Diana would be thrilled at the choice of name for the little one,” he said.
Scroll through to see Princess Diana through the years: