Dodi Fayed's Adventures in Hollywood

To mark the final season of The Crown, which details the final days of Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed, we're resharing this story from last year about Dodi's career in Hollywood.

The first day of location filming for F/X in 1985 found an eerie foreshadowing unfolding for producer Dodi Fayed. Michael Peyser, who worked on the film with Fayed, recalls one of Fayed’s bodyguards getting into an altercation with a bus driver after the bus got too close to Fayed’s car. “It led to a shouting match between the bodyguard, who was talking to the bus driver, who didn’t like his guff,” Peyser says. “And it came to, I believe, some fisticuffs.”

In the melee, the bus driver was either knocked down or fell, and Fayed’s bodyguard fled the scene while the police were called. “We found him and resolved the situation,” Peyser says. “But it was weird that a bodyguard created trouble for his client by having a temper.” Eleven years later, another man in Fayed’s employ would create trouble again, with tragic results.

F/X was Fayed’s third film as chief executive of the production company Allied Stars, but he was already a Hollywood player thanks to his Oscar win for Best Picture with his second project, Chariots of Fire. Born into wealth, Fayed was nevertheless attempting to carve out a name for himself separate from his family’s and apart from his growing reputation as a playboy. Always obsessed with movies, Fayed created a life and career for himself in Los Angeles. He succeeded, to a degree, until the circumstances of his death eradicated what he had accomplished himself.

Born April 17, 1955, Emad El-Din Mohamed Abdel Mena’em Fayed's peripatetic life of night clubs, fast cars and short-lived employment was supposed to end with the creation of production company Allied Stars Ltd. Funded by his father, the company’s second production was a major success. Chariots of Fire earned seven Academy Award nominations, taking home four, including Best Picture.

“Allied Stars was Dodi’s idea,” Mohammed Al-Fayed, Dodi's father, told Variety in 2003. “He was in love with and involved with movies since he was a child.”

But Allied Stars would only see a handful of films released over the course of Fayed’s life (interestingly, Fayed bought the rights to Stephen King’s Firestarter in galley proofs for $1 million before Universal acquired the project). Throughout his career as a producer, Fayed remained an involved, if slightly ineffectual, presence.

Chariots of Fire producer David Puttnam recalled in 2012 that he threw the executive producer off the set for allegedly giving the cast cocaine. “Dodi had other things on his mind than developing a film career for himself, of which girls and drugs rated pretty highly—and not necessarily in that order,” he said.

Another former collaborator agreed with Puttnam’s claim that Fayed’s career was “hopeless.” “Dodi was a lovely guy, but he knew as much about producing as my housekeeper,” this person tells T&C. “When I think of producers, they’re people who knew what they were doing from the ground up. Dodi came in with money and got the title, but I don’t know if he ever did the day-to-day work. I always thought of him as [a] sweet but naïve playboy under the thumb of his father. He had lots of friends and lots of money, but I can’t say much about him as a producer.”

Peyser recalls a very different man. “He was the ultimate go-between facilitator,” Peyser says. ”He could get you everything you needed. Let me put it this way: I’ve worked with many more people who are of less substance and had less understanding of the storytelling they were doing.”

After F/X, Fayed produced just two more films: an F/X sequel and The Scarlet Letter. Though he received an executive producer credit on Steven Spielberg’s Hook, his work on that film extended only as far as selling the rights to Peter Pan (which he bought from the hospital to which original author J.M. Barrie had bequeathed it). Instead, he served on the board of Harrod’s and Turnbull & Asser, both owned by his father. He resigned from Harrod’s after 18 months; he left Turnbull & Asser after three years.

And then, in the summer of 1997, he met Princess Diana.

“I can verify that there was no ambition in the relationship. It was total respect and finding someone who was equally damned,” Peyser says. “It was a sincere affection. He wasn’t chasing any kind of celebrity.”

Peyser spoke on the phone with Dodi not long before the fatal car crash and remembers Fayed’s enthusiasm about the new relationship. “I know he called me within the time they were seeing each other and saying, ‘We’re gonna get together and you’ll love her and she’s great.’”

Not everyone was as delighted with the burgeoning romance, including Diana herself, according to some claims. Diana’s former butler and confidante, Paul Burrell, suggested in his testimony at the inquest into their deaths that Fayed was a “rebound” from her previous relationship with heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, with whom she ended things shortly after first meeting Fayed. And model Kelly Fisher sued Fayed for $500,000, claiming he broke off their engagement after meeting Diana and had promised to support her if she gave up her career. Fisher dropped the lawsuit in the wake of his death.

Whether or not Fayed and Diana would have remained together or married is impossible to know. But the unknown is now moot; their names have been bound together for 25 years, almost the same amount of time Fayed spent as a film producer.

Pursued by paparazzi, Fayed’s driver and bodyguard, Henri Paul, tried to outrun them and crashed into a pillar in the Alma tunnel. Post-mortem toxicology reports found that Paul was three times over the French legal blood alcohol content when he, Fayed, and Diana perished on August 31, 1997.

Posthumously, Fayed achieved the fame that some claimed he perpetually sought. But in the immediate aftermath of the crash and in the subsequent 25 years, the headlines around his demise have obscured his life prior to his death.

“He was coddled by his family, but as an individual, he was a real guy with the kind of infectious, giggling laugh that couldn’t stop,” Peyser says. “He enjoyed life, you know? And that’s what I would say. He was a good spirit and protective and embracing in a certain kind of way."

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