Emma Corrin on playing Diana in The Crown: 'I was told my life would change as much as hers did'

There had been other intense scenes and other memorable costumes, but when Emma Corrin first walked out in a recreation of the romantic wedding dress worn by Diana, Princess of Wales, the whole cast and crew of The Crown fell silent, as if they were witnessing a reincarnation.

When they started to speak, it was in whispers. ‘It was incredible because of the significance of what I was wearing,’ Corrin recalls, ‘but the effect it had on everyone in the room was quite terrifying. There was a reverence.’

The dress had been inspired by the iconic original design, conceived by David and Elizabeth Emanuel for the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981.

It was so massive that 10 people were needed to help the young actor into it for the wedding scene in the keenly awaited fourth series of Netflix’s drama. We sense the weight of expectation as Diana, seen from behind, advances slowly in her miles of satin towards an uncertain future.

The role is the most coveted and demanding of the entire £100 million television production, except that of the Queen – first played by the crystalline Claire Foy and now by Olivia Colman. It’s about to skyrocket the 24-year-old unknown actor from obscurity to life-changing celebrity, and there is no way of telling how it will be. ‘I’ve heard it said that you stop growing from the age you get famous,’ she says warily.

So far, Corrin is famous for being nearly famous. Ahead of the premiere next month, interest in her is feverish. As soon as the cast was announced in March last year, the paparazzi started to pursue her around London – an unpleasant echo of Diana’s treatment.

In a fashion anointing, she wears a plunging cobalt-blue gown by Oscar de la Renta on the cover of this month’s British Vogue, and she has a team to steer her through the rapids of oncoming fame. Her excitement is overlaid with caution. ‘It’s a lot of new experiences in a short amount of time. You have to be very good at setting boundaries for yourself, so you’re not taken advantage of.’

Having feasted on all 10 episodes, I can say that Corrin is as convincing a Diana as another human being could be. It’s not just a matter of the sidelong look or the voice or the glamour, but the dramatic truth of a divided personality that she gets so well. On their 1983 tour of Australia, where Diana is mobbed by adoring crowds, she confronts Charles with his neglect of her and his lingering attachment to Camilla.

Corrin captures exactly the trademark vulnerability and steel. ‘Where do I fit in?’ she demands. ‘You can’t leave her alone.’ To those of us who lived through the crowded Diana years, when almost every day’s press traded on her loveliness and her pain, it is like being confronted with the late Princess’s living embodiment. Shivery stuff.

‘As well as having the innocence and beauty of a young Diana,’ said the series’ creator Peter Morgan, when he announced the cast in April, ‘she also has, in abundance, the range and complexity to play an extraordinary woman who went from anonymous teenager to the most iconic woman of her generation.’ It was no hype.

‘She’s a total natural on set,’ says her dialect coach William Conacher. ‘Sometimes it was hard to believe she hasn’t been acting for the camera for decades. One of the first things Emma told me was that her mother is very like Diana. So much so that after Diana’s death, people used to do a double-take when they saw her. It’s in the blood. Emma was made to play Diana.’

The Crown has been with us now since 2016, an addictive soap opera that opened with Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to Prince Philip in 1947. Series four covers the turbulent decade from 1979 when Margaret Thatcher (a brilliant Gillian Anderson) reaches Number 10. Lord Mountbatten, the Queen’s cousin, is murdered on his boat by the IRA, Princess Anne’s marriage collapses, Michael Fagan breaks into Buckingham Palace and sits on the Queen’s bed – and a shy, upper-class girl of 19, a virginal kindergarten teacher, appears from nowhere as the answer to the 33-year-old Prince of Wales’s urgent marriage problem.

We were all – press and public, Church and state – taken in by the superficial magic of the Charles and Diana story, despite the almost perfunctory nature of their courtship. We colluded in the fairy tale. The country was in a state of political and social unrest, unemployment was high.

A royal romance to cheer and to distract was exactly what was needed and newspapers spared no expense in covering it. I was one of a small detachment of journalists sent to Gibraltar to cover the first leg of the royal honeymoon in August 1981. We had no suspicion that the couple on the deck of the Royal Yacht Britannia, looking carefree, were already heading for the marital rocks. Girlish in a flowersprigged dress, she looked far too young to be embarking on this voyage, but we assumed that the man at her side, almost 13 years her senior, would be her protector.

‘I don’t think it was intentionally an arranged marriage,’ says Corrin. ‘That sounds too calculated. But through expectation, tradition and a need for Prince Charles to get married to the “right” person, she came along and was, yeah, pretty perfect.’

In The Crown, Diana discovers before the wedding that Charles is still in love with Camilla Parker Bowles and tries to call the Queen to say the marriage cannot go ahead. The range of panic, disbelief and suppressed anger that Corrin lays bare is startling. ‘When I read Peter’s script,’ she says, ‘I wanted to shout, “Why aren’t you leaving? Why don’t you go? Why don’t you get out?”’

We are in a photographic studio near Earl’s Court, just a stone’s throw from Lady Diana Spencer’s old flat. Though Corrin says doing publicity makes her nervous, she has modelled for our cover shoot with professional aplomb and now appears relaxed in jeans and an enveloping JW Anderson top. Her grey-green eyes are steady and her features – rounder and more classically symmetrical than Diana’s – are composed. There is nothing particularly Diana-ish about her, except her height, but when she demonstrates her ‘hook word’ for catching Diana’s light, girlish voice – ‘Awright, awright’ – there’s a jolt of recognition. That tinselly final consonant is uncanny.

‘Diana’s accent was not especially remarkable,’ says Conacher. ‘Her intonation is the thing an actor can hang their vocal hat on. She spoke with a minor key phrase ending much of the time, something that came from lack of confidence, I think, in younger life and a tool she used in later life to reinforce empathy.’

Corrin’s rightness for the part was notched up in tiny increments over many months. In the summer of 2018, she had just left Cam - bridge University and was ‘auditioning relentlessly’ while trying to earn some money. She’d had two small television roles – in the US drama Pennyworth and an episode of Grantchester – and had a small part in the film Misbehaviour, about a group of 1970s feminists who disrupt the Miss World contest.

She was working in a start-up, packaging lingerie, when her agent Maya Hambro rang. ‘Don’t freak out,’ she said. ‘It’s not hugely exciting, but it’s a great opportunity.’ The Crown was auditioning five potential Camillas for season three and wanted someone to ‘read in’ for Diana, alongside Josh O’Connor, playing Prince Charles. ‘It’s paid,’ Hambro added, ‘and you’ll be off-camera, but the room will be full of producers, directors and casting people.’

Corrin learnt the lines, devoured count - less books and documentaries about Diana, and took a deep breath. ‘It was kind of perfect for me, very much starting out, to be in an audition, but under no pressure.’

In a lunch break, one of the directors took her aside and asked if she would like to do more work on the character. ‘Can we put you on tape as well?’ he asked. ‘Don’t get your hopes up, Emma,’ Hambro warned. ‘It wasn’t an audition.’

But there were pointers. ‘I had some meetings. They called to check a few times to see what work I was doing. Little things. Then the public casting started and they invited me to audition.’

Hundreds of girls were seen. Corrin’s audition lasted for two hours and at the end of it she told a friend: ‘If this goes no further, it’s been the best time of my life.’ Corrin believes her impromptu rendering of All I Ask of You, from the musical The Phantom of the Opera, helped to clinch it. As an ill-judged seventh anniversary present to the Prince of Wales, Diana arranged to have herself filmed on the West End stage, performing the song in costume with the orchestra. ‘Can you sing it now?’ Morgan asked. Robert Sterne, the casting director, called up the karaoke version on YouTube. He took the male part and Corrin sang the female part.

‘“My God,” I thought, “What am I doing?”’ Corrin recalls. ‘I hadn’t sung it in ages. I hadn’t warmed up. I was slightly flying by the seat of my pants, feeling absolutely mortified. They’ve since told me that it was the fact that I was so willing to do it that shocked them. They didn’t think I would.’

There was a further audition when she was summoned for a chemistry read with Josh O’Connor, but it sounds like a formality. Moments after arriving, the costume department were taking her measurements. The director Ben Caron offered her the role then and there, on set. ‘After that long process, it was the most wonderful way for it to end,’ says Corrin. ‘I had the most intense rush of feelings I’ve ever experienced.’

Though she had vowed not to say anything about being offered the role of Diana, she went straight to her family home in Sevenoaks to tell her parents – Juliette, a speech therapist, and Chris, a businessman. Perhaps because of her South African mother’s resemblance to the Princess, Corrin had always been fascinated by Diana, and was an avid follower of The Crown. ‘I am very proud,’ she says. ‘Joining this incredibly talented acting family was just surreal.’

The show’s research department produced a huge lever-arch file of everything she needed to know, episode by episode. Corrin was not quite two when Diana died in August 1997, aged 36. ‘I have no living memory of her and I think that was useful.’ She met Diana’s former private secretary Patrick Jephson, who told her not to forget that Diana was funny and happy much of the time. ‘Do you think she loved Charles?’ she asked him. He replied, ‘Undoubtedly.’

And she watched the 2017 Channel 4 documentary Diana: In Her Own Words obsessively. ‘It helped me get a grip on her voice and the way she reflected on what happened to her. It was very useful to hear her talk about the massive shift from being in Earl’s Court with her flatmates to the isolation of Palace life. I don’t like using the word naive about her – it does her an injustice – but it was so different from how she’d imagined. She’s in a kind of dream, waiting for someone to care she’s there.’

The ‘weird parallels’ between her experience of being plucked from obscurity and Diana’s are inescapable. ‘Ben Caron said to me, “Look, your life’s going to change in very much the same way as hers did. If anything happens that makes you feel scared or overwhelmed, if there are photographers following you, just use those feelings [in the part].”

‘That was incredibly useful because it has been a bit like that. It can feel very much like a runaway train, but I can control it, I can slow it down by being more careful. I get very anxious doing press and events, so it’s important I surround myself with people I get on with and really trust.’

Her team of five professionals are also friends – her agent Hambro, stylist Harry Lambert, best known for his work with Harry Styles, US managers Charles Mastropietro and Frank Frattaroli, who look after Frances McDormand and Willem Dafoe, and her publicist Pandora Weldon. These are the people who advise and protect her – sometimes from herself. ‘I am a people-pleaser. I don’t like letting people down.’

Another route to getting into character was being fitted for both the wedding dress and the black satin gown inspired by the one Diana wore to her first official public engagement with Prince Charles – the moment when she is transformed from shy nursery teacher to movie-star celebrity. ‘When you first meet her she’s wearing rather frumpy skirts,’ says Corrin. ‘But later you can tell that the clothes she wears help her to stand up and feel that she has a voice.’

Corrin shares a flat in London with four friends, none of them actors, with whom she went to university. ‘It’s nice to come back to people who really know you. It helps to balance out some of the silliness that comes with this job, like having your face on the cover of a magazine. It’s great to have people taking the p—s out of you, which they do – constantly. It keeps me grounded.’ She says there is no boyfriend on the scene. ‘I’d rather navigate this on my own. It’s nicer to feel like I’m taking care of me.’ She is reluctant to speculate about the future except to say that her next move may be a sideways one: she is exploring the idea of going into production.

Filming started in September 2019 in the cold and windswept Scottish Highlands where The Balmoral Test (episode two) was clearly as much a test of Emma Corrin the untried actor as of Lady Diana Spencer’s suitability for royal life. She turns out at first light to stalk a wounded stag with the Duke of Edinburgh (Tobias Menzies), who is captivated by her girlish charm and her willingness to muck in.

‘I love being outside and getting stuck into stuff,’ Corrin says. ‘It was vital for getting to grips with her character because those scenes with Philip show that although she’s being tested, although she’s young and nervous, she plays this game; she knows the rules. I refuse to believe for one minute that she didn’t know what she was doing. She is flirtatious in a nice way. I love her dynamic with Philip. There is a moving last scene [after the marriage has fallen apart] when he says to her, “We are all outsiders and I do understand.” But he couldn’t really understand in the end, I think.’

The relationship with Olivia Colman was so comfortable that she wondered how they would ever get in character for their one-on-one encounter in episode six, when the Queen accuses Diana of deliberately playing to the gallery and eclipsing Charles on their Australia tour. ‘I knew the weight of that scene and wanted to do it justice. But we were laughing and joking and being completely silly beforehand. I’m thinking: “She’s meant to be horrible to Diana. How can I do this?” Colly’s [Colman’s nickname] so nice, the least intimidating person in the world, and she’s got a lovely maternal energy on set. The Queen’s meant to be completely the opposite. But honestly, at the flick of a switch she was in character. I was absolutely terrified. No acting required.’

Corrin and Josh O’Connor are poignant in their hopeless union. ‘Charles and Diana both had unsupported, isolated upbringings that led to a massive desire for a maternal figure in their lives,’ says Corrin. ‘Neither could be that for the other, so there was an impossibility in the relationship, no matter how much they loved one another.’

The actors established an instant rapport and would devise silly word games to keep themselves amused when filming was slack. Yet their wounding on-screen arguments are masterclasses in marital despair. After so much public restraint, Corrin admits she liked shouting. ‘Raising my voice felt new and quite dangerous.’

Despite the depth of her research, Corrin likes to remind herself, and me, that The Crown is a writer’s take on the Royal family, based on certain key events and characters. But now the series has shifted closer to the present day, she is aware of the sensibilities of the people portrayed. ‘We can say as much as we like that it’s Peter Morgan’s version, it’s fictitious, but actually, you know, it is Diana, she’s real: an exceptional person who had an exceptional effect on many people.’

She can ‘totally imagine’ that Princes William and Harry would prefer not to see their mother’s life on screen. ‘In their place, I don’t think I would want to. I felt overwhelming frustration at the speculation about Diana when I was doing the research. If I’m feeling that, how much more tired the family must be about the endless commentary from people who feel like they own her.’

Prince Harry, in particular, is said to be upset by the inclusion of his mother’s bulimia, something Corrin insisted on doing ‘properly’ – that is, showing Diana at her most desolate, bingeing and then making herself sick.

‘This kind of thing couldn’t just be alluded to,’ she explains. ‘It’s something I don’t want to shy away from. The people [who suffer from the condition] are being done a disservice if it’s not shown. I really wanted to get to grips with it.’ To understand bulimia and how to portray it, Corrin worked with the charity Beat, an eating disorder support group.

‘For the Diana of the series, the Diana we’re creating, it was a response to her loneliness, a way of controlling something when she felt she couldn’t control any other thing; a purging, a secret she could carry around with her. She had this thing that almost became a friend, that she could rely on.’

Through total immersion in the Princess’s life, Corrin says Diana has become like a companion to her, but there are still things she doesn’t understand. Sacrificial lamb or an agent of her own unhappiness? I ask. ‘None of us is perfect,’ she says carefully, ‘placed in extreme circumstances, as she was.’

She would like to have met her in the flesh. ‘I’d want to ask her what it really felt like because that’s the only thing I can’t ever know. I have all the factual information, but it doesn’t tell me what she actually felt leaving the innermost circle of royalty, whether she found personal happiness.’ I think what makes Corrin exceptional is that she actually cares.

The real princess VS queen of the screen

This article was originally published October 23 2020. Series four of The Crown is available now on Netflix