The People’s Princess always and forever. The British royal family has kept Princess Diana’s memory alive since her untimely death in August 1997.
The mother of Prince William and Prince Harry died at the age of 36 after a car accident in Paris that resulted from her driver, Henri Paul, fleeing the paparazzi. Paul and Diana’s boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, were also killed in the crash, while her bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, survived with serious injuries.
Diana’s funeral became one of the U.K.’s most-watched TV programs of all time, and the touching tributes to the late Princess of Wales continue on to this day.
Diana, who married into the royal family when she wed Prince Charles in 1981, was celebrated for her dedication to dozens of charities, most notably ones that aided sick children and people affected by HIV/AIDS, cancer and mental illnesses. In the mid-‘80s, she famously shook hands with a man living with AIDS, publicly challenging the notion that HIV could be passed from person to person through physical contact. She also served as the president of Great Ormond Street Hospital in London from 1989 until her death.
In recent years, the royals have paid tribute to Diana in countless interviews, in addition to commemorating her birthday and the anniversary of her death. Harry has spoken about the regrets he felt in the wake of his mother’s death, while William has shared some of his fondest memories of their time together. The brothers — who were 15 and 12, respectively, when Diana died — did not speak publicly about her passing until they were older.
“There are not many days that go by that I don’t think of her,” the Duke of Cambridge said in the 2017 HBO documentary Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy. The Duke of Sussex, for his part, noted that he has “a lot of grief that still needs to be let out.”
Take a look back at some of the royal family’s most touching tributes to Diana over the years.
