Prince Harry previously said, “If I’d known that that was the last time I was going to speak to my mother, the things that I would — the things I would have said to her…”
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Princess Diana, Prince Harry and Prince William. Photo: Antony Jones/Julian Parker/UK Press via Getty Images
The Crown portrays Princess Diana having a final phone call with her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry — something that happened in real life.
Prince William, now 41, and Prince Harry, now 39, opened up about speaking to their mother for the last time before her death in the 1997 documentary ITV documentary Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy. As portrayed in the Netflix drama, William and Harry — just 15 and 12 at the time — were at Balmoral Castle in Scotland when their mother died in a Paris car crash in August 1997.
In the documentary, Prince William said he recalled his last conversation with Princess Diana but did not reveal details. He shared that he and his brother were having a good time with their cousins at Balmoral when the call occurred.
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“Harry and I were in a desperate rush to say goodbye, you know, ‘See you later’… if I’d known now obviously what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have been so blasé about it and everything else,” the Prince of Wales said.
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Prince William and Princess Diana in 1991.Rebecca Naden/PA Images via Getty
Prince Harry confirmed that Princess Diana was in Paris when the phone call took place.
“I can’t really necessarily remember what I said but all I do remember is probably regretting for the rest of my life how short the phone call was,” the Duke of Sussex said.
He added, “If I’d known that that was the last time I was going to speak to my mother, the things that I would – the things I would have said to her…”
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Princess Diana, Prince Harry, Prince Charles and Prince William in 1985.Diana Archive/Getty
Richard Kay, a longtime royal reporter and friend of Princess Diana, looked back on the telephone conversation that would turn out to be the Princess of Wales’ last for a 2021 documentary.
“I spoke to her that night,” he recalled. “[The] police said that the last call she made was to me.”
She was “in quite a good place,” shared Kay. But above all, “she wanted to come back and see her boys.”
In a scene from their 2017 documentary for ITV and HBO, Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, Prince Harry revealed that they hadn’t seen their mother for several weeks while speaking with two landmine victims, Zarko Peric and Malic Bradaric, who Diana met when she went on her last mission to Bosnia to raise awareness about the brutality of landmines.
“You guys were the, almost the last people to see my mother,” Harry told them in the documentary. “Well, you saw my mother more recently than I did, I guess.”
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As children of divorced parents, William and Harry also spent time traveling between the two homes in the years before Diana’s death.
“There was the point where our parents split and . . . we never saw our mother enough or we never saw our father enough,” Prince Harry said in the documentary. “There was a lot of traveling and lot of fights on the back seat with my brother — which I would win.”
“There was all that to contend with,” he added. “And — I don’t pretend we’re the only people to have to deal with that, but it was an interesting way of growing up.”
