Prince Charles and Princess Diana Joked About Their Marriage

(Image credit: Photo by John Shelley Collection / Avalon / Getty)

published 9 August 2022

New Diana documentary The Princess, which airs on HBO Max on Aug. 13, includes a now-cult short clip from the Prince and Princess of Wales' 1983 tour of Australia.

Before the doc, The Crown season four had explored the scene depicted in the clip and its consequences for the royal couple, but it got one crucial detail wrong. Here's what happened.

Making a speech in Tasmania with Diana sat behind him, Prince Charles told the assembled crowd, "The last time I was here was two years ago, in 1981, shortly before we were married, and at that time, everybody was saying, 'good luck!' and, 'hope everything goes well!' and, 'how lucky you are to be engaged to such a lovely lady,' and my goodness, I was lucky enough to marry her."

At this point in her husband's speech, Diana made a face which jokingly suggested someone in that marriage wasn't that lucky (she presumably meant that Charles wasn't that lucky to marry her, rather than the other way around).

This simple gesture of hers had the crowd in stitches: They loved her cheekiness and humor.

Charles, hearing the laughter but not knowing what it was about, was stopped in his tracks. He looked slightly frazzled to have been overshadowed by his wife, but kept a professional smile on the whole time.

The Crown's depiction was so far, so accurate.

"It's amazing what ladies do when your back's turned," Charles then joked. But, whereas in real life the crowd—including Diana—loved his quip and laughed heartily, Netflix showed his joke fall flat.

This was, presumably, a deliberate choice on the producers' part, because they then showed the Prince Charles character to have felt exceedingly jealous of the attention his wife was getting.

And while we don't really know what happened behind closed doors, Princess Diana herself confirmed that her husband was in fact jealous of her in her 1995 BBC interview.

Basically, The Crown made Charles look slightly worse than he actually did in order to get the point across in a more impactful way.

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Iris Goldsztajn is a London-based journalist, editor and author. She is the morning editor at Marie Claire, and her work has appeared in the likes of British Vogue, InStyle, Cosmopolitan, Refinery29 and SELF. Iris writes about everything from celebrity news and relationship advice to the pitfalls of diet culture and the joys of exercise. She has many opinions on Harry Styles, and can typically be found eating her body weight in cheap chocolate.

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