'The Crown' fictionalizes a long-rumored romantic moment in the couple's last days -- but did it really happen?
The Crown debuted the first four episodes of their final season on Thursday, focusing on Princess Diana, her relationship with Dodi Fayed, and the tumultuous weeks leading up to their death in August 1997.
While the series steered clear of depicting the fatal gruesome car wreck -- which killed Diana, Dodi and driver Henri Paul in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris in the early hours of Aug. 31, 1997 -- it did fictionalize another long-rumored moment from that fateful day: Dodi proposing to Diana.
In the season's third episode, the couple are in Paris at a fancy dinner at the Ritz hotel when Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) gets emotional, forcing them to cut their night short.
Back in their suite, Diana apologizes to Dodi (Khalid Abdalla) for "the never-ending chaos of being with me," but he insists the apology should come from him.
"There was a reason we needed to come via Paris, and that was my fault," he tells her, putting on a romantic song and presenting her with a ring, "The one you liked in Monte Carlo."
But when he gets down on one knee, Diana can't say no fast enough, repeating it multiple times.
"Stop, I can't bear it. This is madness," she tells him. "Please get up."
"I'm nowhere near ready for another marriage," Diana tells Dodi when they sit down to talk it out. "I know you're upset now. I know you always want to make everyone happy, and that's adorable. But there's only one person in the world this marriage would make happy."
"I can't make your father love you more by becoming your wife," she clarifies, and when he insists she could, she replies, "Well, I won't."
But did the proposal actually happen in real life?
There is little evidence to suggest that Dodi popped the question prior to the couple's fatal wreck, however, some details about the couple's last days -- which have been put under a microscope in the years since -- would lead some to believe that he was certainly planning to propose soon.
Following the crash, Dodi's father, Mohamed Al Fayed, channeled his grief into the pursuit of a number of legal inquests and conspiracy theories -- much to the chagrin of the royal family. It was one such inquest, in 2007, that revealed some of the most specific details about Dodi's rumored plans to propose.
CCTV footage showed Dodi visiting a Repossi jeweler's shop on Aug. 31, 1997, just steps from the Ritz hotel in Paris where the couple would depart from later that night prior to the fatal crash. He was seen looking at several rings, but leaving with just a brochure.
Later, Claude Roulet, assistant to the president of the Ritz, was seen visiting the shop and then taking an item in a bag to Dodi and Diana's room in the hotel's Imperial Suite. The bag was later stored in the hotel safe.
A £11,600 ring with the inscription "Dis-moi Oui" ("Tell me yes") was found in Dodi's Paris apartment after the couple's death, along with a receipt dated Aug. 30 1997, the day before the crash, listing a "bague de fiançaille," or "engagement ring."
While these facts certainly point to plans for a proposal, they did little to prove Mohamed's initial claim that the couple was murdered on the orders of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, because Diana was pregnant and planned to marry Dodi. In April 2008, Lord Justice Baker announced that there was "not a shred of evidence" to support that theory and the jury later concluded that the tragic deaths were simply due to "grossly negligent driving" by Henri Paul and the pursuing paparazzi.
There's also the fact that at least one person close to Diana refuted the idea that she would be open to a proposal.
Lady Annabel Goldsmith, a friend of the late Princess of Wales, was interviewed as part of the inquest, where she recalled speaking with Diana about her relationship with Dodi, and questioning, "You’re not going to do anything silly like rushing off and eloping or getting married?"
According to Lady Goldsmith, the princess replied, "I would need marriage like a rash on my face."
"I took it to mean that she was not serious about marriage to Dodi," Goldsmith clarified. "She might have been having a wonderful time with him, I’m sure, but I thought her remark that she needed marriage like a rash meant she was not serious about it."
Royal expert Katie Nicholl agreed, telling ET after the episodes premiered that Diana and Dodi's "wasn't a very, very serious relationship, I believe, that was ever going to end in a marriage."
"But it was what Diana needed," she continued. "She was heartbroken. She didn't want to spend the summer alone, and so this offer to go and spend the rest of the summer -- once the boys had gone back to Scotland with their father -- with Dodi was frankly, an irresistible offer. She wanted to go and have a bit of fun."
Nicholl also referenced the inquest as proof that there was no real-life proposal between the two. "None of her friends believe that she was about to accept any marriage proposal from Dodi," she noted.
"Yes, there was a ring. Yes possibly it was Dodi's intention to propose with that ring," she added. "That was probably what he was planning to do, but as far as the inquest was concerned, and certainly, as far as Diana's friends were concerned, there was no proposal. Diana had no plans to marry Dodi."
As for actors who portrayed the on-screen couple, they told ET that stepping into Diana and Dodi's shoes on The Crown gave them a new perspective on the long-speculated relationship.
"I've been in the car. I know what it feels like to have that banging on the window," Abdalla shared. "Suddenly the image has a different reality."
"Dodi died in cowboy boots, you know?" the actor continued. "There are all these little weird details that change things."
However, Abdalla admitted that he doesn't believe that Dodi actually proposed to Diana in real life.
"What I think Peter [Morgan] has done here, which I think is really bold... was that he's taken all of those different speculations and ideas and things and put them in this big melting pot and kind of gone, 'Let's explore that,'" he explained. "For me, it's a kind of reality which is about exploring those possibilities, rather than going, 'This is what happened.'"
"Do I believe that he proposed on that day? No, I personally don't," he continued. "However, there was clearly a ring. Was there a plan of it? I can't answer that question. But I think it's worth asking it intensely. And that's what happens here."
Debicki agreed, noting that she always hopes to be clear about the fact that the series shows "Peter's interpretation of that relationship."
"What Khalid and I found within it was just this really beautiful ease," she shared. "This sense of two people being kind of thrown together in a strange, pretty unusual circumstances... this really surprising sense of two people finding out that they're very at peace with each other and that they can give the other person something they desperately need."
The Crown is streaming now on Netflix. Part 2 of the sixth and final season premieres Dec. 14.
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