A Strange Detail About Princess Diana’s Hair Is The First Clue In Unraveling A Larger Story

The year was 1991, and the event in question was a concert marking the 30th anniversary of Italian tenor Pavarotti’s glittering career. The setting was London’s Hyde Park, and 125,000 people — including members of British royalty — were expected to descend upon the venue for the free gig. It seemed as if the stars had aligned for a magical evening.

By ’91 Pavarotti was at the height of his fame. The previous year, his stirring version of “Nessun dorma” was used as the BBC’s theme for the soccer World Cup. The song became his biggest and most enduring hit around the world. The singer also performed as part of the Three Tenors for the first time before the World Cup final, with the global audience utterly mesmerized.

Conversely, ’91 wasn’t great for Diana. By the time Christmas rolled around, she endured a tumultuous three days at Sandringham, during which she reportedly vowed to call time on her marriage to Prince Charles. By that point, in fact, their marital strife had been all over the tabloids for four years.

Throughout this period photographer Anwar Hussein worked closely with Diana, just as he had done years earlier with Charles. He wound up taking so many memorable photos of Diana that 140 were spotlighted in the Princess Diana Exhibition: Accredited Access, which opened in 2022. One wet-haired image, in particular, became famous, and we’ll soon explain why.

At the time, the eyes of the world were on Diana. Hussein, her preferred photographer, felt he got to know her much more closely than other media members, though. She would often be seen chatting with him at events and they even sometimes traveled on the same airplanes. He told People magazine, “The story of Diana unfolded in front of us.”

Hussein believed he saw Diana evolve over the years, revealing, “You could see her go from Shy Di, looking down, to becoming stronger — which she had to do. She wanted to prove she was brave enough to do what she wanted.” He added, “I saw every side of Diana. She was a genuine, good human being.”

In Hussein’s view, Diana was an incredible photography subject. Apparently, she had an intrinsic idea of how her body and face could be captured in memorable imagery. He revealed, “She had a canny way of showing her mood — whether she was happy or unhappy... It came naturally to her, but she also knew which pictures would go around the world.”

Cliff Skelliter, the curator of the Accredited Access exhibition, had a fascinating view on Hussein’s photography. He felt the close connection with Diana was integral in setting Hussein’s work apart. Skelliter told People, “The personal relationship between a princess and a photographer who’s with them all the time — they’ve got a closeness but also a distance in order to get a really interesting take.”

Looking at the Hyde Park photograph through the lens of this personal relationship, it seems to reveal a lot about Diana’s personality. Before we get to that, though, it must be said that the day proved problematic for the concert organizers. You see, London was experiencing one of its oh-so-frequent rainy days. It was so wet that Pavarotti reportedly considered calling the whole thing off, thinking nobody would turn up.

Of course, the opera legend underestimated the British ability to deal with bad weather. A little bit of rain — or even a lot of rain — never scared any Londoners away! So, the concert went ahead, and Pavarotti began his set, with Diana and Charles sitting beside then-Prime Minister John Major. It soon became obvious there was a problem, though.

Hussein explained to People magazine, “It was pouring down with rain. This was an outdoor concert, and everybody had their umbrellas up. It was hard for people to see, and it was difficult for Pavarotti to see his audience and get a connection with them too.” Harvey Goldsmith, the promoter who organized the gig, knew he had to do something.

Hussein continued, “The concert organizers begged everyone to close their umbrellas so they could enjoy the show.” People may have been reticent to do this — until Diana stepped in. Hussein said, “Diana was the first one to do so, very quickly. Then everybody else across the audience followed. And, of course, she got soaking wet.”

When he spotted what the princess had done, a smiling Pavarotti asked for Prince Charles’ blessing for something — he wanted to dedicate an aria to her. The audience applauded and the singer began a stirring rendition of “Donna Non Vidi Mai.” Brilliantly, this translates as “I Have Never Seen a Woman Like That.”

It’s clear this simple act showed who Diana really was — a generous spirit who didn’t want to separate herself from anyone else. Universal music executive Dickon Stainer told USA Today in 2021, “You could see it on the screen as Diana proceeded to get completely soaked. It played right to her ‘People’s Princess’ image, Diana not bothered about the buckets of rain.”

In fact, Diana was such a good sport about the whole thing that she poked fun at herself when she went backstage to meet the opera legend. According to Hussein, she joked, “Do you like my new hairstyle?” while patting herself on her wet locks. The photographer believed this was indicative of her growing comfort with media affairs at the time.

Hussain claimed, “She was really confident by now. She was playing for the cameras a little. She knew what to do and what to wear.” Pavarotti must have responded positively to Diana’s confidence and playfulness, as the Italian singer and princess soon struck up what Hussein described as “close friendship.”

As a fun aside, in his autobiography Pavarotti wrote about an amusing dinner mishap he and his royal friend once had. He waxed lyrical about how delicious her shrimp looked, but she seemed oblivious to his real question. So, eventually the hungry tenor said, “Listen, I tried twice with no success. Now I ask you directly, may I have one of your shrimp?”

Anyway, perhaps it was Stainer who summed up the iconic image most eloquently. He told USA Today, “It was the tenor who met the princess in the rain of Hyde Park. That romantic image of Pavarotti addressing a princess has gone down in history as an iconic moment in our popular culture. He allowed everyone to dream a little.”

It also perfectly encapsulated Diana’s persona as the royal regular folks felt they could relate to. She didn’t care if she didn’t look pristine in a photo with Pavarotti — she was having fun, and that energy emanated from her. But there’s one photo of the princess that fans will never be able to forget: the one where she’s crying on her tour in Australia. And the man behind the camera has since opened up about what was really happening that day.

Diana and Charles embarked on their much-publicized tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1983. And it’s well established now just how much tension it caused between the couple. For starters, they had become parents for the first time only months before.

But Diana was determined that she would be a different kind of royal parent. Instead of leaving Prince William at home to be cared for by nannies, Diana insisted her son came on tour with her. This was a big break with royal tradition, but it proved to be a good PR move. Australians were very impressed that Diana had refused to be separated from her son. 

Of course, that wasn’t the only thing the public liked about Diana. Even though most Australians had, well, mixed feelings about the royal family, the princess won people over with her warmth and beauty. Suddenly, excited crowds were following Diana wherever she went, holding up signs praising her.

But Charles and the Queen hadn’t expected Diana to be such a success. Reportedly, the monarch had expressed concern about her daughter-in-law before the trip because she had seemed so frail and nervous. And the British media had begun to publish rumors that she had an eating disorder, leading to cruel speculation that she was mentally unstable.

But Diana’s supposed failings were actually the things that made her relatable to the public. When she and Charles stopped off at Uluru — the famous landmark previously referred to as Ayers Rock — Diana asked for a drink of water because she was too hot. And the simple fact that she was able to admit to weakness meant people took her to their hearts.

Meanwhile, Charles wasn’t doing so well. He made a joke about feeding baby William “warm milk and minced kangaroo,” and many Australians didn’t take that kindly. He also fell off his horse in front of a large audience at a polo match. And when he was with Diana, she constantly seemed to be upstaging him. 

Diana’s biographer Andrew Morton wrote extensively about the trip in his 1992 book Diana: Her True Story. He noted, “The crowds complained when Prince Charles went over to their side of the street during a walkabout... In public, Charles accepted the revised status quo with good grace; in private, he blamed Diana.”

And as the tour continued, ABC News reported on the royal visitors, “The princess seemed more anxious to meet the people than did her husband. She dispensed tidbits concerning Prince William’s health, the weather, and jokingly inquired of an elderly citizen if she had any whisky in her picnic basket.” It seemed clear in many people’s minds that Diana was the star attraction, with Charles merely her sidekick.

Diana spoke about this in the 1992 Morton book. She remembered, “Everyone always said when we were in the car, ‘Oh, we’re on the wrong side, we want to see her, we don’t want to see him.’ And obviously, he wasn’t used to that, and nor was I. He took it out on me… I understood the jealousy, but I couldn’t explain that I didn’t ask for it.”

But Charles attempted to hide his jealousy with quips. He reportedly joked to a group who met him rather than Diana, “It’s not fair, is it? You’d better ask for your money back!” He also said on the trip, “I have come to the conclusion that it really would have been easier to have had two wives. Then they could cover both sides of the street, and I could walk down the middle, directing operations.”

It’s clear that Charles and Diana always tried to present a happy facade for public consumption. When their tour took them to Sydney, they took part in a charity ball and danced together. Onlookers, or people who viewed the photos of the event, would have thought they were a young couple happily in love.

But Morton, among others, always knew of Diana’s great turmoil underneath her warm smile. In a 2017 article for the New York Post, he recollected that the princess had told him, “I’ve got what my mother’s got. However bloody you’re feeling, you can put on the most amazing show of happiness.”

According to Morton, Diana hadn’t been looking forward to the Australia trip at all. He wrote in his article, “The newly minted royal was petrified of facing the crowds, meeting the countless dignitaries as well as the fabled royal ‘rat pack,’ the media circus who follow the royals around the globe.”

“When [Diana] walked into the media reception in the unglamorous setting of an Alice Springs hotel, she was hot, jet-lagged, and sunburned,” Morton went on. “Yet she was able to charm and captivate the representatives of the Fourth Estate. Only later did I realize that the tour was utterly traumatic.”

Morton told the New York Post, “Back in the privacy of her hotel room, [Diana] cried her eyes out, unable to handle the constant attention. She wanted to go home. She wanted to hide, overwhelmed by the size of the crowds in a nation gripped by Di-mania. But she survived.” 

One of the so-called “rat pack” was ready with his camera as Diana went through all this. He was Ken Lennox, and he’d known Diana — if “known” was the word — since the days she was first getting to know Charles. Lennox considered her a polite, cooperative young woman who was good with photographers.

But as time went on, Lennox overstepped accepted boundaries, as many photographers did with the royals. In 1982 he snapped a picture of a pregnant Diana in a bikini on a private beach. The Queen condemned this as “the blackest day in the history of British journalism,” and Lennox later regretted it.

Then, one year later, while the Australia tour was in full swing, Lennox would snap another notorious picture of Diana. She was caught in another unguarded moment, but a very different one this time. For one brief minute outside the Sydney Opera House, Lennox saw her crying, and he took a shot.

When the picture was released to the media, it had the caption, “The Princess of Wales pulls a funny face as a bouquet of flowers hits her on the head when thrown from the crowd into the car.” But according to Lennox himself, the reality had been very different.

Lennox explained what had really happened on the 2020 documentary Inside the Crown: Secrets of the Royals. He said, “I’m about 4 feet from the princess, and I’m trying to get a bit of the opera house in the background and some of the crowd. And Diana burst into tears and wept for a couple of minutes.”

The photographer recalled, “After it was over, I went to see the press officer for the prince and princess at that time, and I said what happened.” But the press officer told him that Diana and Charles simply had jet lag and were unaccustomed to Australia’s tremendous heat. At the time, Lennox accepted this.

However, decades after the fact, Lennox said in the documentary, “Charles, I don’t think, has noticed [Diana crying] at that stage. If he has, typical of Prince Charles to look the other way.” It was the first sign that “something was wrong,” he said, and later there would be even more obvious signs.

As the years progressed, more and more photos showed Diana and her husband turning away from each other or appearing openly hostile. Despite their attempts to maintain stiff upper lips in public, or “put on the most amazing show of happiness” as Diana had suggested, the images said it all.

But there are indications that Diana knew how to manipulate photo opportunities to her own advantage. In 1992 – just before the couple separated – Charles left Diana alone at the Taj Mahal while the two were in India together. And Diana posed solo outside the monument looking forlorn. Did she do this on purpose? Some think so.

In 1997 Lennox also spoke to PBS about his experiences with Diana and Charles. And he remembered, “Diana from day one had upstaged Prince Charles. It wasn’t a simple development. Up until then, Charles was listed as one of the most eligible men in the world… The Princess of Wales came onto the scene, and Charles was forgotten.”

And Diana was the one who sold all the newspapers. “Anyone covering the Princess of Wales was guaranteed [the] front page day after day,” Lennox remembered. “It was funny sometimes. She would go to Australia or New Zealand, and from the photographs you saw nothing of Australia or New Zealand. We cropped everything out.”

We don’t know what Diana thought of that one particular pic of her crying, but we do know what she thought of the paparazzi in general. Basically, she hated them. In 1993 she told the whole world how the media intrusion had affected her.

Diana announced, “When I started my public life 12 years ago, I understood that the media might be interested in what I did. But I was not aware of how overwhelming that attention would become, nor the extent to which it would affect both my public duties and my personal life, in a manner that’s been hard to bear.”

And of course, as the whole planet knows, the paparazzi played a role in Diana’s untimely and tragic death. When her car crashed in a Paris tunnel in August 1997, the driver had been fleeing from a crowd of photographers. There were other factors in the accident, but many members of Diana’s own family blamed the media.

At Diana’s funeral, watched by millions all over the world, her brother Charles Spencer pointed the finger at the paparazzi. He described his sister as “the most hunted person of the modern age,” adding, “She would want us today to pledge ourselves to protecting her beloved boys William and Harry from a similar fate.”

Lennox was actually among the journalists on the front line, so to speak, when Diana passed away. He was picture editor of The Sun newspaper at the time, and he later admitted to having initially opted to purchase photographs of the badly injured princess in the back of her wrecked car. When he was told she had died, however, he deleted them.

And Morton also wrote about the fatal crash in his 2004 book Diana: In Pursuit of Love. He claimed that as soon as the crash photographs were taken, “they were... evidence of a terrible complicity in the shameful ending of the fairytale; a damsel in distress exploited by commercial greed to feed the public’s shameless voyeurism.”

Diana’s younger son Harry still harbors anger towards the paparazzi for the way his mother died. In 2017 he revealed in the documentary Diana, 7 Days, “One of the hardest things to come to terms with is the people who chased her into the tunnel were the same people who were taking photographs of her while she was still dying on the back seat of the car.”

And Lennox agreed that the media tended to go too far in their pursuit of the royals. After a photo of Kate Middleton in a bikini was published, he told Hello! magazine, “Prince William and his brother Harry have a slow-burning inner rage about press intrusion… How can it be otherwise, when Kate is enduring the same treatment that was meted out to Diana over 30 years ago?”

But royal photographs, including the one of Diana in tears in Australia, are an important part of history. If Lennox hadn’t happened to have pointed his camera at Diana at that precise moment, we wouldn’t have had that insight into her personal feelings about her life and marriage. Yet there will always be the question of how much intrusion is too much. 

In a way, it’s a double-edged sword. Charles wanted media attention on the Australia press tour, and Diana was the one who got it. But in the end, it would ruin her life. Perhaps the princess herself expressed it best in her 1995 BBC interview. She said, “With the media attention came a lot of jealousy. A great deal of complicated situations arose because of that.”