Diana, princess of Wales, b. 1 July 1961, da. of Edward, Earl Spencer, and Frances, da. of Edward, Lord Fermoy; m. Charles, prince of Wales, 29 July 1981; divorced 15 July 1996; d. 31 Aug. 1997; bur. Althorp, Northamptonshire.   The most controversial member of the royal family in the twentieth century, Lady Diana Spencer was educated at Riddlesworth Hall, Norfolk, and then at West Heath school, near Sevenoaks in Kent. Despite the family's wealth and standing, her childhood was mixed; when she was eight, her parents had an acrimonious divorce, and relations with her stepmother were strained. After leaving school she shared a flat in London with other girls, and helped in a kindergarten. She married the prince of Wales when she was twenty, in a dazzling ceremony at St Paul's Cathedral watched on television by tens of millions.

The marriage was soon in trouble—according to the princess when she realized that her husband's friendship with Camilla Parker Bowles was far from over. She found the royal family aloof, and her unhappiness expressed itself first in bulimia, then in a number of affairs. An attractive and highly photogenic woman, she was pursued without mercy by paparazzi, who caused her great distress, though when she appealed to the press commission its chairman declared unsympathetically that she had ‘invaded her own privacy’. In 1992 a biography, Diana, Her True Story, revealed the depth of her despair and, in a pirated tape, she called her marriage ‘torture’. An unexpected development was the increasing interest she took in charities and good causes, where she revealed a remarkable, though well-publicized, capacity for comforting and cheering people in distress. In the last year of her life she was conducting an effective campaign against the indiscriminate use of land-mines, which had claimed many victims, particularly children. After an escalation of bitterness between the princess and her husband, queen Elizabeth suggested a speedy divorce. The negotiations were protracted and the settlement expensive. Diana then began a friendship with Dodi, son of Mohamed Al-Fayed, the owner of Harrods, which ended when both were killed in a brutal car-crash in the early hours in the centre of Paris. She was buried on an island in the lake at Althorp, her childhood home.