Jamie Lee Curtis Shares Moving Encounter with Princess Diana Just 2 Months Before Her Death
“I’m still moved by her grace and courage.”
The Gist
- Princess Diana died at just 36 years old on August 31, 1997 as a result of injuries sustained in a Paris car crash.
- Just two months before her death, actress Jamie Lee Curtis had a missed encounter with the Princess of Wales face-to-face on a movie set in London.
- The two women exchanged letters, hoping to meet up soon—but they never got the chance.
As the world marked the 28th anniversary of her death on August 31, 1997, Jamie Lee Curtis shared a moving story about Princess Diana and an encounter they had two months before the Princess of Wales’s untimely death.
In an Instagram post shared on August 31, Curtis wrote that she “almost met” Diana in 1997 on a movie set, with Curtis’s words shared alongside a famous photo of Diana with her arms wide open greeting her young sons Prince William and Prince Harry.
As Curtis wrote, Diana “was to visit the set of the follow-up to A Fish Called Wanda, Fierce Creatures, and we were shooting at Pinewood,” which is a studio nearby London. During her break, Curtis wrote that she “jumped in a golf cart and drove the mile back to the dressing room to use the restroom.” That was when Diana, William, and Harry arrived on set.
“My driver started banging on the door, saying that she had arrived with her sons, and I jumped into the golf cart, and by the time I got back, she was walking away,” Curtis shared.
The next day, Curtis wrote Diana a letter to the Princess of Wales’s home at Kensington Palace, explaining “why I wasn’t there and how much I admired her.” To Curtis’s surprise, she received a letter back from Diana just the following day, “thanking me for writing and understanding, of course, nature calling as it happens to her all the time, and that she looked forward to meeting,” Curtis wrote.
“She died two months later,” the actress added in her lengthy caption of Diana’s death as a result of a Paris car crash at just 36 years old.
“I had just returned from England,” Curtis continued. “I remember watching the news…” After hearing the news, Curtis read about “insight meditation,” which talked about “people who tried to live a mindful life, at the time of their death.” It reminded her of Diana. The book asked two questions: “Did I learn to live wisely? Did I love well?” Curtis remembered.
“I immediately thought about Princess Diana and her learning to live wisely,” Curtis wrote, adding that Diana “talked about her own personal issues and demonstrated courage and compassion,” like being vulnerable about her divorce from Prince Charles or other famous images of Diana, like her walking through an Angolan minefield or “putting her hand on the leg of the young man with HIV/AIDS,” Curtis added.
“I certainly thought that she had learned to live wisely,” she continued, adding, “I’m still moved by her grace and courage.”
Of her sons William and Harry—referencing the photo she posted alongside her caption—Curtis wrote that Diana “loved them in a way a royal person never had, and she really loved the world and so she did love well.”
“I’m also comforted in knowing that she lived a mindful, wise, loving life,” Curtis said.
Among the other tributes on Sunday to mark Diana’s passing, her brother Earl Charles Spencer shared a photo of the flowers he cut to bring to Diana’s final resting place on the grounds of Althorp, the Spencer family ancestral home.
“Always an impossible day,” he wrote alongside a photo of a bouquet of white and pink roses and a photo of the private island where she is buried, able to finally, at last, rest in peace.
