Princess Diana Had Big Plans for a “Broad Media Content Deal” Similar to Meghan Markle’s

Picture this: it’s July 1997 at the Four Seasons restaurant, off Park Avenue in Manhattan. Princess Diana arrives for lunch in a mint green Chanel suit and three-inch Manolos. She’s meeting Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and Tina Brown, former editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair and now editor-in-chief of The New Yorker. No one knows, obviously, that the Princess of Wales will be dead in less than two months as a result of a car crash in Paris.

“All heads swiveled when she dazzled her way across the room,” Brown later wrote in Tatler, adding that “Diana was always so much more beautiful in person than in her photographs.”

Diana was in New York City for her Christie’s charity auction, which saw many of her most iconic dresses auctioned off for a good cause. (It was her son Prince William’s idea.) She “was focused on repositioning herself as a woman of substance,” Brown wrote of this moment in Diana’s life. She and Prince Charles had, at last, finalized their divorce 11 months prior, in August 1996. She was on the precipice of her next chapter. And, according to Brown, it involved a plan that looked a lot like Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s multimillion-dollar Netflix deal over two decades before the Duke and Duchess of Sussex inked said deal in 2020.

During their lunch, Diana told Brown and Wintour that she had a plan for her future, one Brown wrote much later sounded “very like” the one that Harry and Meghan are undertaking today.

“At lunch that day, I was struck by the clarity of her vision,” Brown wrote. Diana’s plans included “what would not be considered a broad media content deal,” with a plan to release “a film every two years” centered around a “humanitarian campaign.”

“First, she said, she would raise awareness of the issue, then produce a documentary in partnership with a television channel, and ultimately leave a structure in place to maintain her involvement with the cause,” Brown added. Interestingly, the issue Diana wanted to start with was illiteracy, which has since become a cornerstone of Queen Camilla’s work as a royal.

Diana, Brown continued, “was always ahead of the curve”: “Her plan sounds very like the one Meghan and Harry have in mind, but with one central difference—it was better thought out,” she wrote.

According to Brown, Diana’s divorce lawyer Anthony Julius once told Brown of the Princess of Wales, “I never saw someone who was as much a project under construction as Diana. You could almost see the plumbing and wires as she was changing in front of you.”

“Like the heroine of a fairy story, she became a princess,” Brown wrote of Diana. “But her refusal to play her assigned role, her insistence on living in the now, and her quest for happiness on her own terms enabled her to break free from the Windsors’ chilly past and the stagnating present. Her death at 36 left her forever young in a freeze frame of unfinished longing.”