Princess Diana Called Her Bulimia a "Symptom" of Her Unhappy Marriage (2024)

• Season 4 of The Crown addresses Princess Diana's decade-long struggle with bulimia.
• In a 1995 interview with the BBC, Diana described her eating disorder as a "symptom of what was going on in [her] marriage."
• Princess Diana was candid about her eating disorder—here's what she said.

Season 4 of The Crown may be about princesses and princes—but there are no fairy-tale marriages in sight. Prince Charles and Diana Spencer wed in 1981. As The Crown shows, trouble began before their wedding took place. In episode 3, 19-year-old Diana (Emma Corrin) binges and purges while alone in Buckingham Palace, as Charles (Josh O'Connor) socializes with his longtime love, Camilla (Emerald Fennell).

"I felt that if we were trying to depict bulimia in an honest way, we had to actually show it—otherwise it’s a disservice to anyone who has been through that," Corrin told RadioTimes per People. "I don’t think we should shy away from those conversations; Diana was very candid about her experience with bulimia, and I so admire that."

The Crown addresses Diana's struggle with bulimia openly, just as Diana herself did years later in a tell-all 1992 biography written by Andrew Morton. While living in the palace, Diana snuck tapes to Morton via an intermediary. Her candid interviews, which broached topics like depression and raising royals, broke with palace precedent and made headlines. Her openness about taboo subjects, combined with her already widespread popularity, is what led Diana to become the "People's Princess."

Diana: Her True Story—In Her Own Words brought her experience with an eating disorder to light for the first time. The book candidly describes the toll twin forces of high-pressure palace life, and an unhappy marriage, had on Diana. She reportedly tried to take her own life several times, including when she was three months pregnant with William (The Crown skips that incident). "Charles thought that she was faking her problems," Morton writes.

Morton especially zeroes in on the same time period depicted in The Crown's ironically titled "Fairytale" episode, during which Diana stumbled in her adjustment from kindergarten teacher to princess-in-training. According to Diana, this is when her decade-long battle with bulimia began.

"For all her aristocratic breeding, this innocent young kindergarten teacher felt totally at sea in the deferential hierarchy of Buckingham Palace. There were many tears in those three months and many more to come after that. Weight simply dropped off, her waist shrinking from 29 inches when the engagement was announced down to 23 inches on her wedding day. It was during this turbulent time that her bulimia nervosa, which would take nearly a decade to overcome, began," Morton writes.

After the wedding in 1981, Prince Charles allegedly commented on Diana's weight, which exacerbated Diana's insecurities. “My husband put his hand on my waistline and said: ‘Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?’ and that triggered off something in me. And the Camilla thing,” Diana said in the novel, the "Camilla thing" being Charles's apparent and ongoing affair with Camilla Shand. On their honeymoon, Charles wore cufflinks that Camilla had given him, which had intertwined "C's," and spoke to her on the phone regularly.

While Diana's bulimia was a secret to the public, the princess said everyone in the palace was aware of her struggles. "Everyone in the family knew about the bulimia, and everyone blamed the bulimia for the failure of the marriage," she said.

From the book's publication on, Diana continued to be open about her mental health. In an 1995 interview with the BBC, given after the couple's separation, Diana described bulimia as a “symptom of what was going on in my marriage.” She continued, "I didn’t like myself, I was ashamed because I couldn’t cope with the pressures. I had bulimia for a number of years, and that's like a secret disease...It's a repetitive pattern which is very destructive to yourself."

While very public with her struggles, Diana was not the only person in her family to have them. Diana's older sister, Lady Sarah, reportedly also struggled with an eating disorder. When she met (and briefly dated) Prince Charles in the late '70s, she was recovering from anorexia. In fact, according to the book Diana: Finally, the Complete Story, Prince Charles asked Sarah point-blank whether she had the illness.

Diana saw what her sister went through, and allegedly learned from it. "Years later Diana told patients at the Priory, a private clinic treating addictions on the outskirts of London, that she first had symptoms of bulimia in the mid-seventies, attributing it to Sarah's experience: 'It started because Sarah was anorexic and I idolized her so much that I wanted to be like her,'" Sarah Bradford wrote in Diana: Finally the Complete Story.

Diana recovered after a decade-long battle with the illness. Her personal trainer, Jenni Rivett, told Yahoo's Royal Box that regular workouts helped, but that the condition especially improved after her divorce from Charles. “She knew that after each session, she would feel amazing. It would help her to better herself and she would feel more and more empowered and be able to make the eating disorder a thing of the past," Rivett said.

Today, Diana's sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, continue their mother's legacy of openly addressing their own mental health issues. Harry, in particular, has spoken about the lifelong ramifications of his mother's tragic death in 1997. "I have probably been very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions when all sorts of grief and sort of lies and misconceptions and everything are coming to you from every angle," he said in 2017, adding that William encouraged him to seek therapy.

William and Harry also use their privilege to advocate for others to get help. The Duke and duch*ess of Cambridge, along with Prince Harry, launched the "Heads Together" mental health initiative in 2016; Harry worked with the British military to create an online platform of resources to help troops deal with mental health problems in 2020. Harry is also collaborating with Oprah on a mental health TV series for Apple TV.

The princes keep their mother's legacy in their minds. William spoke about Diana's bulimia for the first time for a 2017 Channel Four documentary entitled Wasting Away: The Truth About Anorexia. He said he was "proud" of his mother's openness: "These are illnesses. Mental health needs to be taken as seriously as physical health."

The Crown depicts Diana's struggle with bulimia—but she already told the story herself, years ago.

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