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After 25 years, Diana and Dodi are reunited... by The Crown

By Padraic Flanagan

PICTURED together for the first time, here are The Crown’s Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed lookalikes recreating the last family getaway the tragic couple ever took.

In these exclusive photographs, Elizabeth Debicki and Khalid Abdalla bear an uncanny resemblance to the ill-fated lovers as they holidayed with William and Harry in the South of France in July 1997. Just a month later, the couple would lose their lives in a Paris car crash.

The actors filmed their scenes for the sixth and final series of the Netflix hit on the Spanish island of Majorca, which stood in for Saint-Tropez, where the real couple stayed aboard a super-yacht owned by Dodi’s father Mohamed Al Fayed.

The adult stars were joined by Rufus Kampa, 16, who plays a young Prince William, and Will Powell as Prince Harry.

In the scenes, Miss Debicki, 32, donned a pair of stylish striped trousers similar to those Diana was pictured wearing several times, paired with a navy tank top and white boat shoes. Abdalla, 40, was in a multicoloured shirt and cream slacks.

Production on The Crown has resumed after pausing for just two days following the Queen’s death: one immediately after her passing on September 8 and one last Monday for her State funeral. After news of her death broke, the drama’s writer Peter Morgan was quoted as saying: ‘The Crown is a love letter to her and I’ve nothing to add for now, just silence and respect.’

However, the programme has faced criticism over inaccuracies portrayed as truth. In 2020, then Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden demanded that Netflix make clear the show is fiction with an on-screen disclaimer.

‘Without this, I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact,’ he said.

The streaming giant has added no such warning.

Fabricated scenes have included the false suggestion that the affair between Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles continued throughout his marriage to Diana, and that Charles’s great-uncle Lord Mountbatten wrote him a letter condemning the relationship.

Morgan has defended his work, saying: ‘You sometimes have to forsake accuracy, but you must never forsake truth.’

Series five of The Crown is due out this autumn, with series six released next year.

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2022-09-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-09-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

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