A carriage carries the Prince and Princess of Wales on its way from St. Paul's Cathedral to Buckingham Palace after the royal wedding in London on July 29, 1981. Thirty-six years after Lady Diana Spencer married Prince Charles, The Associated Press has restored original footage from the wedding and is making it available to the public on YouTube.AP/YONHAP
Roh Jeong-tae
The author is a writer and senior fellow at the Institute for Social and Economic Research.
Paris was still awake after midnight on Aug. 31, 1997. The area around the Hôtel Ritz Paris was especially chaotic, crowded with paparazzi pursuing Diana Spencer, the former Princess of Wales.
At around 12:20 a.m., Diana left the hotel with her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, in a Mercedes-Benz provided by the Ritz, heading for Fayed’s apartment near the Champs-Élysées. Their driver, Henri Paul, who was later found to have been intoxicated, accelerated at high speed before the car crashed into a pillar in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel beside the Seine.
Fayed and Paul died at the scene, while Diana’s bodyguard was seriously injured. Diana was taken to a hospital in critical condition and later pronounced dead. She was 36.
Diana Frances Spencer was born the third daughter of one of Britain’s prominent aristocratic families. From a distinguished family and admired for her appearance, she became engaged to Prince Charles in 1981 at the age of 19. Five months later, on July 29, 1981, the 20-year-old Diana became Princess of Wales.
She instantly became a celebrity not only in Britain but around the world. That attention, however, contained the seeds of tragedy.
Charles continued his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, now Queen Camilla, whom he had known before his marriage. For Diana, whose childhood had already been scarred by her parents’ troubled marriage, the situation was particularly painful.
Charles publicly acknowledged adultery in 1994. Diana acknowledged her own affair in a 1995 BBC interview. The marriage once celebrated worldwide was heading toward collapse, and the couple divorced in 1996.
Diana escaped the legal bonds of marriage but never the prison of public attention. Britain was then in the heyday of tabloid journalism. Newspapers paid enormous sums for photographs of Diana as they chronicled the royal family’s increasingly sensational private drama. Paparazzi pursued her relentlessly.
Twenty-nine years have passed, yet public fascination, excitement and controversy surrounding celebrities’ private lives remain.
Smartphones and social media have largely made the professional paparazzo obsolete. But they have also created a world in which virtually anyone can become one. There is something deeply unsettling about that transformation.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
