Category: Fashion

When they first met in 1995, the heart surgeon Hasnat Khan offered exactly what the recently divorced Princess Diana needed in a partner: normality, stability, wisdom, and warmth. What he couldn’t provide was legitimacy. Horrified by the intrusion of paparazzi and deeply serious about his work at Royal Brompton Hospital, the 36-year-old Pakistani cardiologist knew going public with the Princess of Wales would ignite a press frenzy he didn’t care to read, let alone involve himself in. Never mind the response his family would have, the racism he’d experience, or how much he loved her; the Lady Diana Spencer would never be his wife.

But that didn’t prevent Diana from trying to convince him, spurred along by the same hopeless-romantic willpower that had chased Prince Charles all the years of their marriage.

Season 5 of The Crown depicts the budding relationship between Khan and Diana, and while Humayun Saeed and Elizabeth Debicki fit well in their roles, the plotting around the relationship is orchestrated with all the conviction of cotton candy. There’s a certain romantic fluff that plagues them in the few scenes they’re together on-screen, labeling what was one of the most pivotal romances in Diana’s life as just another dashed dream. (The dialogue doesn’t help in this department. In one particularly oof scene, Hasnat explains that his patients don’t feel any pain during surgery because they’re under general anesthesia. Diana responds, “Trust me, I feel everything.”)

Certainly, Diana’s relationship with Hasnat highlighted the tragedies of her life: the incessant pursuit of the press; the never-realized desire for familial acceptance; the possibility of a life outside London. But to banish so many moments of Hasnat and Diana’s relationship off-screen is to implicitly imply it lacked importance. The Crown always purports to be about the people behind the palace adornments. Perhaps no one more than Hasnat revealed who Diana who really was—or, at least, wanted so painfully to become.

In The Crown, Hasnat and Diana’s love ends shortly after the cardiologist watches her BBC interview with Martin Bashir. In reality, their relationship lasted for years after the interview aired, even intermingling with the princess’s romance with Dodi Fayed. Below, a brief timeline of their time together—and a reminder of everything the Netflix drama chose to skip.

1995-1996: The happy years

As depicted in the new season of The Crown, the princess met Khan at Royal Brompton in September 1995, while Diana was visiting a patient, the husband of her friend and acupuncturist Oonagh Shanley-Toffolo. Wrote journalist Tina Brown in her biography The Diana Chronicles, “The doctor was entirely absorbed in Toffolo’s condition and took no notice of the Princess—which, for a woman used to everyone fawning over her, was almost unbearably sexy.” He gave Diana little more than a polite nod, and his name was indeed written on his shoes.

Now thoroughly beguiled by a game of cat and mouse, Diana started visiting Toffolo’s husband more and more frequently, talking with other patients while keeping one eye out for the handsome heart surgeon. Eventually, she caught his attention during an elevator ride they shared. “Over a period of time, we became good friends,” Khan himself revealed in a police statement, following an inquest around Diana’s tragic death in 1997. Before a trip to his uncle and aunt’s home in Stratford-upon-Avon, he asked if the princess would like to join. “We drove there together and Diana met my aunt and uncle,” Khan said. “We had dinner in a restaurant and then drove back to London. After this, our friendship turned into a relationship.”

Reporters had their suspicions, especially after a large shipment of flowers was delivered to Khan from Kensington Palace. The press started following Khan, talking to his old girlfriends and mentors. Nevertheless, the duo continued their romance for the next two years, with Diana immersing herself completely in Khan’s interests and culture. As Brown covers in The Diana Chronicles, the princess read Gray’s Anatomy and surgical reports; she watched the hospital soap opera Casualty every Saturday; she considered converting to Islam; she flew to Pakistan numerous times and became close friends with Imran Khan, a cricket player and distant cousin of Hasnat’s, and his wife Jemima.

In turn, Kahn brought the princess Kentucky Fried Chicken at Kensington Palace, where he’d arrive in the back of butler Paul Burrell’s car under cover of a blanket. Sometimes she’d sleep in his call room at the hospital, tip-toeing home before the sun rose. When she made calls to the hospital, she’d use fake names like “Dr. Armani,” revealed Sarah Ellison in a 2013 piece for Vanity Fair. As depicted in The Crown, the pair would occasionally go out on dates with Diana incognito; on one night in particular, she wore a black wig and glasses to a show at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club.

According to Brown, Khan refused to consummate the relationship until Diana was formally detached from the Prince of Wales. On the day she was finally granted a divorce—July 4, 1996—she wore an ivory shalwar kameez. “The pearls were an emblem for her gained wisdom and a new dawn, while the traditional Pakistani silhouette was evocative of her love and loyalty to Khan, a man she believed would never betray her—and she was right; he never did,” writes fashion blogger Eloise Moran in her book The Lady Di Look Book. Diana was finally becoming the woman she’d fought so hard to be: an independent woman, more respected but no less adored. With Khan, she was the most romantically fulfilled she’d been in decades. Everything seemed to be going right.

1997: The breakup

“After Charles, Khan was undoubtedly the most important love of Diana’s life,” wrote journalist Kate Snell in her book Diana: Her Last Love. But, by 1997, it was becoming ever clearer that Khan had no intention of going public with Diana, which meant he had no intention of slipping an engagement ring onto her finger. Their viewpoints were increasingly oppositional. As Brown writes in The Diana Chronicles:

“She no more understood why Charles valued the earnest audiences he provided to architects, philosophers, and environmentalists than she could later see why cardiologist Hasnat Khan spent such an unreasonable amount of time at the hospital. ‘I just don’t get him,’ she told her friend Lucia Flecha de Lima about Khan on a phone call in 1997. ‘He’s always so busy and his work is so important to him. I keep telling him he doesn’t need to work at the hospital. We would make a great team. We could do my work together. But he doesn’t want to know.’”

Such a call underlined a crucial misalignment between Diana and her beloved doctor: He didn’t want to do her work. He wanted to do his.

A Sunday Mirror story was the first to officially reveal the two as romantic partners, and—in a tailspin—Diana granted a story to the Daily Mail denying the relationship. Khan was hurt by her lie, but he was equally aghast at the publicity. Things only got worse when Khan’s father, Dr. Rashid Khan, told The Daily Express the two would never marry, as Diana was unsuitable for Khan as a bride. “We are looking for a bride for him,” the doctor said. “She must belong to a respectable family. She should be rich, belonging to the upper middle class. Preferably to our relations or tribe, which is Pathan. But if we do not find her in our own tribe, we can try outside it. But preferably she should be at least a Pakistani Muslim girl.”

Ever convinced of her own magnetism, in May 1997 Diana flew to Pakistan—without warning her lover—and visited his family in Lahore. They liked her well enough, but Brown writes, “Charm was irrelevant. Hasnat’s mother had no intention of letting the union happen, and Hasnat had doubts of his own.” Still, Diana spent another day with Khan’s family in late June.

“She came to visit me twice in Pakistan to help fund-raise for Imran’s hospital, but both times she also went to meet his family secretly to discuss the possibility of marriage to Hasnat,” Jemima Khan told Vanity Fair. “She wanted to know how hard it had been for me to adapt to life in Pakistan and she wanted advice on how to deal with Pakistani men and their cultural baggage.”

By then, their relationship was sinking fast. Only weeks after the Pakistan visit, she joined Mohamed Al-Fayed onboard the Jonikal on July 11, where his son, Dodi Fayed, joined them on July 14. Only the night before—on July 10—Hasnat had stayed with the princess at Kensington Palace. “When Diana went to St. Tropez with Mr. Al Fayed, everything was fine between us,” Hasnat told police. “After a few days, I felt something was wrong. Her mobile kept going on to answerphone.”

According to Snell’s research, Khan and Diana officially broke off their relationship near the end of July, and by July 31 Diana was being photographed on the Jonikal in her infamous swimsuit shots with Dodi. A month later, while in Paris with Dodi, the car carrying them both crashed, and the two were killed.

Many believe Diana died while still deeply in love with Khan. He was present at her funeral, and later told police, “I do not know what Diana was like in other relationships but she protected me very well, not just from the media but also from a lot of information. Perhaps she protected me because she thought we had a future together.”

In the early days of Princess Diana’s marriage to the man who’d become king, Dr. James Colthurst knew something most of the world as yet did not: The Princess of Wales was miserable. An old friend from her days as a blushing London socialite, Colthurst shared her stately pedigree; as the second son of an Irish baronet, his family home was a literal castle. More importantly, they shared a confidence—one of the few in the late princess’s short life that was challenged but never outright betrayed.

In the latest season of the Netflix drama The Crown, Colthurst is depicted in only one episode by the actor Oliver Chris. True, his scenes with Elizabeth Debicki’s Diana are hardly the finest acting work in a series stacked with high-caliber performances. And yet, a niggling sense of loss remains after the season 5 finale; many of Diana’s most important moments and relationships are relegated to a handful of scenes. Her friendship with Colthurst is one of them.

I’m not unsympathetic to The Crown’s need to cover entire decades in the span of a few hours. But denying Chris’ Colthurst even one additional appearance feels like a missed opportunity. Showrunner Peter Morgan takes a measured approach to his depiction of the princess, refusing to commit to either her side or Prince Charles’, and further refusing to allow The Crown to become The Diana Show. But the errors of omission seem to appear more frequently in Diana’s camp. Further integrating Colthurst would have contextualized Diana’s involvement in her own implosion.

The 17-year-old Lady Diana Spencer first met the future radiologist while he was still a medical student, at a chalet in the French Alps, where she slept on his Etonian friends’ sofa bed after injuring her ankle skiing. The two struck up a friendship they maintained until the princess’s tragic car accident in 1997. By the time we meet him in The Crown, he’s already a doctor at St. Thomas’ Hospital, and while he clearly has some sort of pre-established closeness with the princess, his primary role is to serve as the middleman for what would become the explosive book Diana: Her True Story.

Much of what The Crown depicts here is accurate. The journalist Andrew Morton, whom Debicki’s Diana refers to as “one of the friendly ones,” did strike up a chummy rapport with a 35-year-old Colthurst over lunches and games of squash, as journalist Tina Brown wrote in her 2007 book The Diana Chronicles: “Morton picked up on Colthurst’s message not to fish for information about the Princess, but he took care to water his source against the day he might.” Their camaraderie made its way back to Diana, and she agreed to record audiotapes of her answers to Morton’s interview questions, with Colthurst ferrying the tapes back and forth from writer to source.

In The Crown, Chris’ Colthurst expresses some shock over the revelations in these interviews, but the real Colthurst had already known much of what was going on in Diana’s marriage. As Brown outlines, he knew she had bulimia nervosa; he knew that bodyguard Barry Mannakee was her first extramarital affair; he even knew that the Waleses had troubles in bed, with Diana confessing to Colthurst that the issues were “geographical” in nature.

Diana trusted Colthurst with startlingly intimate secrets, though their own relationship never turned romantic. Brown writes in The Diana Chronicles, “Colthurst’s ability to retain Diana’s esteem over time very likely depended on their not becoming sexually involved…His qualification for consigliere was not just his intelligence but also the protective fondness he felt for the trapped Princess whom he had known as a girl.”

The doctor believed in Diana: Her True Story because Diana needed him to. She needed to believe in it, so she could believe in her marriage. The Crown gets this right as well: When Chris’ Colthurst asks why Diana has agreed to record her answers for Morton, she tells him it’s because she’s already “tried everything” else. The real Diana felt the same way. If she cracked open her diary, poured out her very soul for the world to devour, it might convince her husband—and his parents—of their own hand in her misery.

Brown puts it like this:

“Diana’s friends cooperated [with the Morton book] because they believed that she faced a choice—explode or implode. They were right, sadly. There is a vitality of survival in Diana’s reckless act that eclipses its folly. Her mad courage blasted the Palace out of its frozen presumptions and institutionalized lying. She told the truth as she saw it. Her own lies of exaggeration were still not as great as theirs of withholding.”

By the end of season 5’s second episode, Morton’s book is out in the world, making its namesake her headlines and its author his money. Chris’ Colthurst is never seen or heard from again—a shame, given what we know about his continued involvement in Diana’s life behind the scenes. Brown writes that he remained one of her confidants until late 1995, when her self-destructiveness in relationships finally damaged theirs. “She exiled everyone associated with helping her produce the Morton book,” Brown wrote, adding:

“So rattled was she by the controversy, she now denied her participation even to herself… James Colthurst survived till late 1995, finally throwing in the towel after a row with Diana about William, who had enrolled at Eton in September. He told Diana she was showing up at the school too much and embarrassing her thirteen-year-old son, a tough thing for a mother to hear. ‘Unless a mother was a widow, it wasn’t done for them to go up without fathers or instead of fathers,’ Colthurst told me. ‘I was at Eton myself, and I told her she shouldn’t be going up there as much as three times a week. She got very angry with me and hung up. And then I thought that’s it, that’s enough. I had been swamped with calls for three years and it was too much.’”

Colthurst, who is still living in Berkshire, England, today, later revealed he and Diana had smoothed over their difficulties by the time she died. He wrote a column for the Telegraph in 2021 that revealed his last conversation with her was over the phone, “not long before her death.” He continued:

“What remains with me is her almost infectious laugh, coupled with her serious desire to help others. She set a high bar for her sons, who have both inherited her natural way with others. Both have her sensitivity and caring. But they are also gutsy and tough and share their mother’s passion for using their roles to do good in the world.”

Morgan’s Diana, the Diana of The Crown, is almost constantly framed in isolation—whether literal, figurative, or self-imposed. In season 5, it’s easy to feel sorry for her; it’s harder, perhaps, to understand her.

There’s some necessity to this degree of distance. The real Diana was similarly quick to isolate herself. And Morgan’s job as showrunner and writer is not to rally for the late princess’s vindication, nor to scrub over her more unsavory sides. But denying a longer-lasting lens to the relative few who knew her away from the cameras, like James Colthurst or Lady Sarah Ferguson, protection officer Ken Wharfe, or even Dr. Hasnat Khan, feels disappointing. Even if it’s only a byproduct of the cutting room floor’s demands.

Netflix premiered season one of Heartstopper this spring and it was renewed for a second season only a month later. The show is based on a popular graphic novel and webcomic of the same name created by Alice Oseman, and it has a huge following. Deadline reports that Heartstopper is one of Netflix’s best-reviewed series.

The queer coming-of-age romcom is keeping fans on the edge of their seats and here’s what they can expect from season two.

Who is in Heartstopper season 2 cast?

Netflix has already confirmed that the entire main cast of Heartstopper is coming back, including Kit Connor and Joe Locke, who play Nick and Charlie, the show’s main couple, Also returning are William Gao, Tobie Donovan, Corinna Brown, Kizzy Edgell, Sebastian Croft, Rhea Norwood, Olivia Colman as Nick’s mother Sarah, and Jenny Walser. Yasmin Finney will also be back as Elle, even though she was recently cast in the BBC’s Doctor Who.

A number of new cast members have also been announced along with their characters, who are known from the comic series. Actor Jack Barton will play Nick’s older brother, David Nelson. Nima Taleghani was cast as Mr. Farouk, a new schoolteacher, and Bradley Riches, who was relegated to the background in season one has been named in the role of James McEwan. The character Sahar Zahid was cast after an open call, and newcomer Leila Khan will be taking on her first professional TV role as Sahar.

In early November, it was announced that Call My Agent! star Thibault de Montalembert had joined the cast at Nick’s father, Stephane.

What will season 2 of Heartstopper be about?

Volume One and Two of the Heartstopper series was covered in season one, so it’s a good guess that the plot of Volume Three and Four will be a heavy part of next season. Of course, TV adaptations often deviate from the original material. But if it does stick to the original, the show will cover Nick and Charlie encountering relationship problems after some smooth sailing and going on a trip to Paris with their fellow students.

When is season 2 of Heartstopper coming out?

Netflix announced that Heartstopper season two was already in production in September of 2022, and the first season aired in early 2022. It seems like 2023 is definitely the year we’ll be seeing Nick and Charlie together again.