The screenwriters who tackled the romantic entanglements of Diana, Princess of Wales, for the forthcoming series of The Crown have fallen out after a romantic drama of their own.
Jemima Khan, 47, was brought in to help the Netflix series’s creator, Peter Morgan, write the script describing her close friend Diana’s last years before her death in a car crash in Paris in 1997.
But she has now revealed that she pulled out of the project after concluding that The Crown’s portrayal of Diana’s story was not being handled “as respectfully or compassionately as I had hoped”. Khan and Morgan were briefly linked romantically, but broke up earlier this year.
She said she was asked by Morgan to help write the forthcoming fifth series in 2019. She agreed, despite not having publicly spoken about her friendship with Diana, because “it was really important to me that the final years of my friend’s life be portrayed accurately and with compassion, as has not always happened in the past”.
Between September last year and February this year, they worked on story outlines and scripts, including Diana’s romances with the heart surgeon Hasnat Khan and Harrods heir Dodi Fayed, her visits to Pakistan, the bombshell BBC Panorama interview with Martin Bashir, and the last two years of her life.
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However, Khan said that when she realised the stories were going in a direction she did not agree with, she “requested that all my contributions be removed from the series and I declined a [writing] credit”.
Having been friends for years, Khan and Morgan, 58, became a couple late last year after he split from his partner of four years, the actress Gillian Anderson.
Khan and Morgan broke up in February and he rekindled his on-off relationship with Anderson, 53, who won an Emmy for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in the fourth series of The Crown.
Morgan has written films including The Queen, Frost/Nixon and The Damned United. Khan, a former Independent and New Statesman journalist, now makes films and TV shows through Instinct Productions. She has written her first feature film, What’s Love Got to Do With It?, starring Lily James and Emma Thompson.
The daughter of the late Eurosceptic financier Sir James Goldsmith and the socialite Lady Annabel Goldsmith, she married the Pakistani cricketer Imran Khan — now the country’s prime minister — in 1995. Diana visited Jemima and Imran Khan in Pakistan twice, in 1996 and 1997. Hasnat Khan, considered by some to have been the love of Diana’s life, is a distant cousin of Imran Khan.
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The period that The Crown’s fifth series, to be screened from next November, will cover has not been revealed, but it is thought likely to chronicle the Windsor Castle fire, the disintegration of the marriages of Prince Charles and Prince Andrew, Diana’s interview with the now-disgraced Bashir, and her death. There will also be a sixth series to bring the royal family into the 21st century.
The Australian actress Elizabeth Debicki, 31, who is best known for her roles in the Christopher Nolan blockbuster Tenet and the BBC series The Night Manager, is playing Diana in the new series. Dominic West plays Prince Charles, Imelda Staunton takes on the role of the Queen from Olivia Colman, and the Duke of Edinburgh will be played by Jonathan Pryce. Bertie Carvel is to play Tony Blair, while Trainspotting star Jonny Lee Miller will portray John Major.
Jemima Khan said: “In 2019, Peter Morgan asked me to co-write on the fifth series of The Crown, particularly those episodes which concerned Princess Diana’s last years before she died. After a great deal of thought, having never spoken publicly about any of this before, I decided to contribute.”
She added: “We worked together on the outline and scripts from September 2020 until February 2021. When our co-writing agreement was not honoured, and when I realised that particular storyline would not necessarily be told as respectfully or compassionately as I had hoped, I requested that all my contributions be removed from the series and I declined a credit.”
It is not the first time that the portrayal of the royals in the series has courted controversy.
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Last year Oliver Dowden, who was then the culture secretary, said that The Crown’s creators should warn viewers that the show is a drama, because “I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact”. Netflix declined to put a disclaimer on screen and Morgan has described the show as “an act of creative imagination”.
Khan has not always been hostile to the Netflix show, however. She tweeted supportively of the fourth series last year, calling it the “best yet”, and praised the portrayal of Diana by Emma Corrin, 25, because she “captured all the magic of shy Di”. That series covered the years of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, from 1979-90.
A spokesman for The Crown said: “Jemima Khan has been a friend, fan and a vocal public supporter of The Crown since season one. She has been part of a wide network of well-informed and varied sources who have provided extensive background information to our writers and research team — providing context for the drama that is The Crown. She has never been contracted as a writer on the series.”
