Prince Harry is not holding much back in his Netflix documentary or his new book. He even shares about the day he found out from his father that his mother, Princess Diana, had died.
Prince Harry is now 38, but he was just 12 years old when Diana died in a car crash in Paris in 1997. She was just 36 years old.
Harry, now a father of two, opens up about the sad day in his memoir, “Spare.” He writes that his father, King Charles III, broke the news to him while Harry was at Balmoral, the royal family’s estate in Scotland, along with his older brother Prince William, then 15.
Harry’s father sat his 12-year-old son down on the bed and told him his mother had head injuries in the accident and it was not likely that she would improve while in a hospital in Paris. King Charles called Harry “my dear son” while sharing this news, but he did not embrace him.
Both Kensington Palace and Buckingham Palace have declined to comment on the book. A representative for Prince Harry also declined to comment.
Prince Harry talked about this time in his life in a 2017 BBC documentary titled, “Diana, 7 Days.” He said his father was “there” for him and his brother.
“One of the hardest things for a parent to have to do is to tell your children that your other parent has died,” he said.
“How you deal with that? I don’t know. But you know, he was there for us. He was the one out of two left, and he tried to do his best and to make sure that we were protected and looked after,” he continued. “But … he was going through the same grieving process as well.”
In a 2017 ITV documentary titled, “Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy,” Harry talked about the last phone call he ever had with Diana.
“If I’d known that that was the last time I was going to speak to my mother the things that I would — the things I would have said to her. All I do remember regretting for the rest of my life how short that phone call is,” he said. “Looking back now, I have to live with that for the rest of my life.”
