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Doomed marriage

The Crown / Netflix, streaming from Sunday 15 November

The likeness is extraordinary. Not primarily because actor Emma Corrin bears a particular resemblance to Lady Diana Spencer, although she does, but because publicity photographs suggest Corrin has perfectly caught the young Diana’s wariness, the sense this was a young woman caught by the world’s gaze.

As series four of Peter Morgan’s The Crown explores as it charts the Windsors’ story from c1977-90, the future Princess of Wales had every reason to be worried. Her marriage to Charles (Josh O’Connor), celebrated in the fairytale ‘Wedding of the Century’ (1981), would soon hit the rocks, as was perhaps inevitable considering Charles’s longstanding attachment to Camilla Parker Bowles (Emerald Fennell).

Outside the confines of the royal family, the 1980s were a tumultuousfame plays The Iron Lady, an arch-royalist who nonetheless has a sometimes strained relationship with Elizabeth (Olivia Colman), in part because the monarch sees her role as one of encouraging national unity and a sense of continuity.

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