The royal family didn’t understand the “ravages” of Princess Diana’s “bulimia ” according to her former voice coach.
Stewart Pearce, who also worked as a voice coach for the likes of late former British Margaret Thatcher, suggests Diana got “little sympathy” from the monarchy, who didn’t understand her “demand for authenticity” and were content “living behind masks” when her struggles came to light.
In an interview with Zoe Forsey on the ‘Pod Save the Queen’ podcast, he said: “I mean, the British royal family just didn’t understand what she was going through, literally. They didn’t understand the ravages of her bulimia, they didn’t understand her extraordinary immediacy and the demand for authenticity. They were living behind masks, which was very effective for them ‒ less so today than they were 25 years ago or 30 years ago but, even so, that was the case. And Diana was absolutely spontaneous, completely immediate and totally impetuous.”
Stewart – who was hired by Diana following her controversial 1995 BBC Panorama interview with Martin Bashir in which she discussed the problems that had existed in her marriage to Prince Charles – added that the for the majority of Diana’s life she was was an attempting to find out “how does a woman empower herself?”, something made even more confusing by her popularity with the public, while she was being “disparaged or disenfranchised on the inside”.
He added: “The whole vessel of her life is really a document of: how does a woman empower herself? And in her context, in that particular social environment, where she was adored on the outside and disparaged or disenfranchised on the inside.”
Last month, former Supreme Court Judge Lord Dyson concluded his independent inquiry on the ‘Panorama’ interview and stated that Bashir used forged bank statements to secure access to Princess Diana – who died at the age of 36 in a car crash in Paris – and said that the BBC was “woefully ineffective” in getting to the bottom of his wrongdoing at the time.
Dyson’s investigation also found that Bashir “deceived” his way to the interview that made his name, while the BBC “fell short of the high standards of integrity and transparency which are its hallmark”.