Who was Princess Diana’s secret boyfriend Hasnat Khan?
A new film starring Naomi Watts as Princess Diana follows her life for about two years before her death in a car accident during a paparazzi chase. At the time of her death, July 1997, the divorced princess was dating billionaire Harrod’s heir Dodi Fayed. The film follows the romance between Diana and another man, heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, who she had just broken up with a few weeks before the tragic accident. There’s been a lot of controversy about the movie, which opens in the U.S. Nov. 1, which many critics saying it’s boring, and others close to Diana saying it’s completely wrong.
What really happened between Diana and boyfriend Hasnat Khan?
Unlike Diana’s relationship with Dodi Fayed, her courtship with Hasnat was kept secret to the public while it was happening. The heart surgeon worked long hours, and she often had to be away with her children William and Harry, so they didn’t get to see each other a lot. When they did, they would stay in, or Princess Di would try to disguise herself by dressing down and wearing sunglasses.
Unlike others who knew Diana, Hasnat barely spoke to the press after she she died. One friend of Diana’s told Vanity Fair that this devotion to privacy led Diana to trust Hasnat in a way she did not trust anyone else. “Hasnat is the one person who will never sell me out.”
Perhaps that trust began the very first day they met, which was by chance. Diana was accompanying her acupuncturist to the hospital while her husband received triple by-pass surgery from Khan.
The movie claims to be based on multiple reports of Diana’s romance with Hasnat, but only lists one book in the credits: Diana – Her Last Love by Kate Snell. Khan himself hasn’t spoken out much about the movie except to say he will never see it and to denounce it. He saw a promotional poster for the film, and says based on that the movie is “completely wrong” and full of “cruel lies.”
“I could tell immediately those were never our mannerisms at all, he says of seeing the poster. “You could just tell from that picture that it is all just presumed about how we would behave with each other, and they have got it completely wrong.”
Princess Diana’s friend Richard Kay wrote a long piece for The Daily Mail outlining a number of details the film gets wrong. Most of the issues are details that can be forgivable in a biopic, like a few timeline discrepancies, and what her kitchen looked like, but he says that the biggest mistake in the entire film is that Diana was with her very last love Dodi Fayed was just a fling to make Hasnat jealous. “The truth is that by the summer of 1997 she was drifting away from Hasnat. It is here where the film is particularly disingenuous.
It chooses to portray her romance with Dodi Fayed as a fling to make Hasnat jealous — and by golly he was,” Kay writes. “But it was with Dodi that she found peace and contentment, if only briefly. He was the only man she publicly acknowledged — not counting her one-time Cavalry officer lover James Hewitt.”
Another problem with the film? Princess Di is always seen with a wineglass in her hand during a period of her life when she barely drank alcohol at all, and was never much of a drinker.
Here’s the trailer for Diana:
