Princess Diana has been repeatedly recast on screen, from Naomi Watts in Diana to Emma Corrin and Elizabeth Debicki in The Crown, and Kristen Stewart in Spencer. Earlier projects such as Princess in Love and Diana: Last Days of a Princess also tried to turn the late royal’s life into screen drama. Yet every new Diana portrayal faces the same impossible task: reproducing a woman whose public image was already shaped by cameras, headlines and mythology.

For Charles Spencer, the question is not simply which actress looked most like Princess Diana. It is whether any performance managed to catch the woman behind the photographs. His answer gives Kristen Stewart considerable credit, even while delivering Spencer one of the harshest reviews imaginable.

During a recent conversation with journalist Tina Brown, Charles Spencer was asked whether any fictional portrayal had come close to capturing what his late sister was really like. Spencer said he did not watch The Crown, although he acknowledged the acclaim surrounding Emma Corrin and Elizabeth Debicki. 

“Kristen Stewart, who doesn’t really look like Diana, but, my goodness, she caught her spirit…I thought it was an incredible performance — the film is terrible,” he shared.

The exchange on The Tina Brown Show is particularly revealing because Spencer was not judging Stewart solely through the familiar royal-biopic checklist of wigs, costumes and physical resemblance. Spencer, directed by Pablo Larraín and written by Steven Knight, deliberately operates as a psychological fable rather than a conventional Princess Diana biopic, focusing on a fictionalized Christmas weekend at Sandringham in 1991. Stewart’s performance nevertheless earned widespread critical acclaim and an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.

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That distinction matters because Princess Diana has rarely been portrayed without a layer of interpretation. From the romanticized early television movies to Naomi Watts’ 2013 Diana and the prestige drama of The Crown, filmmakers have repeatedly chosen different pieces of her mythology to foreground.

The timing of Charles Spencer’s comments is notable because his new memoir, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, has placed his relationship with Princess Diana back under intense scrutiny. Recent controversy surrounding the book has also brought him into a dispute with politician Michael Gove over claims about how close the siblings were before Princess Diana’s death.

Spencer’s representative has specifically rejected a claim that the late Princess of Wales asked to stay at Althorp with her sons in 1997 and was refused because of paparazzi concerns. The spokesperson said Princess Diana never made that request that summer and maintained that Spencer had offered her a choice of homes on the estate after her marriage broke down. Spencer has reportedly asked The Spectator to correct the record and remove the podcast episode. 

For someone now defending his own memories of Princess Diana, Spencer’s assessment of Stewart carries an interesting weight. He may dislike the film, but he clearly believes the actress found something beneath the surface of the royal icon.

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What do you think of Charles Spencer’s verdict on Kristen Stewart’s Spencer? Share your thoughts in the comments.