Her emotional parenting style was in sharp contrast to the hands-off approach of her husband, who was often portrayed in the press as cold and relatively uninvolved in the lives of his sons and wife, preferring to spend his personal time on such favorite pursuits as hunting and polo.

In the late 1980s, Diana began increasingly to involve herself in charity work, taking on a number of causes including such sensitive issues as HIV/AIDS, domestic abuse, and drug addiction. She traveled thousands of miles a year in support of her favorite causes, often taking along her beloved sons—especially William, who many expect will become king someday—to hospitals and homeless shelters so that they would understand the world outside the palace walls. From the beginning, the public adored the photogenic princess, and the media followed her every move. But even as her growing dedication to charity work built her reputation as the “people’s princess,” her marriage to the imperious and less-camera ready Prince Charles was steadily unraveling. Reports that the marriage was in trouble began to appear in the early 1980s, and the press speculated (correctly, as it turned out) that both Charles and Diana were having extramarital affairs. Specifically, rumors arose about Charles’ relationship with his longtime friend, Camilla Parker Bowles, and Diana’s alleged dalliance with a cavalry officer, James Hewitt, who later collaborated in a book about their romance. As the decade wore on, the tension between the two began to creep into even their public appearances, as it became ever more difficult for them to live up to the front of the perfect royal marriage. In 1992, three biographies of Diana were published, each making the disturbing claim that the princess suffered from an eating disorder. The most sympathetic among them (at least to Diana), was Diana: Her True Story, by Andrew Morton. Morton painted a brutal picture of Charles as a cold, remote husband and father and alleged that Diana had suffered from extreme depression, even attempting suicide several times during the early 1980s. His book was given a good deal of credence because of the specificity of its details, especially when rumors surfaced that Diana herself had collaborated with Morton or at least given her close friends and relatives permission to be interviewed.

On December 9, 1992, a Buckingham Palace spokesperson announced that Charles and Diana were separating. A few months later, a stressed and tired Diana stated that she was withdrawing from public life, although she would continue with her charity work. The princess was drawn out of her relative seclusion after Charles appeared in a television interview in June 1994, during which he claimed that he had never loved Diana and admitted to an adulterous relationship with Parker Bowles.

Diana responded in November 1995 with a televised interview of her own on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) program Panorama.