English princess, former wife of Charles, Prince of Wales. Born July 1, 1961, in Norfolk, England. Her father, Lord Althorp, became the eighth Earl Spencer in 1975; he had served as a personal equerry to both King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II. Lady Diana Spencer grew up on her family mansion near the British royal family’s estate in Sandringham, England. When she was only six years old, her mother, Frances, left her father for Peter Shand Kydd, a wealthy businessman. Though her two sisters, Sarah and Jane, were by then in boarding school, Diana and her younger brother Charles unhappily divided their time during the next several years between their parents’ homes.
Diana attended the exclusive West Heath boarding school in Kent for four years, but dropped out when she was 16. After a term at a Swiss finishing school, she ended her formal education and got a job in London working as a nursery school teacher’s aide. Though she had known the Prince of Wales, heir to the throne of the United Kingdom, for most of her life (his younger brother Andrew had been her childhood playmate and Charles had dated her older sister, Sarah), their relationship began to intensify during a visit with her sister Jane, who was married to the queen’s assistant secretary, as a guest of the royal family at Balmoral Castle in Scotland. When the press noticed the prince’s growing interest in the young Lady Spencer, they began to follow Diana’s movements and photograph her at every opportunity. At the age of 19, Lady Diana Spencer had become an object of fixation for the national media, and she soon cultivated a bashful but charming smile for the cameras that earned her the nickname “Shy Di.”

In February 1981, Charles proposed to Diana, and the couple appeared together in public for the first time at the official engagement announcement. They were married on July 29, 1981, at St. Paul’s Cathedral, before a congregation of 2,500. In addition, an estimated 750 million people worldwide watched the televised ceremony.

William (nicknamed Wills), the first of the royal couple’s two sons and second in line to the throne, was born in 1982; Harry followed in 1984. From the beginning, Diana devoted herself to her sons and resolved to give them as normal a life as possible and to shield them from the unrelenting glare of the media spotlight.