Britain’s Princes William and Harry hope that a charity concert for Princess Diana will silence her critics by reminding the good she achieved as they spoke openly about the loss of their mother, nearly a decade after her death in a road accident.
“After ten years there’s been a rumbling of people bringing up the bad and over time people seem to forget — or have forgotten — all the amazing things she did,” said William, 24, in a yet to be telecast interview with BBC.
He said that the concert on July 1 at the Wembley Stadium would counter the critics of their mother while Harry spoke about treasured private memories of their mother. July 1 would have been Diana’s 46th birthday.
“We felt that this was the best way of bringing her back to life and letting people remember all the good things about her because she’s not here to defend herself when she gets criticised and so we want to do that instead and this is the best way of us getting that across to people,” William said.
Prince Harry (22) said, “The memories that we’ve got of her, we’re very lucky to have because they’re private between us — that’s the nicest thing about it, as you see her get slated for such and such.”
American singer Anastacia, Australian singer Jason Donovan, Italian singer Andrew Bocelli and American entertainer Donny Osmond have been added to the concert’s line up, along with singer and actor Sarah Brightman, ex-wife of Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Prince William said, “She loved exactly the kind of people who are coming to the concert. She loved Sir Elton, George Michael, she loved Supertramp, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Bryan Adams. We used to catch her dancing to music — we’d walk out the room rather embarrassed that our mother was just dancing around,” the prince said in the interview to be telecast on June 29.
“We were so lucky to have her as our mother and there’s not a day that goes past when we don’t think about her,” he said adding that everything she did was “from the heart... loved caring for people and she loved helping.”
About her death in a Paris car crash on August 31, 1997 along with friend Dodi Fayed, William said: “It’s one of those things that is very sad but you learn to deal with it and there are plenty of other people out there who have got the same or worse problems than we’ve had.”
Diana was divorced from their father Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, in 1996.
The princes are both in the British army. In an interview to a US channel earlier in the week, Harry had said he would “never stop wondering” about his mother’s death.