Over a million people lined the four-mile (6 km) route from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey. Outside the Abbey and in Hyde Park crowds watched and listened to proceedings on giant outdoor screens and huge speakers as guests filed in, including representatives of the many charities of which Diana was patron. Notable attendants included Hillary Rodham Clinton; Bernadette Chirac, wife of the French President, Jacques Chirac; and other celebrities, including Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti and Diana's good friends singers George Michael and Elton John -- the latter performed a rewritten version of his song, "Candle in the Wind", that was dedicated to her. The service was televised live around the world.
Protocol was disregarded when the guests applauded the speech by Diana's younger brother Earl Spencer, who strongly criticised the press and indirectly criticised the Royal Family for their treatment of her. The funeral is estimated to have been watched by 31.5 million viewers in Britain. Precise calculation of the worldwide audience is not possible.
After the end of the ceremony, the coffin was driven to Althorp in a Daimler hearse. Mourners cast flowers at the funeral procession for almost the entire length of its journey and vehicles even stopped on the opposite carriageway of the M1 motorway as the cars passed on the route to Althorp. In a private ceremony, Diana was buried on the Althorp estate on an island in the middle of a lake. In her casket, she wears a black Catherine Walker dress and is clutching a rosary in her hands. A visitors' centre is open during summer months, allowing visitors to see an exhibition about her and to walk around the lake. All profits made are donated to the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund.
During the four weeks following her funeral, the overall suicide rate in England and Wales rose by 17% and cases of deliberate self harm by 44.3%, compared with the average reported for that period in the four previous years. Researchers suggest that this was caused by the "identification" effect, as the greatest increase in suicides was by people most similar to Diana: women aged 25 to 44, whose suicide rate increased by over 45%.
In the years after her death, interest in the life of Diana has remained high. As a temporary memorial, the public co-opted the Flamme de la Liberté (Flame of Liberty), a monument near the Alma Tunnel, and related to the French donation of the Statue of Liberty to the United States. The messages of condolence have since been removed, and its use as a Diana memorial has discontinued, though visitors still leave messages at the site in her memory. A permanent memorial, the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain was opened in Hyde Park in London on 6 July 2004.
Diana was ranked third in the 2002 Great Britons poll sponsored by the BBC and voted for by the British public, just above Charles Darwin (4th), William Shakespeare (5th), and Isaac Newton (6th).
In 2003, Marvel Comics announced it was to publish a five-part series entitled Di Another Day (a reference to the James Bond film Die Another Day) featuring a resurrected Diana, Princess of Wales, as a mutant with superpowers, as part of Peter Milligan's satirical X-Statix title. Amidst considerable outcry, the idea was quickly dropped.[42] Heliograph Incorporated produced a roleplaying game, Diana: Warrior Princess by Marcus L. Rowland, about a fictionalised version of the twentieth century as it might be seen a thousand years from now. Artist Thomas Demand made a video, Tunnel, in 1999, that featured a trip through a cardboard mock-up of the tunnel in which Diana died.
After her death, the actor Kevin Costner, who had been introduced to the Princess by her former sister-in-law, Sarah, Duchess of York, claimed he had been in negotiations with the divorced Princess to co-star in a sequel to the thriller film The Bodyguard, which starred Costner and Whitney Houston. Buckingham Palace dismissed Costner's claims as unfounded.
Actor George Clooney publicly lambasted several tabloids and paparazzi agencies following Diana's death. A few of the tabloids boycotted Clooney following the outburst, stating that he "owed a fair portion of his celebrity" to the tabloids and photo agencies in question.
(extract from Wikipedia 2011)
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Princess Di Live Funeral Coverage - 1997 (6/7)by mycityperth888 views
We missing You, Diana
CEorganization 6 months ago