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Inside the £13m 208ft ‘love boat’ yacht where Princess Diana & Dodi Fayed had their romantic fling which is on The Crown

• Becky Pemberton
• Published : 12:36, 16 Nov 2023
• Updated : 12:36, 16 Nov 2023

THE famous £13million superyacht where Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed enjoyed their romantic fling is featured on the new season of The Crown.

The glamorous royal and her wealthy boyfriend were famously pictured kissing on the luxury “love boat” Jonikal, which is now called Bash, before their tragic deaths in 1997.

Photos of the couple’s Mediterranean getaway circulated around the world, with The Sunday Mirror paying £250,000 for first rights to the collection.

The fall out of the photos was depicted on the sixth and final season of Netflix’s The Crown, with the Queen , played by Imelda Staunton , seen viewing the multi-page spread back home.

The stunning 208ft yacht can hold up to 18 people across nine staterooms, along with 26 crew members.

It also offers a range of impressive amenities including a jacuzzi, swim platform, sun deck, formal dining room, a bar, and office space.

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The yacht belonged to Dodi’s multi-millionaire father Mohamed Al-Fayed .

The billionaire former Harrods owner amassed his astonishing fortune running several high-profile business ventures and a Premier League football club prior to the announcement of his death in August 2023.

The ship was first launched in 1990, and has had a number of owners over the years.

According to Boat International, it was sold earlier this year, and although the sum hasn’t been disclosed, the asking price was €15,500,000 (£13million).

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Diana’s final month included two cruises on The Jonikal.

The holidays sparked unfounded rumours that Diana was pregnant and about to announce plans to marry Dodi .

Dodi died aged 42 in a Paris car crash with Diana 26 years ago.

The pair first met at a polo match in 1989, but they did not get together until Dodi invited the princess to stay at his father's 30-bedroom villa in St Tropez in July 1997.

Much of Dodi's fortune was spent on impressing a string of beautiful models and actresses.

The playboy was linked to Blue Lagoon actress Brooke Shields, Val Kilmer’s ex-wife Joanne Whalley, Stranger Things star Winona Ryder and Frank Sinatra’s daughter Tina.

Following the 1997 car crash that led to the couple's deaths, Mohamed attempted to sell the yacht on a number of occasions before ultimately parting with it in 2014.

It was most recently purchased by Bassim Haidar in June of 2021, who sold it just over a year later with plans to upgrade to a larger vessel.

• Celebrity relationships and break ups
• The Crown (TV Show)
• Princess Diana

Here Are The Real Photos Of Diana On Vacation That Inspired Those Scenes In The Crown

The Princess of Wales did indeed have a little chat with paparazzi on a boat.

The sixth and final season of The Crown got off to an emotional start by depicting Princess Diana’s final weeks before her death in August 1997. At the time, Princess Diana was newly dating Dodi Fayed, son of Harrod’s owner Mohamed Al-Fayed and famously spent time on Al-Fayed’s yacht in the south of France that summer with 12-year-old Prince Harry and 15-year-old Prince William. She was being constantly followed by the paparazzi, and is seen confronting photographers in The Crown in an effort to get them to leave her sons alone so they could enjoy their holiday. Which, according to photos taken of the princess at the time, appears to be at least somewhat based on a real event.

Season 6, Part 1 of The Crown saw Princess Diana (played by Elizabeth Debicki) vacationing off the coast of Saint-Tropez with her sons, Prince Harry and Prince William (played by Fflyn Edwards and Rufus Kampa, respectively), on Al-Fayed’s yacht. If The Crown is to be believed, Prince William in particular was struggling to have a good time on his holiday because of the constant presence of the paparazzi. And so, Princess Diana decided to throw on a swimsuit and jet over to the photographers to pose for some shots in an effort to get them to leave.

The Crown’s version...

“Enjoying your holiday?” a member of the paparazzi asks Princess Diana in The Crown when she is seen approaching them on a boat, and she replies. “Yes, we’re having a lovely time, apart from one little thing, you lot. Seriously, how long are we going to have the pleasure of your company? The attention is starting to freak out the boys.”

She offered the paparazzi a “surprise” if they would leave her sons alone as they snapped photos of her. And while we don’t know if the real Princess Diana offered them a surprise, she absolutely did confront them that summer.

How it looked in real life...

A year after Princess Diana’s death in a car crash in Paris, journalist and biographer Sally Bedell Smith wrote about the royal’s relationship with the paparazzi for Vanity Fair — in particular, that fateful summer in the south of France. “On a holiday in July 1997 with her boyfriend Dodi Fayed and his family in Saint-Tropez,” Bedell Smith wrote at the time, “she first eluded paparazzi by crawling along a balcony and hiding behind a towel, then surprised a contingent of British tabloid reporters and photographers ... by addressing them from her motorboat in a fetching leopard-print bathing suit. ‘You will have a big surprise coming soon, the next thing I do,’ she teased, and implied that she was thinking of living abroad.”

This wasn’t the only moment that the Netflix series recreated from Princess Diana’s holiday that last summer. Princess Diana was also seen in a super colorful swim suit, hanging out on the beach with her sons. A scene The Crown pulled off perfectly.

In real life, most of the photos from that moment were taken with Princess Diana spending time with her sons on the yacht, even wrapping her son Prince Harry up in a big hug while wearing the iconic swimsuit.

Princess Diana was also photographed sitting on the diving board of Al-Fayed’s yacht, all alone in a bright blue bathing suit. Looking, some might say, quite lonely.

Like the series showed, Princess Diana in 1997 was also seen wearing a bright blue one-piece swimsuit, staring off into space.

While The Crown has certainly done an impeccable job of recreating real-life photos of moments from the lives of royals, it’s important to remember that these are dramatized and fictionalized versions of real events. No matter how spot-on they might look to us.

This article was originally published on November 20, 2023

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‘The Crown’: Behind the Photo of an Embrace That Changed Princess Diana’s Life

In the show, Mohamed al-Fayed sends the photographer Mario Brenna to capture shots of Diana and al-Fayed’s son, Dodi, on vacation. The portrayal is inaccurate, Brenna says.

By Alex Marshall

Reporting from London

It’s summer 1997, and Princess Diana is flirting with Dodi Fayed, a globe-trotting playboy, on the Jonikal, a yacht floating on sparkling Mediterranean waters.

Diana, teasingly, says that she likes men who have lips that are “just the right temperature.”

“Are mine the right temperature?” Dodi replies.

“I don’t know,” Diana says: “Need to check.” Then, the couple kiss, blissfully unaware that just a few meters away, Mario Brenna, a slick Italian photographer, is on a boat, with a long-lens camera trained on the couple.

A few days later, Brenna’s shots of the princess and her new beau are on the front pages of newspapers worldwide.

This is a central scene in the sixth and final season of Netflix’s royal drama “The Crown” — the first batch of episodes premiered on Thursday — and a moment that signaled the start of a tabloid frenzy around the couple that many blame for their deaths on Aug. 31, 1997, in a car crash in Paris as they were chased by photographers.

Yet the depiction is far from accurate, according to Brenna, speaking in what he said was his first interview with an English-language newspaper.

For a start, “The Crown” has Mohamed al-Fayed — Dodi’s father, and a retail and hotel tycoon who died this year — appearing to hire Brenna to take the shots, in an effort to push Diana and Dodi’s relationship into the public eye, and cajole the pair to marry.

In an email, Annie Sulzberger, the head of research for the show — she is also the sister of The Times’s publisher, A.G. Sulzberger — said that “there are a few theories about how Brenna managed to find the Jonikal moored somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea,” but the one the team found most credible was that one of al-Fayed’s employees leaked the boat’s location to Brenna.

But Brenna said the idea that al-Fayed hired him was “absurd and completely invented,” and that no one leaked information about the yacht’s whereabouts to him. Every summer at that time, he was in Sardinia so he could take paparazzi shots of famous people, he said, and coming across Diana and Dodi was simply a “great stroke of luck.”

On Aug. 1, 1997, Brenna said he approached Diana’s yacht on a fast moving inflatable boat after mistaking a blonde woman making a telephone call on its upper deck for an old acquaintance. As he got closer, he was stunned to realize it was the princess.

Bruno Malka, Brenna’s agent at the time who helped sell the images to Paris Match magazine, said in an email that he thought Brenna was familiar with the yacht, “without knowing it was Diana and Dodi” onboard that day. Brenna was successful, Malka added, because he had spent so many years working in the region.

After spotting the couple, Brenna said he spent the next few days stalking the boat, including climbing a cliff to get a better view. From that elevated position, about 400 meters away from Diana, he took several photos of Diana and Dodi in an embrace. The shots were almost blurred, Brenna said, because the heat haze meant he struggled to get the pair in focus.

Still, he knew immediately he’d secured “a historic photo.” He’d also captured an image that “solved my personal and family problems,” he said, at a time when he had recently divorced and so “was not swimming in wealth.”

He unloaded the rolls of film from the camera, then buried them to make sure they didn’t get exposed to the sun as he tried to take more images, and also as he feared a competitor might have seen him at work and try to steal his camera and so obtain the images every other photographer in the Mediterranean had been hoping to get first.

On Aug. 10, the Sunday Mirror, a British tabloid, splashed Brenna’s image on its front page . “The Kiss,” the headline read. Soon, Brenna said, he was selling the pictures worldwide. In the following six-to-eight months, he said, he made about 1.7 million pounds, or $2.1 million, from his photos of the couple.

Brenna’s pictures — and the prices news outlets paid for them — sparked a frenzy. In 2013, Jason Fraser, a British photographer who helped Brenna sell his images, told The Daily Mail that after they were published, over 2,000 photographers arrived in the Mediterranean hoping to get their own snaps of Diana and Dodi. “I felt the whole thing was spinning out of control,” Fraser said. Weeks later, the couple died.

In “The Crown,” Brenna (portrayed by Enzo Cilenti) explains his methods to camera. To capture celebrities misbehaving, the fictional Brenna says, you have to take risks. Paparazzi also have to act like “hunters … killers.”

Brenna said in the email interview that he did not share this opinion of his work (“I do not identify with the term ‘killer,’”) and that he was never contacted by anyone from “The Crown” to learn about his experiences (Netflix did not respond to a request for comment).

After Diana and Dodi’s death, al-Fayed sued Fraser, the British photographer, for taking photos of Diana and Dodi on a boat, saying it was an invasion of privacy. Brenna said he did not face any such action, adding his images were legal as they “were taken outdoors, in a public place.” And he regretted the privacy crackdown that happened since, with governments and stars trying to stop the paparazzi from taking photos: “There is still the right to report,” he said.

Today, Brenna lives near Lake Como, in Italy, where he said he’s photographed celebrities including George Clooney, Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé, even as the dawn of social media had impacted his profession significantly, including its financial rewards.

Brenna said he and his family enjoyed the success of the photos throughout August 1997. But then, Diana died. When he heard the news, Brenna said, he “couldn’t believe it” and cried, not least because he had two children himself and so could understand what her death would mean for Diana’s boys. He made a decision “not to speak or disclose anything about the incident until William and Harry reached adulthood.”

The mere thought that his images “could have contributed to fueling the hunt for Diana and Dodi obviously saddens me,” Brenna said. But he did not think his work added significantly to the furor around the princess.

“If it hadn’t been me,” he added, “someone else would certainly have captured those images.”

Alex Marshall is a European culture reporter, based in London. More about Alex Marshall

How The Crown Recreated the Iconic Princess Diana Diving Board Photo

Spoiler alert: It wasn't actually a diving board she was sitting on.

On August 24, 1997—exactly a week before Princess Diana's tragic death —paparazzi captured one of the last, and perhaps most iconic, photos ever taken of her. The royal, who had been vacationing with boyfriend Dodi Al Fayed on his father's luxury yacht off the coast of Portofino, was seen wearing a turquoise one-piece swimsuit, sitting alone on the edge of the diving board looking out at sea. Except it wasn't a diving board that she was perched on.

"It's the platform you [use to] get on and off the yacht," reveals Alison Harvey, The Crown 's series set director. Or the passerelle, as it is more commonly known in the boating world.

Nevertheless, it was that haunting image, which would later send shockwaves around the world following Diana's passing, that was poignantly chosen as the main poster of the sixth and final season of The Crown . And according to the show's production team, recreating the photo took a village.

"We were very lucky to go to a real superyacht. I think if we tried to do it from scratch we would have never made that," Harvey says of remaking Mohamed Al Fayed 's 208-ft yacht, Jonikal, for the series. "We had the bones of the set that we then enhanced with more period details to make it feel more like the Fayed's world."

The result: the interior of the yacht featured a blue and yellow motif with Egyptian art, paintings, fabrics and patterns from the '90s. "Everything [was] stylized to fit the Fayed world to counteract with The Queen's world, which is a much more dreary environment," continues Harvey. "It was that old money, new money [kind of thing]."

Getting Elizabeth Debicki , who plays Diana in the series, to look exactly like the Princess of Wales in that moment also required some reimagining. "There were some restrictions in term of copyright and what we could show, what we couldn't show, and how the picture was taken," explains Harvey, "so it was slightly adapted for our purposes."

For starters, the hair and makeup department were tasked with making a wig that looked like Diana's hair post-swim. "The challenge was really this thing of realizing that iconic Diana but without being able to fall back on her very manufactured hair and makeup that we're used to seeing in the media," Cate Hall, hair & makeup designer of The Crown , explains. "Obviously [Elizabeth's wearing] a wig, but it's about if you look at the shading, the color, the tone and the way it's sitting. Most of our efforts go into any which way we can into making [wigs] look natural and I think it does look natural and lived in."

Then the costume department had to recreate the turquoise bathing suit to look identical to the one Diana wore in real life. "We didn't get the [actual] designer to do it," says Sidonie Roberts, The Crown 's co-costume designer, "so it was our version of it."

While "it was relatively simple" to do so, "the question with us with Elizabeth was what does she feel comfortable in? Because '90s to 2000s swimwear is pretty high on the thigh," says Roberts. "That I think was our first fitting with her, so it was getting a balance between the actual shape and also what Elizabeth, as an actress would feel comfortable, being quite exposed, in this scene. But in terms of color, we just went similarly as the other one because it is a moment in itself and we wanted to keep that iconic moment as it was."

In the days that followed that photo, Princess Diana and Dodi traveled to Paris, where they died in car crash on August 31 . Diana was 36 and Dodi 42. The first part of The Crown, which is available to stream on Netflix now , follows the weeks leading up to and after their death. The rest of the season is set to hit the streaming platform Thursday, December 14.

Sophie Dweck is the associate shopping editor for Town & Country, where she covers beauty, fashion, home and décor, and more. 

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Diana’s final hours: Dodi’s yacht, a Ritz suite, a diamond ring and relentless photographers

The last day of Princess Diana’s life began on the top deck of her lover’s yacht, with croissants and fresh jams.

Diana and her beau, Dodi Al Fayed, sipped their coffee marveling at the breathtaking Emerald Coast in Sardinia. Diana took hers with milk. Fayed took his black. There were kiwis, too.

“They were in a good mood,” his butler remembered later. “They were always laughing, holding hands.”

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Their romance was a whirlwind — passionate, thrilling, scandalous. Fayed, the son of Harrod’s department store owner Mohamed Al-Fayed, was a rich playboy. Diana, divorced from Prince Charles after he cheated on her, was the mother of the future King of England and the most photographed woman in the world.

[ How Britain and the world mourned Diana, the ‘People’s Princess’ ]

That Saturday — Aug. 30, 1997 — promised to be a moment of change. The Princess knew it. She snuck a call to Richard Kay, a friend who covered the Royals for the Daily Mail, and told him, as he later wrote , “she had decided to radically change her life.”

“She was going to complete her obligations to her charities,” Kay continued, “and then, around November, would completely withdraw from her formal public life.” Diana had not told Kay why, but he had a hunch: “They were, to use an old but priceless cliche, blissfully happy. I cannot say for certain that they would have married, but in my view it was likely.”

In the 20 years since she’s been gone, there have been countless revisions to this love story. Her friends and relatives: They weren’t in love! His friends and relatives: They were in love!

Last week, in the Daily Mail, Kay published an article with this headline: “Was Diana about to dump Dodi?” In it, he quoted Diana’s private secretary saying she’d planned to return home after becoming bored with Fayed.

“It’s very much a personal view,” the secretary said, “but I don’t think she would have seen Dodi again once she got back.”

Whatever the case, Fayed wanted to propose that fateful night. It was summer. As they were on holiday, Britain announced plans to invite the Irish Republican Army for peace talks. Conspiracies theories about the suicide of Vincent Foster, President Bill Clinton’s lawyer, were spreading. Israel and Lebanon were sparring with one another.

Fayed’s primary concern was the six-figure diamond ring waiting in Paris. People close to Fayed said the couple picked it out a week earlier even though they had been dating less than a month.

The danger of their relationship wasn’t its brevity. To royal watchers, to Buckingham Palace, and no doubt to the British tabloids whose photographers were hounding them, the threat was something the couple apparently had not yet considered, even as rumors swirled that Diana was already pregnant.

“For the mother of the future king of England to bear the child of a Muslim Arab, a child who would be the half sibling of the heir to the throne, would be embarrassing in the eyes of the royal family and the ruling Establishment,” former Time magazine reporters Tom Sancton and Scott MacLeod wrote in their book,  “Death of a Princess.”

Fayed’s calendar that day had just one entry — at 6:30 p.m., he was to pick up the ring at a store near his father’s hotel in Paris, The Ritz. They left the boat for Fayed’s plane around 11:30 a.m., taking along the butler and a masseuse for Fayed’s painful back.

As soon as they landed in Paris, Fayed saw the paparazzi out his window.

“Dodi did not want this special occasion ruined by a bunch of a shutter-happy cowboys trying to corral them on motorcycles and shoving lenses in their faces,” the ex-Time reporters wrote. “As soon as the door opened, cameras started clicking.”

Diana and the media: She used them, and they used her. Until the day she died.

The aggressiveness of the photographers — and their sheer numbers — would increase as the day progressed.

Diana and Fayed arrived at The Ritz in the late afternoon. She went to the salon for a hair appointment. He went to the jeweler. The couple then rested in the hotel’s Imperial Suite before going to Fayed’s apartment to get dressed for dinner. She checked in with her children, who were in Scotland with Prince Charles and the Queen.

“On that Saturday evening, Diana was as happy as I have ever known her,” her friend Kay wrote in the Daily Mail. “For the first time in years, all was well with her world.”

They left for Fayed’s apartment around 7 p.m., trailed by photographers. More were waiting at the building’s front door when they arrived. Fayed fumed. There was an ugly shoving match.

Once inside, Fayed pulled his butler aside, telling him about his plan to propose that night.

“The ring was on the nightstand in his bedroom,” author Christopher Anderson wrote in “The Day Diana Died.” “Dodi had checked to make sure they had several bottles of Dom Pérignon on ice for the big moment.”

But dinner was a bust.

The first restaurant they tried — Chez Benoit, a cozy, casual bistro not far from the city center — was quickly overrun by photographers. They split and headed for The Ritz, ducking into the dining room hoping to be left alone.

The Princess ordered vegetable tempura. Fayed ordered grilled turbot.

“No sooner had they ordered,” the ex-Time reporters wrote, “they began to feel the indiscreet stares of other diners.”

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The couple left and had the food delivered to the Imperial Suite. Fayed’s plan was in shambles. They had to get back to the apartment. But how? The hotel was swarming with photographers.

Fayed devised a plan: The couple’s driver and bodyguards would make a big show out front, appearing to get their caravan of Mercedes sedans ready to leave. Meanwhile, the Princess and Fayed would slip out the back door, in a borrowed car driven by a hotel security officer.

What happened next was the subject of lengthy investigations and conspiracy theories that live on today. The couple did get away. But the driver, it turned out, was drunk.

As the couple sped off, the photographers out front got tipped off about the escape, quickly catching up on their motorcycles. Their driver darted in and out of traffic, wrecking spectacularly inside the Pont de l’Alma tunnel near the Eiffel Tower.

Fayed died instantly. Diana died at the hospital.

Her death startled the world.

An up-and-coming anchor named Brian Williams broke into regular coverage on MSNBC to announce the news to Americans in the early morning hours of Aug. 31.

“I’ve just been handed from the Reuters news service what has been marked ‘bulletin,’” Williams said, speaking slowly. “It says, ‘Princess Diana has died.’”

She was 36.

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Insiders reveal the truth about Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed's relationship

New documentary highlights the last few weeks of princess diana and dodi fayed’s lives.

Social Sharing

During the summer of 1997, photos of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed filled the tabloids as paparazzi photographers scrambled to snap shots of their apparent love affair.

In the new documentary Diana & Dodi: The Princess and the Playboy , members of Diana and Fayed's inner circle remember what they witnessed that summer — which would ultimately be the couple's last. 

She was a former member of the British Royal Family, he was a filmmaker and the son of a wealthy businessman who wanted to be included by the British elite. 

Featuring interviews with close friends, former employees and even Fayed's ex-girlfriends, Diana & Dodi: The Princess and the Playboy uncovers how the two met — and how Fayed's father appears to have orchestrated it all. 

Insiders reveal the truth about Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed's relationship | Diana & Dodi: The Princess and the Playboy

The film also documents how their relationship came under intense scrutiny by the press. Images of the pair together could fetch over one million euros, and they had to find elaborate ways of avoiding photographers. At the same time, a former girlfriend of Fayed's — who says they were engaged when he met Diana — was suing him, claiming he had promised her money to abandon her career. 

Was it true love? Former friends of Diana have said it was just a fling, a rebound from her very public divorce. But in the documentary, Fayed's former butler reveals that the filmmaker was planning to propose in Paris on the night of their deaths. 

• In Depth Expert investigation reveals the truth about Princess Diana's death 25 years ago

Diana & Dodi: The Princess and the Playboy tells the untold story of Dodi Fayed and the truth about his relationship with Princess Diana, featuring unprecedented access and new, revelation-packed stories.

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• In Depth Expert investigation reveals truth about Princess Diana's death more than 25 years ago
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Yacht that Princess Diana spent last summer on with Dodi Al-Fayed sinks to bottom of Mediterranean

Cujo, which made front-page news around the world back in the summer of 1997 when Diana was entertained on board a year after her divorce from Prince Charles, went down in 2500m (8200ft) of water.

Thursday 3 August 2023 17:00, UK

A motor yacht used by Princess Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Al-Fayed on their final summer holiday in the South of France before they died in a Paris car crash has sunk.

The 19m (62ft) Cujo went down 21 miles (35km) off Beaulieu-sur-Mer after sending out a mayday call last Saturday.

The seven people on board the luxury vessel, which was taking on water, were rescued by teams from Antibes before it sank to the bottom of the Mediterranean at a depth of 2500m (8200ft).

They were safely returned to shore.

The area was monitored for pollution as the boat sank with 7,000 litres of diesel in its tanks.

Cujo made front page news around the world back in the summer of 1997 when Al-Fayed entertained Diana onboard, a year after her divorce from Prince Charles, which was finalised in August 1996.

That summer, Diana was also photographed on Sokar, the yacht then owned by al Fayed's billionaire father Mohamed.

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It had previously been named Jonikal.

Cujo was built in Italy in 1972 for businessman John von Neumann who told the Italian Baglietto shipyard that he wanted the world's fastest motor yacht.

She was fitted with two 18-cylinder engines giving her a top speed of 42 knots.

Van Neumann then sold the boat to the son of Saudi businessman and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and he sold her on to his cousin, al Fayed.

Cujo was frequently moored off St Tropez, a famous celebrity hangout on the French Riviera, with guests including Clint Eastwood, Tony Curtis and Bruce Willis.

Following the death of Diana and Al-Fayed in central Paris on 31 August 1997, Cujo fell into disrepair.

She was decommissioned in 1999, and spent years in storage, before being restored by new owners.

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The Famous Superyacht on Which Dodi Fayed Courted Princess Diana in the Summer of 1997 Sinks to the Bottom of the Mediterranean Sea

If you were around that summer 26 years ago, you remember this vessel well from the hordes of photos taken of it with the Princess of Wales aboard.

Last August 31 was the 25-year anniversary of the deaths of Princess Diana , Dodi Fayed, and Henri Paul, who passed away as a result of a Parisian car accident in the early morning hours of that day in 1997. (Diana’s bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones was severely injured but survived the crash.) The summer of 1997 will come to the forefront once more in the forthcoming season six of Netflix’s The Crown , due to debut later this year, and we will no doubt see scenes of Diana and Dodi from their final summer together aboard the superyacht Cujo—a vessel that has made headlines this week.

The Cujo sinking on July 29, 2023

In an unexpected twist to the story, 26 years after Diana and Dodi enjoyed its comforts, Cujo sunk to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea on July 29, with seven passengers aboard. (All seven are safe and unharmed, thankfully.) People reports that the yacht—of which thousands upon thousands of paparazzi photos were taken in the summer of 1997, as the press tried to figure out the relationship between Diana and Dodi—was “sinking due to a leak” after it allegedly hit an unidentified object on the French Riviera, according to an officer. “The skipper of the Cujo issued a Mayday,” an officer said, per The Independent . “Rescue boats were sent from Antibes and, after making sure everyone was safe, gendarmes detected a significant water leak at the level of the starboard front hull. Her owner had activated the pumps and kept the engines running, but this didn’t stop the boat sinking.”

Gendarmerie des Alpes-Maritimes, a branch of the French military, released a statement addressing the incident on its Facebook page, where it was disclosed that the Antibes Nautical Brigade first responded to a distress call at 12:30 p.m. local time for a yacht located 35 kilometers off the coast of Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France, People reports. “When they arrived at the scene 45 minutes later, the ship was already sinking, and the cabins had begun to flood,” the outlet writes. “The seven passengers were already transferred to a life raft and examined for injuries before being taken back to shore.”

Princess Diana that final summer aboard Fayed's boat

After first meeting at a polo match in 1986—in which Dodi was playing against Diana’s then-husband, Prince Charles —Diana and Dodi reconnected romantically over a decade later after Dodi’s father, Mohamed al Fayed, invited the princess and her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry , to vacation at their villa in St. Tropez, France. Diana and Dodi developed a connection aboard the 20-meter superyacht, as the world watched and wondered through paparazzi photos taken of them at the time. Dodi himself owned the Cujo and had spent around £1 million refitting the boat “and wooed Diana on board, as the world’s media looked on,” The Independent reports.

Princess Diana and Prince Harry on the Fayed boat

Princess Diana waves at bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, who would be the sole survivor in the crash that took her life not long after this photo was taken

We’ll never know what would have come from the seemingly budding romance, as the two were killed riding side by side together through a tunnel in Paris—Dodi instantly in the tunnel, and Diana later at the hospital. The car in which they were riding was traveling at 121 mph in order to escape the aforementioned paparazzi chasing them on motorcycles—trailing them this time on land rather than, as they had all summer, at sea. The chase, plus driver Paul’s intoxication, led to the triple fatal crash and the end to any happiness Diana and Dodi might have shared together—the beginnings of which are now resting at the bottom of the Mediterranean.

Cujo—frequently moored off St. Tropez—saw other celebrity guests including Clint Eastwood and Bruce Willis. After Dodi’s death, Cujo fell into disrepair and was decommissioned two years later in 1999. It spent years in storage before being restored by new owners.

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Rachel Burchfield is a writer, editor, and podcaster whose primary interests are fashion and beauty, society and culture, and, most especially, the British Royal Family and other royal families around the world. She serves as Marie Claire’s Senior Celebrity and Royals Editor and has also contributed to publications like Allure, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, InStyle, People, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and W, among others. Before taking on her current role with Marie Claire, Rachel served as its Weekend Editor and later Royals Editor. She is the cohost of  Podcast Royal , a show that was named a top five royal podcast by The New York Times. A voracious reader and lover of books, Rachel also hosts  I’d Rather Be Reading , which spotlights the best current nonfiction books hitting the market and interviews the authors of them. Rachel frequently appears as a media commentator, and she or her work has appeared on outlets like NBC’s Today Show, ABC’s Good Morning America, CNN, and more. 

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Inside the £13m 208ft ‘love boat’ yacht where Princess Diana & Dodi Fayed had their romantic fling which is on The Crown

• Becky Pemberton
• Published : 7:36 ET, Nov 16 2023

THE famous £13million superyacht where Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed enjoyed their romantic fling is featured on the new season of The Crown.

The glamorous royal and her wealthy boyfriend were famously pictured kissing on the luxury “love boat” Jonikal, which is now called Bash, before their tragic deaths in 1997.

Photos of the couple’s Mediterranean getaway circulated around the world, with The Sunday Mirror paying £250,000 for first rights to the collection.

The fall out of the photos was depicted on the sixth and final season of Netflix’s The Crown, with the Queen, played by Imelda Staunton, seen viewing the multi-page spread back home.

The stunning 208ft yacht can hold up to 18 people across nine staterooms, along with 26 crew members.

It also offers a range of impressive amenities including a jacuzzi, swim platform, sun deck, formal dining room, a bar, and office space.

The yacht belonged to Dodi’s multi-millionaire father Mohamed Al-Fayed.

The billionaire former Harrods owner amassed his astonishing fortune running several high-profile business ventures and a Premier League football club prior to the announcement of his death in August 2023.

The ship was first launched in 1990, and has had a number of owners over the years.

According to Boat International, it was sold earlier this year, and although the sum hasn’t been disclosed, the asking price was €15,500,000 (£13million).

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Diana’s final month included two cruises on The Jonikal.

The holidays sparked unfounded rumours that Diana was pregnant and about to announce plans to marry Dodi.

Dodi died aged 42 in a Paris car crash with Diana 26 years ago.

The pair first met at a polo match in 1989, but they did not get together until Dodi invited the princess to stay at his father's 30-bedroom villa in St Tropez in July 1997.

Much of Dodi's fortune was spent on impressing a string of beautiful models and actresses.

The playboy was linked to Blue Lagoon actress Brooke Shields, Val Kilmer’s ex-wife Joanne Whalley, Stranger Things star Winona Ryder and Frank Sinatra’s daughter Tina.

Following the 1997 car crash that led to the couple's deaths, Mohamed attempted to sell the yacht on a number of occasions before ultimately parting with it in 2014.

It was most recently purchased by Bassim Haidar in June of 2021, who sold it just over a year later with plans to upgrade to a larger vessel.

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The Crown is wrong about how I got photo of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, says paparazzo

In the show, Dodi Fayed's father hires a paparazzi photographer to take photos of Princess Diana and his son. Mario Brenna says this suggestion is 'absurd'

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Article content

The sixth and final season of The Crown tells the story of how a photograph of Princess Diana vacationing with her new boyfriend helped spark a media frenzy that ended in a car chase and fatal crash in Paris.

The Crown is wrong about how I got photo of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, says paparazzo Back to video

But the Italian paparazzi photographer who took the photo of the famous couple embracing on a yacht says the Netflix show got a crucial fact wrong, and no one asked him for his side of the story, according to his first English-language interview, which was published in The New York Times .

Episode two of the series depicts Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) and Egyptian film producer Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla) enjoying a Mediterranean cruise and a summer of love on the Jonikal yacht while, unbeknownst to them, Italian photographer Mario Brenna (Enzo Cilenti) snaps their photo.

Brenna sold a photo of the couple embracing in swimwear to Paris Match Magazine and it appeared on the front page of U.K. tabloid the Sunday Mirror on Aug. 10. Brenna said he sold his photos worldwide and made about 1.7 million pounds over eight months. As the images spread across the world, they sparked a frenzy of paparazzi photographers eager to get their own lucrative shot of the couple who had only been dating for a few weeks.

An estimated 2,000 photographers descended on the Mediterranean.

“I felt the whole thing was spinning out of control,” Brenna told The New York Times.

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Just a few weeks later, the couple’s car crashed in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel after it was chased by photographers on Aug. 31, 1997. Diana and Fayed both died.

In the show, business tycoon Mohamed al-Fayed — Fayed’s father — appears to hire Brenna to stalk and photograph the couple in an attempt to convince them to marry. The show portrays al-Fayed, who died this year , as eager to get closer to the Royal family.

Annie Sulzberger, the show’s head of research told The New York Times that “there are a few theories about how Brenna managed to find the Jonikal moored somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea,” and The Crown team decided that it was most likely that one of al-Fayed’s employees leaked the location.

But this moment was completely fabricated, according to Brenna, who also told The New York Times about the mental toll the photograph and its aftermath took on him.

The accusation against al-Fayed is “absurd and completely invented,” he said. Stumbling upon the couple was a “great stroke of luck” for Brenna, who spent every summer in the area trying to get paparazzi photos of prominent people.

Get a dash of perspective along with the trending news of the day in a very readable format.

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Brenna reportedly approached Diana’s yacht on Aug. 1, 1997, on an inflatable boat, after mistaking her for an acquaintance. He was surprised to realize she was the princess and he subsequently followed the couple for the next few days.

From a nearby cliff, Brenna discreetly captured several images of the couple, including the famous one of the pair embracing. He hid his film in the ground to protect it from the sun and competitors, according to The New York Times, as he was worried someone would see him and try to steal his camera.

Brenna told The New York Times that despite the photos being blurry from heat haze, he knew immediately that he had captured an “historic” image that “solved my personal and family problems.”

After news broke that Diana and Fayed had died, Brenna was distraught and “couldn’t believe it.”

In The Crown, Brenna, played by Cilenti, justifies his work, saying that he is catching celebrities misbehaving and paparazzi must be “hunters … killers.”

Brenna said the The Crown never reached out to him to find out how he got the famous photo or to get his perspective on his work. He told The New York Times that he disagrees strongly with how he is portrayed and he does not identify with the term “killer.”

While he said he is saddened by the thought that his images may have contributed to the circumstances leading up to Diana’s death, he thinks there was already a media frenzy around the princess.

“If it hadn’t been me,” he added, “someone else would certainly have captured those images.”

The Crown has been criticized in the past for how it toys with the line between history and fiction, especially as the Netflix series approaches the present day. The show, which covered Queen Elizabeth’s 1947 wedding to Prince Philip in its first season, is expected to conclude with the Prince William’s 2010 engagement to Kate Middleton.

Last year, the streaming service came under intense pressure to clarify that the show is a “fictional dramatization” inspired by real events. The streaming service added a disclaimer to the trailer for season five after actress Dame Judi Dench, and others, called for clarification.

The first half of the sixth and final season of The Crown was released on Nov. 16 and the last six episodes will be available on Netflix on Dec. 14.

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The Harrowing Symbolism Behind the Famous Diving Board Photo of Princess Diana

On October 9, Netflix announced the first half of the sixth season of The Crown on Twitter by sharing a single image: Elizabeth Debicki, sitting on a diving board in a turquoise swimsuit, with her back to the camera as she stares out into the sea. With over 2.6 million views, it’s a visual that resonated with many—and not just because of the Netflix marketing department’s graphic design skills.

There are tens of thousands of photos of Princess Diana in existence. A handful of them, including the royal in front of the Taj Mahal and wearing the little black “revenge dress,” are considered iconic. There is, however, perhaps only one of those legendary images that could be considered harrowing.

On August 24, 1997—a week before her tragic death in Paris—paparazzi captured Princess Diana sitting on the diving board upon Mohamed Al Fayed’s private yacht “Jonikal” off the coast of Portofino. What was intended to be a private vacation quickly turned into a media circus after the British tabloids published her kissing Fayed’s son, Dodi, on board. Bids for those photos went up to £500,000. Although Diana always had a de-facto bounty on her head, it was now at an eye-watering and dangerous sum—especially as rumors that the Princess was pregnant, or engaged, began to swirl.

As a result, paparazzi swarmed her the entire trip, desperate to capture the Princess and her new love interest. One of those photos? Diana, solo, on a diving board. Even far off shore, she could be tracked down by a camera lens—and, therefore, never alone.

The Crown's Elizabeth Debicki in the poster for the show’s final season. 

Once she arrived in Paris, an accessible and busy metropolis, this clamor to take her photograph reached a fever pitch. On August 31, while being chased by paparazzi on motorbikes, the car Diana was being driven in by an intoxicated driver crashed in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. According to witness testimony, paparazzi continued to take photos as the couple lay dying.

Over two decades after her death, the haunting photo of her on the diving board is still seared into our consciousness: a symbol of  Diana’s glamor, her isolation, and the relentless pursuit of her likeliness. It was used for the 2013 poster of the biopic Diana, starring Naomi Watts, and inspired SZA’s cover art for her album SOS. “I just loved how isolated she felt, and that was what I wanted to convey the most,” the musician told Hot 97 . Now, Peter Morgan and The Crown are just the latest to have harnessed its emotional power.

While it’s unclear how much the photo will play a role in the upcoming season, the show will cover Diana’s final days—bringing the tragic story of the final weeks of Diana’s life front and center once again.

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Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed's iconic love boat is now at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea

• The yacht on which Princess Diana holidayed with Dodi Fayed is now at the bottom of the sea, per The Times .
• The boat, named Cujo, sank after it collided with an unidentified object off the French Riviera.
• Cujo has changed hands multiple times in recent years and was most recently owned by a wealthy Italian family.

The yacht where Princess Diana spent part of her last summer with Dodi Fayed has sunk to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.

The boat, named Cujo, sank on July 29 after colliding with an unidentified object off Beaulieu-sur-Mer on the French Riviera, The Times reported.

The Gendarmerie des Alpes-Maritimes uploaded a statement onto their Facebook page confirming that they responded to a distress call from a boat that was in trouble about 35 kilometers, or 22 miles, off the coast.

By the time the coast guards arrived at the scene, the yacht was already partially submerged.

"The distressed yacht is already starting to sink from the front and the 7 shipwrecked are just next to it in a life raft," the statement said. "The cabins of the yacht are already flooded, only a few suitcases located in the kitchen and on the deck can be retrieved."

The Gendarmerie des Alpes-Maritimes added that they would remain in the area to monitor pollution because the yacht sank with almost 7,000 liters of diesel in its tanks.

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When Insider reached out to the Gendarmerie des Alpes-Maritimes for direct confirmation of the boat's identity, the organization told Insider "to search via Google."

Cujo made international headlines in 1997 when Princess Diana was photographed onboard with its then-owner Fayed, per Robb Report .

That summer, Princess Diana was also photographed onboard another yacht owned by Fayed's father, the Jonikal — which was subsequently renamed Sokar, per The Times.

Mere weeks later, the two of them died in a car crash in Paris while trying to escape the paparazzi.

Following their deaths, Cujo fell into disrepair and was decommissioned in 1999, per Robb Report. After a few years in storage, Fayed's cousin, Moody Al-Fayed, spent over $1 million restoring the boat before he sold it to a British car collector Simon Kidston for €160,000, or $175,400.

Kidston subsequently sold the boat to its current owner in 2021, he told Robb Report.

"A young member of a prominent Italian business family—he's 30 years old—had seen Cujoin Lavagna, fallen in love with her and asked if she was for sale," Kidston told Robb Report.

Watch: The rise and fall of the cruise industry

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'The Crown' season 6 recreates famous photographs of Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed, and King Charles. Here is how they compare to the real photos.

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Into the Light: How Playing Princess Diana Changed Elizabeth Debicki’s Approach to Acting

Elizabeth debicki reflects on navigating a royal legacy to portray princess diana in the crown —a career-defining performance that changed the way she approaches acting., elizabeth wears dress by dior. .

Whenever Elizabeth Debicki talks about playing Princess Diana in Netflix’s The Crown , she inevitably circles back to something that the series’ creator, Peter Morgan, has said: If she had not been interested in the part, he would have had to write the show differently—presumably, with the People’s Princess taking up significantly less screen time.

“I’ve heard him say this a few times at panels and things, and I always think, Is that true?” Debicki says. “It’s the complete opposite to me. I think, How did you know that I could do that? How did you trust me so much with such a huge part?”

The role terrified her at first, understandably. Twenty-seven years after her death, Diana remains a beloved figure, prominent in the minds of people who never knew her personally and those who did, no one more so than her sons Prince William and Prince Harry. “It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but it did feel a little bit impossible for a while,” says Debicki, who broke through in 2013 for her supporting turn as Jordan Baker in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby and has since worked with Steve McQueen ( Widows ) and Christopher Nolan ( Tenet ). “She’s one of the most famous people that ever lived and she’s still so important to so many people. So it felt like, how can I do this justice, really? I’m Australian and I was seven when Princess Diana passed away, so I didn’t even have the lived memory of it.”

Elizabeth wears top and skirt, both by Acne Studios .

Whatever spark of royal magnetism Morgan sensed in Debicki proved perspicacious. Picking up from Emma Corrin (who played twentysomething Diana in Season 4), Debicki debuted her interpretation of the princess in Season 5, which dramatizes the breakdown of her marriage to Prince Charles in the early 1990s, and was showered with praise for how uncannily she captured her. The soft voice and aristocratic diction, the head tilt and habit of gazing upward through her lashes, the elegance and warmth—it was all there in an indelible performance that earned Debicki her first Emmy nomination, for supporting actress in a drama series, in 2023.

Having made her way through Season 5 “discovering everything as I went along,” Debicki approached the sixth and final season, which premiered last fall and produced even more raves for the actress, with more confidence and a sense of “sitting comfortably,” she says. “I had the feeling going into Season 6, as if I’d sort of gotten away with it and that I got to try it again. I felt finally like I trusted myself—really, completely—with the part. It took me a long time to feel that.”

Returning to set, Debicki knew, she says, “what I needed to give the audience, and that felt kind of meta. It felt like a deep offering of all the things that we collectively knew she was, needed her to be for us, all the things you love about her. So it was extremely important in Season 6 that I kept finding places for those things to exist, just these snatches of joy and playfulness and that golden, luminous light that seemed to always come off her.”

Elizabeth wears dress by Marni , necklace (in her hands) by Charlotte Chesnais , and shoes by FFORME .

Which is not to say that Season 6 was easy. The first three episodes chronicle Diana’s final days before she died in August 1997 in a car crash in Paris while trying to escape the paparazzi. We follow Diana and her sons (played by Rufus Kampa and Fflyn Edwards) as they vacation in the south of France on Dodi Fayed’s billionaire father’s yacht, spraying each other with water guns as they jump into the Mediterranean and giggling as they watch Jumanji . A romance blossoms between Diana and Dodi (Khalid Abdalla). These moments are soaked in a gorgeous, sun-drenched ease that is overshadowed by what we all know is coming as the princess and her new companion make one decision after another that leads them to their tragic end in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel.

Pushing aside the weight of that dread was Debicki’s greatest challenge. “As an actor, playing the scenes, I was just playing very, very real time, moment to moment,” she says. “I may have done that even more than I’ve ever done before, because it was so important to me that you never get a sense that the characters understand where they’re going. The wave of grief always hit us post–making the scene. The character has never experienced it.”

Particularly taxing was re-creating the now iconic security camera footage of the couple waiting in the service corridor of the Ritz Hotel before entering the car that would crash. “We had to lift ourselves above the impending story beat and give them a blissful lack of awareness,” Debicki says. “That was really difficult because you can’t totally shut out your knowledge of the thing.”

She can’t imagine navigating those moments without her “beautiful and steady scene partner,” Abdalla ( The Kite Runner, The Square ). “Khalid and I played that scene for a few hours. We were staying in a country hotel somewhere in England on location, and we ended up having this quiet dinner in an empty hotel. That gave us time to feel things we couldn’t feel when we’re making the scene. We always had each other to help through the wobble that would inevitably come after.”

From the first question to the last, Debicki gives long, thoughtful answers that reflect just how seriously she took the responsibility of portraying Princess Diana. “I always feel like I ramble so much when I talk about [ The Crown ] because it’s so unusual, what we did. It’s always been difficult to know: How do you express your creative experience of this and be as respectful as humanly possible to the fact that this was a real person who experienced unbelievable tragedy?” she says. “The trauma of all of this is still so alive for people. It’s not an easy thing to talk about, and you can’t just breeze through it. We certainly didn’t breeze through it when we were making it.”

Letting Princess Diana go after living with her for three years has been an equally complicated process. Now, as she sits on the verge of earning a second Emmy nomination (in addition to the SAG Award she won in February), Debicki has her mind set on returning to the stage for the first time since she starred with Hope Davis and Mark Strong in David Hare’s The Red Barn in London in 2016. She understands the impact The Crown has had on her. “When you can’t wriggle out of something that scares the hell out of you, when there’s nowhere to go but back to work, you really learn how to do your job,” she says. “Because I did something that scared me so much, that’s probably made me braver. And I’m really grateful for that.”

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is Deputy Editor of Awards at TheWrap, where she covers all things awards. In this issue of TheWrapBook, Schwartz profiled Elizabeth Debicki and collaborated with Philiana Ng to explore the actors and actresses in our “Faces of TV” portfolio.

The post Into the Light: How Playing Princess Diana Changed Elizabeth Debicki’s Approach to Acting appeared first on TheWrap .

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What is an HOA transfer fee, and who pays for it?

An HOA transfer fee may be on your list of closing costs if you move into a community with a homeowners’ association. Learn whether you’ll have to pay this fee.

Today's best sales: Apple AirPods for $90, 45% off a Patagonia sweater and more

Also on our radar: Save almost 50% on a fire pit for fall bonfires and score a Shark robovac for its lowest price this year.

Shoppers 60+ say this walking pad 'makes exercising easier' — it's on mega-sale

The portable, 45-pound treadmill can be used while working or watching TV, and it's down to just $160.