Queen Of Hearts Princess Diana 1961-1997

Princess Diana never found her happily-ever-after.

Despite her storybook 1981 wedding, despite riches and fame and the entire world’s attention, the young royal spent her last 16 years trapped in a troubled sea of loneliness and dissatisfaction.

And just when it seemed as if the doe-eyed 36-year-old had finally found her real prince charming, Dodi al-Fayed, her story came to a shocking end.

So much for fairy tales.

Since her birth July 1, 1961, Lady Diana Frances Spencer walked a path that delivered her from a broken childhood home to a brief anonymous existence as a London kindergarten teacher.

Then, just like Cinderella, the young woman was plucked out of her commoner’s life by a crown prince and led into the opulance of Buckingham Palace and the obligation of being the most photographed woman in the world. Her 15-year-marriage to Prince Charles brought her two sons - Prince William, 15, and Prince Harry, 12 - who became the joy of her life.

But the marriage never brought her happiness. The relationship - wounded by scandal and infidelity - eventually ended in a bitter and historic divorce.

Hounded daily by battalions of photographers and reporters, Princess Diana had no privacy. She couldn’t work out at a gym, take a drive to her boys’ schools, meet a friend or even walk down the street without being hunted by the media.

Her public life made headlines. Her private life made even more.

Readers hungry for news about their favorite royal devoured stories about her fleeting romances, her ugly eating disorders, her hairstyles, her clothes. No detail was too small for dissection.

Finally, the road traveled by the troubled Princess of Wales led her to a gruesome death alongside her lover in a car accident inside a dark Paris tunnel.

In death, Diana is sure to become a cultural icon.

“We’re wasting our time talking about her merely being a royal,” said David Starkey, an authority on British royals in an interview with CBS News. “She’s up there in the heavens, somewhere with James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Princess Grace and Jack Kennedy.”

For now, her admirers weep.

The news of her death circled the globe in hours, and by Sunday afternoon hundreds of mourners had already expressed their grief on memorial Web pages on the Internet.

“I was selfish. I watched, I listened, I picked up the magazines that had your picture … I was wrong. Please believe me, I never wanted you to suffer … I did not understand, until I saw the news about your death, how badly we treated you,” one unsigned message read.

Similar messages poured in from South Africa, New Zealand, Singapore, Venezuela, Argentina, Canada, the United States and other nations.

They sent prayers to Diana’s children, and almost every message mentioned the princess’s latest campaign to ban land mines as well as her other campaigns to help AIDS victims and garner public acceptance for lepers and help for cancer sufferers.

In life, the princess once wondered in an interview whether people took her new causes seriously.

“The best part of the fairy tale is coming true: That the princess who was thought not to have a mind had one, that she acted on her conscience, that she was about to become an icon of caring, of loving, of giving who could help reshape the world,” said Nelson Shanks, the Bucks County, Pa., artist who painted Diana’s portrait in 1994 and became close friends with her.

Diana Spencer was the third child of Lord and Lady Althrop’s four children. She was quiet and shy, and grew up in a mansion next door to the royal family’s Sandringham estate in eastern England.

Her parents’ marriage failed in 1969 when her mother left to be with the heir to a business fortune. Her father won custody of Diana, her brother and her two sisters.

For much of her early childhood, Diana was schooled at home. After turning 9, she was sent to West Heath, a boarding school in southern England. She then attended a finishing school in Switzerland.

As a small girl she and Prince Andrew were friends, but it was his older brother, The Prince of Wales, who would eventually usher her to fame.

From the moment she became the royal fiancee, Diana’s demure bashfulness charmed the world, and her timid tucked-chin glance became her trademark.

Diana seemed the perfect symbol to usher British culture from the undisciplined 1970s into the conservative 1980s.

Designers dressed her in frilly, high-collared blouses and flouncy pink chiffon.

The mere outline of her bare legs - seen in shadow through a long skirt when she dared to leave the house without a slip - made the evening news.

The royal wedding in 1981 - an opulent ceremony inside St. Paul’s Cathedral in London - changed the fashion of private weddings all around the world, bringing spectacle and glamour back into ceremonies that for more than a decade had downplayed wedding glitz.

Almost exactly one year after the wedding - on June 21, 1982 - Prince William Arthur Philip Louis, heir to the throne, was born.

Diana was reported to have suffered from severe post-natal depression.

On Sept. 15, 1984, she gave birth to a second son, Henry Charles Albert David. She called him Harry.

In addition to being a mother, Diana had to continue being a princess. And despite signs that her marriage was in trouble, Diana lived up to her royal obligation of appearing happy alongside Prince Charles.

She shook hands, and danced with him at official functions. She visited 19 countries in seven years.

But there was trouble behind the guilded facade.

Prince Charles loved somebody else, Camilla Parker Bowles, a longtime family acquaintance, who was also married. Charles would eventually publicly admit that Parker Bowles was the one and only “true love” of his life.

The couple’s first public conflict occurred during a pheasant hunt in 1985. Charles began to avoid Diana, and when they were together, their body language shouted the chasm that had grown between them.

Charles and Diana began to lead very separate lives.

In June 1992 a tell-all book by Andrew Morton, reported that Diana believed she was trapped in a loveless marriage and was so miserable that she had even attempted suicide. That same month Prince Charles admitted in a television documentary that he had committed adultery.

Two months later news agencies uncovered taped phone conversations between Diana and a friend, James Gilbey, about her riding instructor, James Hewitt. Diana would later admit that she had slept with Hewitt while she was still married to Charles.

The storybook marriage was in tatters, and in December of that year, Prime Minister John Major announced that the royal couple had officially separated.

Charles admitted his infidelity and was scorned. Diana admitted hers and got worldwide sympathy.

She was still the darling of the paparazzi, still a model for mothers and young modern women struggling - just like her- to pull their lives together.

By December 1995, even Queen Elizabeth II saw no reason for the empty marriage to continue. She urged the couple to divorce.

After the prime minister promised Diana she could still play an important role in British diplomacy, she agreed.

Diana and Charles were divorced on Aug. 28, 1996. The fairy tale was over, with Diana trading in the title of “her royal highness,” for a chance at finding happiness.

Distraught and exhausted from the constant public scrutiny, Diana announced that she would quit representing 100 charities, and take time off to get her life together. She publicly announced that she hoped that no longer being a royal would give her peace.

But the world couldn’t get enough.

It was earlier this month that the tabloids splashed pictures of a swimsuit-clad Diana with her newest, and final love, Dodi Fayed.

He was the son of Egyptian millionaire Mohamed al Fayed, who owns Harrods department store of London. He was a reported playboy, with jet-set friends and expensive taste in cars, food and women.

Diana did not deny the reports that she was smitten by Fayed.

The princess was recently quoted as calling Fayed “the man who will take me out of one world and into another.”

“I just love his gentleness, his kindness and his almost-dull way of living. For someone like me, who has lived a goldfish-bowl type of existence, I can’t tell you how comforting this is. I like the way he sends me flowers,” she told the Mirror of London.

Of course Fayed’s “dull way of living” included two Ferraris, at least one vintage Rolls-Royce, a Sikorsky helicopter - which ferried Diana to that first and famous Mediterranean cruise; another followed soon afterward - a Gulfstream jet, a castle in Scotland and homes in New York, Dubai, Geneva, Genoa and on posh Park Lane in London.

On their last night together, the princess and Fayed sped into the traffic tunnel in Paris, reportedly to escape the intrusion of photographers following their Mercedes on motorcycles.

Fayed apparently died at the crash site, and Diana was taken to a nearby hospital where she was pronounced dead a few hours later.

Heads of state, commoners with a link to the Internet and millions of others around the world mourned last week.

So much for fairy tales.