Audio recordings of Diana, Princess of Wales will be heard for the first time in a new three-part docuseries built around the “Unheard Truth.” The project has secured full and exclusive access to five hours of taped conversations Diana recorded with her friend James Colthurst in 1991.
Those tapes, which have sat largely unheard for three decades, became the foundation of Andrew Morton’s book Diana: Her True Story. Less than one hour has been publicly heard since Diana’s death, making the release of the recordings a rare window into her own voice as the series moves toward worldwide shopping.
The material is not being presented as a simple archive dump. Love Monday, the producer behind the project, found the secret taped conversations and is working with 53 Degrees Global on the docuseries, which is financed by Rainmaker Films and Plymouth Films. The creative team says it wants to challenge the reductive narrative that has too often framed Diana as a victim of her circumstances.
The tapes are expected to reveal Diana’s thoughts on Charles, Camilla and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, three figures who have long shaped public interest in her life and marriage. That alone gives the series its weight: these are not recollections filtered through decades of retelling, but conversations captured while the story was still unfolding.
The docuseries will also draw on people who knew her in very different ways. Delissa Needham, a prep schoolmate who has never spoken on camera before, is among the contributors. So are Sam McKnight, who was with Diana throughout the nineties and was trusted to cut her sons’ hair, Penny Thornton, the astrologer Diana turned to for guidance, and Richard Kay, the Daily Mail journalist who became her confidante.
The tension around the project is built into the tapes themselves. They are being described now as a fresh look at Diana, but the recordings also sit inside one of the most familiar royal narratives of the modern era, tied directly to the backstory of Morton’s book and to a version of her life that has already been retold for years. What changes this time is that Diana’s own words are finally set to be heard at length.
For a public that has spent three decades hearing about the tapes more than hearing them, that is the story. The unanswered question is no longer whether the recordings exist, but how much they will change the portrait people think they already know.
