Why Wasn’t Princess Diana Speaking To Sarah Ferguson Before She Died?

Princess Diana and Duchess Sarah Ferguson had a very complicated relationship. They were childhood friends who reconnected later in life just as the Princess of Wales was marrying into the royal family. It’s because of the late princess that the Duchess of York connected with and married her ex-husband, Prince Andrew.

Unfortunately, because Princess Diana and Duchess Sarah Furgeson were so close, they also fought viciously. This is why the Princess of Wales wasn’t speaking to Fergie before she died.

Sarah Ferguson insulted Princess Diana in her autobiography

By 1996, both the duchess and the princess were divorced from their husbands. They had both experienced public scandal and infidelity, and for a while, they clung to each other for comfort. They even took their children on vacation together to the South of France.

However, by November of that year, the women had stopped speaking. In her 1996 autobiography My Story: Sarah the Duchess of York, Fergie wrote, some pretty rude things about the late princess. She wrote that Princess Diana had generously given her several pairs of shoes, “and less happily her plantar warts.”

Fergie and Princess Diana had a history of friction

Though the princess and the duchess were close, they also had a history of friction. The autobiography was the final straw. The tension between the pair began in 1981 at Princess Diana’s wedding to Prince Charles. Though Fergie was invited to the wedding, she was insulted because she was not invited to the post-ceremony reception.

Toward the end of her life, Princess Diana told biographer Andrew Morton, that the Duchess of York “wooed everybody in this family and did it so well. She left me looking like dirt.” She even said that her ex-husband Prince Charles told her “I wish you would be like Fergie—all jolly.”

Did Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson ever try to reconcile?

After realizing that her good friend and fourth cousin was gravely insulted by the things she said about her in My Story, Fergie tried to reach out to The People’s Princess. The duchess told Harper’s Bazaar, “I tried, wrote letters, thinking whatever happened didn’t matter, let’s sort it out. And I knew she’d come back. In fact, the day before she died she rang a friend of mine and said, “Where’s that Red? I want to talk to her.”

Fergie still regrets her fight with Princess Diana

Unfortunately, the pair would never speak again. Princess Diana died tragically in Aug. 1997 in a car accident in Paris, the morning she was supposed to return to London. It has haunted the Duchess of York forever. She told Harper’s Bazaar, “Because we were like siblings… we rowed. And the saddest thing, at the end, we hadn’t spoken for a year.”

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