Skip to main content

The upcoming fifth season of The Crown has really struck a nerve with not just members of the royal family but also Princess Diana‘s close friend Jemima Khan.

Season 4 of the Netflix series took viewers into the tumultuous years of Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s marriage, and it’s been reported that a focal point of season 5 will be the couple’s separation and divorce. Khan had been a contributor for The Crown but the script for the new season upset her so much that she quit working on the show. Here’s more on the princess’s confidant, what she said about the script, and the famous men she dated including The Crown‘s creator.

Princess Diana wearing a pale blue shalwar kameez while sitting next to her friend Jemima Khan
Princess Diana sitting next to her friend Jemima Khan during a visit to Shaukat Khanum Hospital in Lahore, Pakistan | Anwar Hussein/WireImage

Khan dated some famous men including ‘The Crown’ creator Peter Morgan

Khan was born Jemima Goldsmith on Jan. 30, 1974, in London to financier Sir James Goldsmith and an aristocratic mother Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart.

She worked as a journalist for publications including The New Statesman and British Vogue. She also served as European editor-at-large for Vanity Fair.

In 1995, she married cricket player Imran Khan, who later became the Prime Minister of Pakistan, and they had two children. The pair divorced in 2004 and she began dating Hugh Grant. They split in 2007. Khan also dated actor Russell Brand in 2013 but they called it quits the following year. In early 2021, she had a brief romance with The Crown creator Peter Morgan. While Khan did not give a reason she and Morgan broke up, she did have a lot to say about working with him on the Netflix show and why she decided to end her contributions to the series.

Why Khan quit working on the show and declined a credit

Princess Diana and Jemima Khan sitting together during the royal’s trip to Lahore, Pakistan
Princess Diana and Jemima Khan sitting together during the royal’s trip to Lahore, Pakistan | Anwar Hussein/Getty Images
Related

Princess Diana Would Be ‘Proud’ of Prince Harry’s Tell-All Memoir Says Royal Expert

Khan became good friends with the Princess of Wales during her marriage to Pakistan’s prime minister. Diana visited the capital city of Lahore multiple times and according to Khan, was thinking about moving there to marry Imran’s distant cousin Dr. Hasnat Khan. Because she was one of the princess’s confidants, the former journalist was tapped by Morgan as an adviser for stories on Diana’s relationships with Hasnat Khan and Dodi Fayed.

She told The Sunday Times: “In 2019, Peter Morgan asked me to co-write on the fifth series of The Crown, particularly those episodes which concerned Princess Diana’s last years before she died. After a great deal of thought, having never spoken publicly about any of this before, I decided to contribute. When our co-writing agreement was not honored, and when I realized that particular storyline would not necessarily be told as respectfully or compassionately as I had hoped, I requested that all my contributions be removed from the series and I declined a credit.”

A spokesman for The Crown told the publication that Khan “has been part of a wide network of well-informed and varied sources who have provided extensive background information to our writers and research team… She has never been contracted as a writer on the series.”

The new season of The Crown is set to be released in 2022. Seasons 1 through 4 are currently streaming on Netflix.

RELATED – ‘The Crown’: How Season 5 Is Really Going to Ruffle Some More Feathers

Best in Entertainment