I was living in New york and coming back late the next night from a three day camping trip in the woods with friends. Hadn't seen a newspaper or tv for days, and the first thing I did when I came home was turn on the radio. I got the last lines from a broadcast and it mentioned that Tony Blair said Britain would always remember her as the people's princess.
I remember turning off the radio in disgust & thinking, How disgusting to broadcast a spoof of the death of a famous person, how tasteless! Then I went to bed.
The next morning, to my shock, I discovered it wasn't some sick radio-exec hoax, but that it really happened!
I had always been a fan of Diana's, until that ill-advised, whiny, woe-is-me Bashir interview that put me straight into Charles's camp because she seemed so narcissistically attention seeking, which I found naive and bad for someone with young kids. Then the Dodi episode: I remember his then fiancee crying on live TV because Diana had stolen her boyfriend, even though at the time it was already plain for all to see, that Dodi was just another toyboy of the princess. That kind of did it for my admiration for her, and although I was saddened by her death, I also remember thinking it was somehow weirdly fitting: someone so celebrated, so out there, so thinking she was above all else, she'd kindof become akin to the washed-up Marilyn Monroe in the early sixties.
That said, I was saddened, as I had always admired her (minus the years 95-97)