‘The Crown’: Đằng sau bức ảnh cái ôm đã thay đổi cuộc đời Công nương Diana

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It’s summer 1997, and Princess Diana is flirting with Dodi Fayed, a globe-trotting (chạy nước kiệu toàn cầu) playboy (tay chơi), on the Jonikal, a yacht (du thuyền) floating on sparkling (lấp lánh) Mediterranean waters.

Diana, teasingly (trêu chọc), says that she likes men who have lips that are “just the right temperature.”

“Are mine the right temperature?” Dodi replies.

“I don’t know,” Diana says: “Need to check.” Then, the couple kiss, blissfully unaware (không biết hạnh phúc) that just a few meters away, Mario Brenna, a slick Italian photographer, is on a boat, with a long-lens camera trained on the couple.

A few days later, Brenna’s shots of the princess and her new beau (bạn trai mới) are on the front pages (trang nhất) of newspapers worldwide.

This is a central scene in the sixth and final season of Netflix’s royal drama “The Crown” — the first batch of episodes premiered on Thursday — and a moment that signaled the start of a tabloid frenzy (cơn sốt báo lá cải) around the couple that many blame for their deaths on Aug. 31, 1997, in a car crash in Paris as they were chased by photographers.

“The Crown” has Mohamed al-Fayed — Dodi’s father, and a retail and hotel tycoon (trùm) who died this year — appearing to hire Brenna to take the shots, in an effort to push Diana and Dodi’s relationship into the public eye, and cajole (phỉnh phờ) the pair to marry.

In an email, Annie Sulzberger, the head of research for the show — she is also the sister of The Times’s publisher, A.G. Sulzberger — said that “there are a few theories about how Brenna managed to find the Jonikal moored somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea,” but the one the team found most credible (đáng tin cậy) was that one of al-Fayed’s employees leaked (tiết lộ) the boat’s location to Brenna.

Brenna said the idea that al-Fayed hired him was “absurd (vô lý) and completely invented,” and that no one leaked information about the yacht’s whereabouts to him. Every summer at that time, he was in Sardinia so he could take paparazzi shots of famous people, he said, and coming across Diana and Dodi was simply a “great stroke of luck (may mắn).”

... On Aug. 10, the Sunday Mirror, a British tabloid, splashed Brenna’s image on its front page. “The Kiss,” the headline read. Soon, Brenna said, he was selling the pictures worldwide. In the following six-to-eight months, he said, he made about 1.7 million pounds, or $2.1 million, from his photos of the couple.

source: nytimes,