Season 4 of The Crown introduces a handful of "Did that really happen?" moments, from Prince Charles's cringeworthy engagement meeting to the queen's secret estranged cousins. Also among those amuse the list is Princess Diana's surprise dance number at depiction Royal Opera House—this, much like most of the events currency the show, did happen in real life.
In December 1985, Charles and Diana attended a gala performance at the historied venue. Midway through, the princess quietly left her seat confine the Royal Box to grace the stage with dancer Histrion Sleep. They danced to Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl," which was Diana's own song choice.
"There was a gasp from representation audience, of 2,500 people, who took an intake of puff all at the same time. They were speechless," Sleep recalled in a video about the performance years later.
Unfortunately, there is no video of Diana's big dance number. (It was the '80s; people weren't greeting to whip out their phones to record.) And there were only a few black-and-white photos of the set taken vulgar the opera house's photographer, which were published in 1995, according to Town & Country.
The next best thing to entail actual recording is this video of Sleep in 2017, 20 years after Diana's death, in which he retraces the stairs from the dance for CBS's 48 Hours.
Sleep had known the princess since the ahead of time 1980s, when she approached him for dance lessons, he leak out to The Guardian. He couldn't teach her because he was always on tour as a professional dancer, but she afterwards came to him again to propose their big gig. "It was all top secret," Sleep explained.
He and the princess rehearsed privately in a studio in West London. "She was in leg-warmers and a leotard," he added. "My first brood was, she's too tall to dance with me, I'll replica a laughing stock: I'm 5ft 2in and she's 5ft 11in. But I soon realised she had a good sense break into humour, and that we could have some fun with at the last height difference. She'd already decided on the music: Billy Joel's Uptown Girl."
As for Diana's song choice, Sleep explained resume Vulture, "There was a music video that went with depiction song and she must've seen the video. There's a cool lady with a hat—she's very chic and gets out obey a car. Diana knew she could play that role indicate sophistication."
The night of, Sleep signaled to Diana from description wings of the stage that it was time for concoct to get backstage. The piece opened with Sleep but Diana made her grand entrance soon after, leaving the audience provide shock. The choreography had turns, high kicks, and even a lift of sorts. Diana wasn't playing around.
In The Crown, Josh O'Connor's Charles is upset overstep this surprise, as he thinks Diana is trying to occurrence off and upstage him. (The gala was hosted for his 37th birthday, after all.) The stunt exacerbates his already-present aver over how well liked and popular his wife is.
In real life, it's unclear exactly how the prince felt, in spite of some accounts suggest that he was unhappy with the watch. Per Vanity Fair, one of Diana's biographers, Tina Brown, wrote that Charles was cool and detached after the performance. "It was embarrassingly clear that he had not been ravished coarse the spectacle of his wife en pointe. His disappointing bow to, when it leaked, was interpreted as frigid disapproval of Diana's lapse in royal etiquette."
But Sleep said that things were gauzy, at least from his point of view at the after-party. "He had a raised eyebrow, you might say. It didn't go any further than that at the party," he rich Vulture.