The movie Spencer came out in the fall of 2021. I went to see it in a real movie theater and I was pretty disappointed by it. Still, it was an odd year for film and Kristen Stewart ended up getting an Oscar nomination for playing Princess Diana. The film takes place over Christmas 1991, as Diana and then-Prince Charles’ marriage has completely fallen apart. There were some surrealist, hallucinatory scenes which were meant to be haunting but were actually just bizarre and silly. Well, as it turns out, Charles Spencer also watched that movie. He didn’t think much of it either, but he did praise K-Stew.

Charles Spencer is sharing some of his opinions about the film and television portrayals of his late sister, Princess Diana. The 9th Earl Spencer sat down with award-winning journalist Tina Brown at St. Peter’s Chelsea in New York City on the evening of Tuesday, Sept. 29, to discuss his new book, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister.

Following their chat about the details of Spencer’s account of Diana’s childhood years, her ill-fated marriage to King Charles and her tragic death in a car accident in Paris at just 36 years old, the pair took some questions from the audience.

One asked, “Do you think that any fictional portrayal of Diana has come close to capturing what she was like in real life?”

“Yeah, actually, I do,” he answered. “I don’t watch The Crown, so I can’t talk about that.”

Spencer added, “But I was on a plane, and I saw a movie called Spencer. I thought I’d better look at that. And there was Kristen Stewart, who doesn’t really look like Diana, but my goodness, she caught the spirit. I thought it was an incredible performance,” he continued.

Though Spencer agreed with Brown’s assessment that the Pablo Larraín-directed film — which portrays the royal family’s 1991 Christmas at Sandringham through a surreal lens — was “terrible,” he admitted, “I was really intrigued by how good [Stewart] was at capturing Diana.”

[From People]

As I said, Kristen actually got an Oscar nomination out of it, so clearly, Academy voters were impressed with her performance too. Her accent work was much better than I expected, but it still needed some work. What I thought Kristen did well was sort of inhabit Diana as someone who was always being watched, and Diana as the black sheep, the odd woman out of the Windsor clan. I hope Kristen is honored by Charles Spencer’s praise – she talked a lot, at the time, about how she felt Diana’s spirit while making the movie, and she clearly did not want to make any kind of exploitative film.

Screencaps from ‘Spencer’ trailer & Tina Brown’s video. Photos courtesy of Cover Images.