Prince Harry Explains Why Looking at This Specific Photograph of Princess Diana Makes Him Feel “Very Connected to Her”
Prince Harry Explains Why Looking at This Specific Photograph of Princess Diana Makes Him Feel “Very Connected to Her”
Rachel BurchfieldThu, October 8, 2026 at 5:29 PM UTC
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Princess Diana and Prince Harry.Credit: GettyThe Gist -
In a MasterClass episode released on October 8, Prince Harry shared the specific photo he looks at most of his late mother, Princess Diana.
The shot—from a December 1995 Harper’s Bazaar cover shot by Patrick Demarchelier—has “a cheekiness in her smile,” he added.
The Duke of Sussex said he sometimes looks at Diana’s photograph “to see if the facial expression changes, but it never does.”
Prince Harry shared in a new interview that he often looks at an old photograph of his mother, Princess Diana—and always asks the portrait the same question.
“I can actually get eye contact from her, and there’s a cheekiness in her smile,” Harry said in a new MasterClass episode that dropped on October 8. The photo he often looks at, he said, is a December 1995 Harper’s Bazaar cover shot by renowned photographer Patrick Demarchelier.
Princess Diana and Prince Harry.Credit: Getty
“I find myself looking at her and wondering, ‘What is she thinking about what I am doing right now?’” he said, noting, “I just feel very connected to her.”
The Duke of Sussex said he sometimes looks at Diana’s photograph “to see if the facial expression changes, but it never does.”
Much of Harry’s MasterClass feature is about grief; he was just 12 years old when the former Princess of Wales died in a Paris car crash on August 31, 1997. She was just 36 years old.
Though he often looks at her photographs now, it took him a long time to do so after her death. “Even though I had photographs in my bedroom at school, I distinctly remember not thinking about my mother because thinking about something that sad was never going to bring her back,” he explained (per Page Six).
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Princess Diana and Prince Harry in 1994.Credit: Getty
Harry said that shutting off memories of his mother not only interrupted the painful ones, but the happy ones, too. He noted that he forgot the sound of her voice, saying, “The defense mechanism for the mind and the body was shut down the emotions and shut down the memories. Not just the bad memories, the good memories, as well. I forgot what my mom sounded like. I forgot her laugh. I couldn’t really visualize what she looked like without looking at a photograph of her.”
Interestingly, years later, a therapist suggested that Harry smell his mother’s perfume as a way of accessing memories of her that had become increasingly hard to tap into.
“And it was like being transported to another time,” he said (per People). “And it unlocked everything that had been locked previously.” Spraying his mother’s perfume “was almost like knocking certain bricks through so that I could see through and certain memories and experiences could start seeping through.”
Princess Diana in Argentina on November 24, 1995.Credit: Getty
When asked how often he thinks of Diana, Harry said, “Pretty much every night, and then most mornings.”
The MasterClass, called “Redefining Grief: Building Resilience Through Loss,” was released just ahead of World Mental Health Day on October 10. Per People, the class benefits two bereavement charities, Comfort Zone Camp and Scotty’s Little Soldiers. The class was filmed in California early this summer, though not at the Montecito home that the Sussex family lived in for six years before relocating back to the U.K. this summer.
on InStyle
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
