Many celebrities had the honor of meeting Princess Diana before her tragic death, and they have a lot of great stories about the late royal.
Diana and Elton John, who has been a close friend of the royal family for years, met numerous times and ultimately became pals on their own. The pair initially met in 1981 at Prince Andrew‘s birthday party at Windsor Castle, where John was performing for the evening. Despite having a brief falling out in the ‘90s, the pair reconciled their friendship.
After Diana’s death in 1997, John performed an emotional rendition of his song “Candle in the Wind” for Diana’s funeral. He retitled the song “Goodbye England’s Rose” in honor of the late princess.
“Me playing at the funeral was one of the most surreal things I have ever done,” John recalled to VH1 in 2008. “What was going through my mind was: ‘Don’t sing a wrong note. Be stoic. Don’t break down and just do it to the best you can possibly do it without showing any emotion whatsoever.’ My heart was beating quite a lot, I have to say.”
Keep scrolling to see other stars’ most heartwarming stories about meeting Diana:
John Travolta
The actor met Diana when she made a royal visit to the White House in 1985. Travolta was invited to the event, which was put on by Ronald Regan’s administration, and got the chance to dance with Diana.
Travolta shared in the PBS documentary In Their Own Words: Diana, Princess of Wales, that Nancy Regan told him it was Diana’s “fantasy” to dance with him.
“My heart starts to race, you know, and I tap her on the shoulder and she turns around and looks at me, and she had that kind of bashful dip [of her chin] that she did, and she looked up at me, and I said, ‘Would you care to dance with me?’” he recalled. “The whole room cleared. We danced for what felt like 15 minutes.”
Tom Selleck
The same night Diana and Travolta swayed on the dance floor, Selleck also got a chance to dance with the royal. According to his memoir, You Never Know, the Magnum, P.I. star was asked to cut in between Travolta and Diana after they danced for more than one song.
“I’M NOT CUTTING IN ON JOHN TRAVOLTA!” he replied, noting that he spoke with “probably too loud a voice.”
Selleck ultimately followed through and asked Diana to dance. According to the actor, the royal seemed “shy” but still engaged in friendly small talk.
“I gotta say she seemed to be having the time of her life,” he penned. “I was relieved she talked most of the time. Let’s just say it was not my finest hour as a conversationalist.”
Phil Collins
In the singer’s memoir, Not Dead Yet, Collins recalled having an awkward run-in with Diana on the streets of London. Collins shared he was “visiting his dentist on London’s Harley Street” and a car pulled up. Diana rolled down the window to see what he was up to.
According to Collins, Diana told him she “just had a colonoscopy. It was great. You should try it.”
Kevin Costner
The Yellowstone actor revealed that he and Diana were in talks to make a The Bodyguard sequel together before her death.
“I said, ‘I’m going to do Bodyguard 2 and I think I can build this around you. Would you be interested?’” he said during a June 2024 appearance on The Howard Stern Show. “She goes, ‘Yes … My life’s about to change.’ I thought I understood what she’s saying: ‘I’d like to open my life… I think I would like to do this.’”
Costner explained he and Diana connected via her former sister-in-law, Sarah Ferguson. At the time Costner pitched the movie, Diana was separating from Charles.
“The second time we talked she said, ‘Is there going to be a kissing scene?’ I said, ‘Do you want there to be one?’ She said, ‘Yeah,’ and I said, ‘Then we’ll do that,’” he recalled, adding that Diana wouldn’t have been his main love interest in the film.
After Diana’s death, the movie was scrapped since Costner believed there was no replacing her.
Lionel Richie
While she and King Charles III were still married, Diana attended a reception following Richie’s performance for the Prince’s Trust. At the soiree, Diana wanted to get her picture taken with the crooner but his photographer was instructed not to do so. However, the group ultimately broke royal protocol and got the snap.
“She said, ‘Is this your photographer right here?’ and I said, ‘Yes it is,’” he recalled to Smooth Radio per the Huffington Post UK. “She said, ‘Alan, take the picture!’ If I could just tell you, the look that Alan [Silfen] got from every guy and lady in charge, it was like, ‘Al, you’re gonna die after this you know this’ but she was so sweet and once again, one of those moments in time, that without that picture, I would just be telling a barbershop story right now.”
Michael J. Fox
Fox met Diana at the London premiere of his movie, Back to the Future, and he got the chance to sit next to her during the screening. However, for Fox, the situation became uncomfortable when he realized he needed to use the restroom after the film started.
“The movie started and also, I had to go pee,” he said during a November 2020 appearance on the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “So, for the rest of the movie, I’m sitting there, like, dying. I can’t say anything to her and I can’t walk away from her, because I can’t turn my back on her.”
While Fox said he was in the middle of a “pee-holding nightmare” he did notice that Diana was enjoying the film, as she “laughed a couple times.”
Elton John
“When I arrived, there was no one there but the dance band and Princess Diana,” the legendary singer recalled of meeting Diana for the first time to biographer Philip Norman in 2000, per the Vancouver Sun. “We danced the Charleston alone on the floor for 20 minutes.”
After taking over the dance floor, the late Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Anne ended up joining the pair. Following that night, Diana and John became fast friends and he formed a close bond with her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry.
However, the pair had a rift after he released the book Rock and Royalty with his friend Gianni Versace in 1997. However, John shared that Diana ultimately called him up to patch things up. After Versace was murdered later that year, Diana offered her shoulder for John to cry on.
“She kept her cool for me … she held her composure,” the Grammy winner later told Barbara Walters. “When I started crying and she put her arms around me … that’s exactly what she was like. She was such a caring and a very calming person.”
