The Crown’s Emma Corrin looked like Princess Diana as a toddler

She has won rave reviews for her role as the late Princess Diana in the fourth series of Netflix hit, The Crown. 

And in a new chat with Interview magazine, Emma, 24, said that she looked so much like Diana even as a child, that people would faint over the resemblance. 

When she was offered the role Emma said she ‘nearly blacked out’. Her reaction felt ‘somewhat predestined’.

More than 20 years before, when Corrin was a toddler, her mother walked into a café in a London railway station, causing several customers to faint because she bore such a resemblance to the Princess of Wales, who had died in a car accident just hours earlier.

She said: ‘I hesitate to tell that story because it almost sounds too insane to be true. There’s this theme throughout my life of Diana cropping up. It doesn’t feel ordinary.’

As a student of education at Cambridge University, Corrin was a keen viewer of the first two seasons of The Crown.  

In 2018, Emma was hired to read a few lines as Diana during a casting call for Camilla Parker Bowles (played by Emerald Fennell).

She was told it wasn’t an audition, but she watching the 2017 documentary Diana: In Her Own Words 15 times and rehearsed with her speech therapist mother anyway.

She said: ‘There were things I tried to emulate, like Diana’s head tilt and her voice. She had a very unique way of speaking.’

Six months later, she was called back for a chemistry read with Josh O’Connor, who plays Prince Charles and she Corrin landed the part there and then. 

Emma was rather unwell during filming battling whooping cough and said that the attention that has come from playing the role is something she is ‘scared about.’  

Now, she’s in the surreal position of portraying the prince’s beloved mother, she said: ‘I feel a lot of responsibility. I try not to think much about it. Otherwise, it does get overwhelming.’