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Everyone remembers where they were when they heard that Diana, Princess of Wales, was dead. The news, on August 31, 1997, that she’d been killed in a car crash in Paris shocked the world and

prompted an unprecedented outpouring of grief – mourners sobbed in the streets and laid a sea of flowers outside her home at London’s Kensington Palace.  Actress Tamsin Greig remembers it

well. She and her husband, fellow actor Richard Leaf, were walking up the road near their London home. “I’d just got married that summer and we were wandering around in a bubble of joy and

nothing could touch us,” recalls Tamsin, 51. They ran into an elderly woman weeping outside the local church. “We said, ‘What’s happened?’” continues Tamsin. “And she said, ‘They’ve killed

her. They’ve killed the Princess.’  I was just in a state of amazement at the news, rather than being personally affected the way she was.” Spooks actress Gemma Jones was at home, glued to

the TV, with her elderly father, the late actor Griffith Jones. She echoes the shock many of us felt. “It didn’t seem possible that a person like her could be killed,” says Gemma, 74. “It

just seemed extraordinary that one minute she was there, the next she was gone.” Gemma’s words sum up the feelings of many who will be revisiting the days following Diana’s death in a

one-off BBC1 film, Diana And I. It explores the extraordinary effect of the event on four fictional people, royalists and non-royalists alike.  Tamsin plays Mary, a divorced Glaswegian

florist who’s hit hard times financially and is living with her mother (Gemma), who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.  CROWD LAYS FLOWERS DOWN AFTER PRINCESS DIANA DEATH Tamsin’s story

explores a non-royalist’s view. Mary is a florist who exploits Diana’s death as a way to make money. “The writer, Jeremy Brock, was looking for a character, in Mary, who was not emotionally

moved by the news,” says Tamsin. “Instead, she has a ‘Eureka!’ moment that the event can be used creatively to get herself out of a hole.”  The drama will undoubtedly invoke some wistfulness

for a slightly gentler era, without mobile phones and Twitter. “This drama will make us reflect on the speed of the developments over the last 20 years,” adds Tamsin.  _DIANA AND I, COMING

SOON, BBC1_