The Pont de l'Alma Tunnel

August 31, 1997, 12:23 a.m. Paris time, the Pont de l'Alma tunnel. The Mercedes-Benz S280 driven by Henri Paul, the Ritz Paris's deputy head of security who is intoxicated and fleeing the paparazzi at 105 km/h in a 50 km/h zone, strikes the thirteenth pillar of the tunnel. Diana Frances Spencer, thirty-six, the Princess of Wales, dies of internal bleeding at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital at 4:00 a.m. Paris time. Her companion Dodi Fayed and Paul are killed at the scene. The bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, the only seatbelted occupant, survives.

Vivian Ashcombe's biography opens earlier — at Park House on the Sandringham estate, where Diana was born on July 1, 1961, the third daughter of Viscount Althorp and his first wife — and follows the arc through the West Heath School years, the Park House-to-Althorp aristocratic childhood, the 1981 engagement to Prince Charles, the July 29, 1981 St. Paul's Cathedral wedding the world watched, the births of William (1982) and Harry (1984), the long Camilla Parker Bowles shadow and the December 1995 Panorama interview with Martin Bashir, the August 1996 divorce, the long anti-landmines campaign and the Halo Trust visit to Angola in January 1997, the Dodi Fayed summer-1997 relationship, the August 1997 Paris weekend, and the Pont de l'Alma.

What emerges is a portrait of the Princess of Wales whose fifteen years as the most-photographed woman in the world remade what a royal could be — and the Paris tunnel that the British monarchy has spent the years since trying to live around.