Comedian Fran Drescher Recalls Making Princess Diana Laugh Over Worst Dressed Fashion List: 'I'll Never Forget It'
Fran Drescher opened up about her unique experience with Princess Diana.
While joining David Yontef on his "Behind The Velvet Rope" podcast, the actress recalled the time she made Prince Harry and Prince William's mom laugh at an awards show. "I’ll never forget that," The Nanny alum said of getting a chuckle out of the late royal.
"It’s really carved into my memory. I was a big fan of the Princess and I was very grateful that I got to meet her and I did make her laugh," Drescher said, explaining the memorable moment happened at the Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards.
The 63-year-old offered background of the situation, explaining she and Diana were both on columnist's Mr. Blackwell's list about fashion. Noting Mr. Blackwell was "a little b*tchy and gossipy," Drescher said, "he wrote a lot about fashion and he had the best dressed and the worst dressed list that came out annually."
“Right around that time, [Diana] was on the best dressed. And I was on the worst dressed. And she didn’t have any awareness of it," Drescher said. When the brunette babe went to take the stage to present at the CFDA Awards, she took the opportunity to poke fun at the situation.
After admitting to Yontef she embellished the conversation, Drescher recalled sharing a chat she had with Diana at the awards show, telling the audience: "I said, ‘we’re both on Mr. Blackwell’s list.’ [Diana] said ‘the Prince has said that she’s on the Best Dressed and I’m on the Worst Dressed’ and I said, ‘yes, but you have Princess Margaret on your list and I have Demi and Madonna on mine. You’re on the wrong list Princess.’"
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“And I ‘snapped a Z’ and the audience went nuts and she was laughing so hard in the front row. I’ll never forget it," Drescher fondly said before adding of Diana: "I think she was very joyful on that trip. She was thinking about moving to New York and I wish she had.”
The late princess had reportedly been eyeing her move to the Big Apple for quite some time before her tragic 1997 Paris car crash. According to close pals, the mother-of-two hoped to escape the paparazzi with her children and start a new life over the pond.
Diana's former butler, Paul Burrell, told Good Morning America in 2006, per Newsweek, that she was looking at "a lovely house" in Malibu and already began working on plans for her new life. "Think of the lifestyle, the boys — nobody's judgmental here in America, you don't have the class system, you don't have the establishment,'" Diana once said, according to Burrell.
Meanwhile, the princess' sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, also reportedly told the police investigation: "Diana had talked about living in America or France but these were just options. She had seen our brother, Charles [Spencer], escape abroad from the paparazzi and this appealed to her."
While Diana was unable to follow through with her plan to escape the paparazzi and move to the U.S., Harry and Meghan Markle packed up their things last year to start their lives anew in California. Harry credited the "toxic" media as one of the reasons why he knew he had to leave the country for the sake of his wife and young son, Archie.
The father-of-two — who also shares daughter Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor with Meghan — has blamed the media in the past for the death of his mother, adamantly noting in his AppleTV+ show, The Me You Can't See: "My mother was chased to her death while she was in a relationship with someone that wasn't white and now look what's happened."
(Diana died alongside Egyptian film producer Dodi Al Fayed, whom she had reportedly been dating for months after she and Prince Charles divorced in 1996.)
When Harry noticed "history repeating itself" with Meghan and the abuse she was enduring from the press, the royal was determined to make the changes needed to save his wife.
