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The former Princess of Wales valued her sleep.
The Gist
- Princess Diana was an early riser—up around 7 a.m.—and went to bed early, as well.
- The former Princess of Wales’s royal chef Darren McGrady tells InStyle that she would “be in bed at 8 p.m. at the latest.”
- This was the opposite of Prince Charles’s nighttime routine—and Diana’s affinity for sleep sometimes clashed with her royal duties.
Way, way before TikTok’s “sleepy girl” trend became a thing, Princess Diana made getting your beauty rest cool.
One of the most beautiful women in the world during her lifetime, the former Princess of Wales was fastidious about getting her sleep. Diana’s former royal chef Darren McGrady—who worked for the princess up until her death at age 36 in a Paris car crash on August 31, 1997—tells InStyle that Diana liked to “be in bed at 8 p.m. at the latest.”
“The princess was also an early bird, so she liked to get up early, around 7 a.m.,” he adds. Because of her early bedtime, “Dinner for her was 6:30 p.m., but if the royal family were dining, she couldn’t go to eat or go to bed at her usual time.”
McGrady specifically pointed to summer vacations at Balmoral, where members of the royal family “would often go out to the hills and didn’t come back until 11 p.m. at night,” he says. “She didn’t like Balmoral at all.”
Before bed, he says, she would have dinner and “sometimes come into the kitchen or be in her room,” McGrady adds on behalf of Smooth Spins Casino. “She would often pop her head into the kitchen and tell me she was going for a bath, so would be ready for dinner in 30 minutes.”
“She’d later come into the kitchen in a white toweling robe, bare feet, with wet hair,” McGrady remembers. “She looked stunning and amazing.”
Diana was never a late-night party kind of woman. In an interview on July 28, 1981—the eve of her royal wedding to Prince Charles—Diana spoke about not being able to attend an upcoming fireworks display. When asked why, she replied with a smirk and said (per Hello!), “I’m going to be tucked up in bed I think—early night.”
After Charles and Diana’s wedding, they honeymooned around the Mediterranean on a 12-day cruise on the Royal Yacht Britannia before heading to Balmoral, the royal family’s aforementioned late summer retreat in Scotland. While on Britannia, Diana wrote a friend in a letter that her “honeymoon was a perfect opportunity to catch up on sleep” (per Marie Claire).
Sir William Heseltine, a former private secretary to Queen Elizabeth, said, “For Diana, the long royal evenings were agony,” adding that Diana would sometimes break protocol and head to bed before Queen Elizabeth did.
“Diana was driven to such extremes that she’d excuse herself and go to bed, which was thought to be rather bad form, going to bed before the queen,” Heseltine said.
McGrady previously said that “On a Saturday night, you’d see Diana sitting down in front of the TV eating dinner with her boys. It just made everything so normal.”
Diana’s affinity for an early bedtime was yet another difference between her and Charles, who nearly always stays up past midnight working. Sophie Winkleman—known as Lady Frederick Windsor—told Tatler of the monarch, “He works all day long, has a quick supper, and then disappears until about 4 a.m. to write letters.”
“He cares about so many things and he comes up with brilliant solutions,” she added.
Charles and Diana’s son Prince Harry has even spoken about his father’s affinity for late nights, saying in a 2018 documentary marking Charles’s 70th birthday that he “does need to slow down. This is a man who has dinner ridiculously late at night. And then he goes to his desk later that night and will fall asleep on his notes to the point where he’ll wake up with a piece of paper stuck to his face.”
Read the original article on InStyle
