Princess Diana spoke of Elizabeth Glaser before her death in a major interview with the Princess of Wales’ director in his upcoming memoir about her last year, according to publisher Random House.
“I remember Princess Diana calling Elizabeth Glaser often and telling her ‘how many children she had,’ ” said Jake Gyllenhaal in excerpts posted on Prince William and Princess Diana: A Conversation with Jake Gyllenhaal by Random House.
Gyllenhaal was then 13, a year older than Glaser, who had overcome a 1991 automobile accident that left her comatose for 15 months and in need of a kidney transplant.
“Her beauty was, you know, you’d walk in the room and she was there,” Gyllenhaal recalls Diana saying in the book. “It was a very special thing.”
The book will include about 100 pages of a recorded conversation that Jake and his brother Charlie gave their mom as she left the stage at the end of her Royal Variety Performance at London’s Palladium Theatre in August 1995.
According to London Telegraph’s The Curious Nature of Celebrity, Jake had read about the accident and felt that it was important to ask about it in the interview.
“We thought we’d write our mom a letter and say: ‘You’re going to leave this stage and we’re going to sit here and talk about something very, very important. It’s something that we don’t always talk about,’ ” Jake says in the book excerpts.
The 35-year-old says his mom always worried about their safety, but also encouraged them to talk openly about their childhood experiences, according to the Telegraph.
But, he says, what was the most difficult aspect of his mom’s last year was having to face the fact that she was going to leave her daughter Hannah.
“She had been like a grandmother to her,” Jake said. “And for it to end … I don’t know if I thought it could ever end, but she was going to be gone. She had that small vulnerability; that little flaw and that was it.”