Despite once sharing a deep bond, the friendship between Sarah Ferguson and the late Princess Diana faced a serious breakdown in the years before Diana’s death. The two women had known each other long before they married into the royal family and were considered close friends for many years.
However, by the time Diana died in 1997, the pair had not spoken to each other for about a year.
In her autobiography Finding Sarah: A Duchess’s Journey to Find Herself, Ferguson reflected on the painful distance that had grown between them. She admitted she never fully understood what caused the rift.
“Sadly, at the end we hadn’t spoken for a year, though I never knew the reason, except that once Diana got something in her head, it stuck there for a while,” she wrote.
Ferguson said she tried to reconnect by reaching out with letters, hoping they could resolve whatever disagreement had come between them.
“I wrote letters, thinking whatever happened didn’t matter, let’s sort it out. And I knew she’d come back. In fact, the day before she died she rang a friend of mine and said, ‘Where’s that Red? I want to talk to her.'”