A poster advertising new film Diana has provoked outrage after it was erected next to the tunnel where the princess died.
The 6ft billboard showing Naomi Watts in costume as the Princess of Wales appeared at the Pont de l’Alma in Paris over the weekend.
It is just metres away from the spot where Diana was tragically killed in a car crash in 1997, and overlooks the gold Flame of Liberty, which became her unofficial memorial in the days after the accident. Fans still visit the spot with flowers 16 years later.
The poster’s appearance has sparked international outrage, with one of Diana’s closest friends branding it “shameless and despicable”.
“I really don’t have any words to describe how I feel about this cynical and shameless attempt to publicise a film that should never have been made,” Rosa Monckton, one of Diana’s closest confidantes, told the MailOnline.
“To have made a film so speculative and as this is disgusting enough, but to then advertise it on the spot at which she died is despicable.
“I cannot imagine that any company could stoop so low. It is a terrible intrusion into her memory, not to mention the lives of her sons, whose feelings are often forgotten in these stories. I would expect them to take it down right away.”
Diana and her lover Dodi Fayed were killed when the car they were travelling in crashed into a pillar in the tunnel in the early hours of August 31, 1997.
Her driver Henri Paul was drunk and attempting to outrun the paparazzi.
The film Diana opens in Paris this weekend and in Sydney next week. The critics have not been kind so far, branding it historically inaccurate, overly-dramatic and poorly-acted.
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