Gliding theatrically down the stairs in her brand-new wig and glasses, Princess Diana playfully winds the brunette curls around her fingers and pulls a goofy face.
“What do you think?” she asks her butler, Paul Burrell, standing in the hallway of her Kensington Palace apartment. “Reckon it will fool them?”
This is London, 1996, and the iconic blonde is wearing a disguise so she can go out on a rare public date with the Pakistani surgeon she calls “Mr. Wonderful” — a somewhat unlikely paramour with a bushy mustache, a terrible smoking habit and a punishing 90-hour-per-week work schedule.
“She looked in the mirror and we fell about laughing,” recalls Burrell, who tells The Post he’d been dispatched to buy the wig and a pair of non-prescription specs from an Oxford Street department store that afternoon. “The disguise was her ticket to normality and freedom.”
It was also her ticket to love.
The controversial movie “Diana,” out in the US on Nov. 1 and starring Naomi Watts in the title role, shines a light on the top-secret romance between the doomed royal and the charismatic but fiercely private Muslim Khan.
Inspired by the 2000 biography “Diana: Her Last Love” by English author Kate Snell, an associate producer of the film, it features a scene where the wigged and bespectacled Diana goes unnoticed at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club. Undercover, she is able to lose herself in the music and hold hands with the then-36-year-old doctor who, as she told a close friend at the time, was “the one person who will never sell me out.”
The depiction of Ronnie Scott’s is spot-on — Diana’s spiritual adviser Simone Simmons tells The Post “she was walking on air that night and was full of excitement about it the next day” — but the saccharine-sweet biopic has caused outrage in the UK amid claims of inaccuracy and exploitation.
Last month Khan — who in 2008 gave written evidence at the inquest into Diana’s death but has never spoken to the media about their two-year relationship that ended in July 1997 — slammed the movie as a “betrayal” based on cruel “lies.” Nevertheless, its makers are confident that an American audience will be more forgiving, even if some of the factual detail and dialogue are dubious.
“Theirs [Khan and Diana’s] is a beautiful love story,” says director Oliver Hirschbiegel, explaining that, as a German with none of the peculiarly British hang-ups about Diana’s memory, he felt he was “able to make a film that’s as authentic, honest and true as possible, without having anything to fear.”
English screenwriter Stephen Jeffreys adds: “In private scenes, nobody actually knows what happened, so I tried to take off and fly using empathy and imagination.”
The film starts with the lonely princess, officially separated from Prince Charles, meeting Khan by chance at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London.
She was instantly taken with his exotic good looks — nurses in the unit compared him to Omar Sharif — and remarked to her acupuncturist Oonagh Toffolo that he was “drop-dead gorgeous.”
Within a matter of days, the 34-year-old mother of two was hotly pursuing the shy surgeon, first persuading him to show her around his wards at the hospital and then to stop by Kensington Palace for supper after his shifts.
“She deserved happiness and he gave that to her,” says Simmons, who wrote “Diana: The Secret Years” and “Diana: The Last Word.” “She was treated like an equal for the first time in her life and there was no one person who was domineering in their relationship.”
The couple enjoyed microwave dinners in her apartment when Khan would come back from the nearby hospital but remain on call with a beeper. He was an avid soccer fan and, though Diana knew nothing about the game, she would watch it on television with him, just to be close to him.
He was said to find the whole idea of seeing a princess “hilarious” because he was so ordinary and earned a modest salary, but Diana, who had studied the Koran, took the commitment very seriously.
“I bought her a copy of ‘Gray’s Anatomy and Physiology’ because she wanted to know more about medicine so she could talk knowledgably to Hasnat,” reveals Simmons. “People used to say she was thick, but she wasn’t. She had exceptional intellect and read it in the space of one week.”
After a while, Diana — who attacked Charles in her November 1995 BBC interview, claiming “there were three of us [her, Charles and his mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles] in this marriage” — imagined a future with Khan, even though he was extremely reticent about going public with their affair.
He knew he couldn’t carry on working as a doctor if that happened and dreaded being in the limelight. Undeterred, in May 1997 Diana went so far as to arrange a private visit to his family’s compound in Lahore, Pakistan (ostensibly, the princess was in the city on official duties), when she met his parents in the hopes of charming them into accepting her.
But Khan’s devout mother, Naheed Khan, was less than enthusiastic about the idea of her eldest son compromising his medical career and settling down with not only a Western woman, but the most famous woman on the planet and the mother of a future king.
“She did win over some family members, but the mother could see the complexity and the problems it would bring,” says Burrell. “There was the diversity of their religions, let alone their social standing.”
Besides, in observance of his family’s traditions, Khan was locked into an arranged marriage from his childhood. (Khan did in fact marry the daughter of an Afghan noble named Hadia Sher Ali in May 2006, nine years after Diana’s death. They divorced two years later and Khan, who now works in a hospital in a town outside London, remains single and childless.)
“For once in her life, being a princess didn’t work,” says Burrell, who remembers Diana returning to Kensington Palace “deeply disappointed,” mission unaccomplished. “She wasn’t able to pull strings and use her position to save the day.”
She still persevered with her relationship with Khan, which, according to Simmons, was more “based on humanitarianism, friendship, humor and communication” rather than the sexually charged chemistry portrayed in the film.
But it was going nowhere. As Snell writes in her book, “Hasnat loved Diana and wanted to marry her, so he was torn in two. He wanted to please his parents and do right by himself and Diana. He found himself unable to take the big step.”
The pair had an explosive row in July 1997, just a month before her death, after meeting in a London park to discuss the future of their romance. Perhaps they could live near a hospital in South Africa or Australia with less media intrusion?
But again, Khan wouldn’t bend. “The princess told me the next morning that this was the end,” says Burrell. “The minute Hasnat was exposed, the minute he was found out, his beloved career was over and he wasn’t prepared to give everything up for her.”
Possibly to make Hasnat jealous, Diana sought solace in the arms of Egyptian playboy Dodi Fayed. As the world knows, their brief courtship ended tragically in the Pont de L’Alma tunnel in Paris on Aug. 31, 1997. Hasnat learned the news in the early hours of the morning and, according to Burrell, was “a broken man.” He attended Diana’s funeral six days later in dark glasses, his face frozen in sorrow, barely noticed by the TV cameras.