If Princess Diana were still alive, Friday, July 1, would be her 50th birthday. Many are speculating what she would be like today — how she would look, where she would live, who she would have married. The magazine Newsweek even created a computer-generated image of her next to Kate Middleton for a controversial cover. But amid all the speculation, few people doubt one thing: She would be proud of her sons, who are carrying on a trait that arguably made her so famous — empathy.
Her older son, Prince William, and his new wife will be in Canada on the day Diana would have turned 50, and they head to Los Angeles on July 8. Bob Sullivan, managing editor of LIFE Books and author and editor of the new book "Diana at 50," notes that William's appeal and charity work are largely because of his mother.
"He clearly has inherited her preternatural gift for empathy," he says. "Wills is more his mother's son than his father's, and that would please her, of course."
More beloved than the family that put her on the global stage, Diana had a personality that paved the way for her sons to live very different lives than their father did. In many ways, her empathy and modernity transformed the British royal family.
"They really didn't know what hit them," Sullivan says. "It wasn't that she changed them and they wanted to be changed. It's that she shocked them."
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