From their fashion choices and approach to royal life, through to their hands-on parenting, Kate and Diana have much in common, despite the fact their paths never crossed.

And while Diana’s love for her sons William and Harry was clear to see, she desperately wanted a daughter, according to former royal butler Paul Burrell, who was also her close friend.

Speaking in Amazon’s 2017 documentary, The Diana Story, he said: “To have another baby girl in the family would have made everything for Diana.

“She was robbed of the opportunity of loving her grandchildren – especially Charlotte. She would have loved Kate, too.”

Kate and William welcomed Princess Charlotte in May 2015. Her older brother Prince George was born in July 2013 with little Prince Louis arriving in

Her full name is Charlotte Elizabeth Diana, a tribute to the grandmother she tragically never got to meet. The little royal is said to be similar to Diana in many ways, including her love of dance.

Diana had excelled at sport and dance from an early age and when she was at school she would sneak down to the hall at night and practise ballet for hours.

At the end of the spring term in 1976, she won a dancing competition, but her height – 5ft 10in – prevented her from taking her passion further. Dancing was also said to have helped Diana through her divorce.

Just last year, meanwhile, Princess Kate told another young dancer: “My daughter Charlotte likes dancing, she loves ballet and tap. Keep up the dancing.”

And earlier in 2023, Kate brought Princess Charlotte and friends to a ballet performance of Cinderella at the Royal Opera House in London to celebrate her eighth birthday.

While Kate and her children never got to meet Diana, who was killed in a car crash in August 1997, Prince William has revealed how he keeps his mother’s memory alive for the youngsters.

In the 2017 documentary Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, Prince William said he is “constantly talking about Granny Diana” with the children. “We’ve got more photos up ’round the house now of her, and we talk about her a bit and stuff,” he added.

“It’s hard because obviously Catherine didn’t know her, so she cannot really provide that — that level of detail,” he said. “So, I do [when] regularly putting George or Charlotte to bed, talk about her and just try and remind them that there are two grandmothers, there were two grandmothers in their lives, and so it’s important that they know who she was and that she existed.”