Fact-checking 'The Crown': Did Prince Philip really have a midlife crisis?

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Fact-checking 'The Crown': Did the Duke of Edinburgh go through a middle-age slump and was he fixated on the Apollo 11 moon landing?

"Moondust" finds the prince feeling adrift, directionless and spiritually inert."There wasn't a specific moment when it started," Philip says in one poignant scene."It's been more of a gradual thing: a drip, drip, drip of doubt, disaffection, disease, discomfort. ... [and] compulsive overexercising. An inability to find calm or satisfaction or fulfillment.

"I believe it is complete invention," Smith said in a recent phone interview."I don't think he would've known a midlife crisis if it slapped him in the face. He has always been secure and confident, and he has always understood what his role was vis-à-vis the Queen." Smith added that the real-life Philip has never been for lack of hobbies and activities, from medical advances to mentoring young people partly through the Duke of Edinburgh's Award program. What's more, according to a New York Times article from Nov. 8, 1969, Philip was active in the burgeoning movement against environmental pollution in Great Britain.

, and the royal family proudly hosted the astronauts — Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins — at Buckingham Palace in October 1969. It also makes sense that Philip was drawn to the Apollo 11 mission given his well-documented passion for science, technology, world exploration and adventurism, including visits to Papua New Guinea and the Antarctic that were depicted in the second season of"The Crown.

But it would be a stretch to suggest that the self-possessed Duke of Edinburgh was single-minded in his fixation on Apollo 11, or that a midlife crisis grew out of a sense of perceived inferiority, according to Smith."The idea that he was obsessed with them and had a midlife crisis over not being on the Moon is really preposterous," she said."He wouldn't have been sitting around brooding about not being an astronaut.

 

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