Who Is the Real Mohamed Al-Fayed?

While exploring Princess Diana’s divorce from Prince Charles, The Crown‘s fifth season also lays the groundwork for her relationship with film producer Dodi Fayed. While the future partners, played by Elizabeth Debicki and Khalid Abdalla, only meet once in the new episodes, the series takes care to dive into Dodi’s backstory and family, starting with his father, Mohamed Al-Fayed.

Season 5, episode 3 “Mou Mou” introduces Mohamed as a young man (Amir El-Masry) in Alexandria, Egypt. He is selling sodas on the street when the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson make a royal visit to town, leaving him starstruck. Although his father understandably resents the British for occupying Egypt and “[trampling] on our freedoms. Our dignity,” Mohamed finds them aspirational. “I want to match them. I want to be like them. Have power like them,” he says later in his room.

After a time jump, The Crown shows the adult Mohamed (Salim Daw), now a wealthy businessman, in pursuit of that power. He buys the Ritz, attends the same horse shows as the royal family, buys Harrods, and refurbishes the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s country villa in France. He even hires Sydney Johnson, the former equerry to the abdicated King Edward VIII. At the end of the episode, Daw’s Mohamed meets Debicki’s Diana as they’re seated together at a royal horse show, and become fast friends.

Here’s what to know about the real-life Al-Fayed.

He’s a billionaire.

Mohamed Fayed—he added Al to his name in the ’70s—was born in Alexandria, Egypt, though his exact birth date is disputed. (He is believed to be around 90 today.) He married Samira Khashoggi, sister of the arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, in 1954. The following year, they welcomed a son together, Emad El-Din Mohamed Abdel Mena’em Fayed, a.k.a. Dodi Fayed. The couple divorced in 1956. Not much is known about his early business ventures, but he worked in the Saudi Arabian import business, launched a shipping business, and consulted the Sultan of Brunei in 1966, according to BBC. He then moved to the U.K. in the 1970s.

In 1979, as shown in The Crown, Mohamed and his brother Ali bought the Ritz Paris hotel. At the time, the establishment was not doing well following the death of hotelier Charle Ritz, who died in 1976. His widow Monique decided to sell it three years later, per History Extra. Perhaps his most famous venture is buying the department store Harrods, which he and his brother did in 1985. (This was also the same year he married socialite and model Heini Wathen.) Doing so allowed him access to elite social circles, including events which the royals attended. He sold the store to the Qatari royal family in 2010 for a reported $2.4 billion.

His other business dealings include funding the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire via his and Dodi’s production company Allied Stars, and buying the Fulham Football Club in 1997, which sold in 2013 for reported $300 million. As of November 2022, Forbes estimates Al-Fayed’s net worth is $1.9 billion.

He renovated “Villa Windsor.”

In 1986, Al-Fayed took a 50-year lease on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s French home, a 14-room 19th-century villa in the Bois de Boulogne. The state of the villa had deteriorated by the time the Duchess died earlier that year. (The Duke passed in 1972.) Al-Fayed planned to refurbish the estate into a private museum, a place where “historians, members of the British royal family, personalities, friends and important guests of the Ritz” could visit, he told The New York Times. He ultimately spent $12 million on renovations, according to People.

Al-Fayed only met the royal couple once, during a party at the villa in the ’60s, he told the Times. But they left a lasting impression on him, and he recalled “the way they danced and their sense of fun.” He later told People, “I was completely taken by their manner and their warmth.”

Sydney Johnson, a former valet to the Duke for over 30 years, restored the pieces in Al-Fayed’s renovation project. He became a valet for the businessman at the villa after working at the Ritz, per the Times. Al-Fayed called him a “dictionary,” adding to the Times, “He’s a very cultured man. He got all these things out of boxes and safes and storage rooms, and he knows their history.”

He invited Diana and her kids on vacation.

While The Crown depicts Mohamed and Diana’s first meeting at a horse show, they actually met earlier via Diana’s stepmother Raine Spencer, who was on the Harrods board, according to History Extra. While their conversation onscreen was imagined, there was likely some truth behind their discussion about feeling like outsiders—Diana within the royal family and Al-Fayed in the U.K. He applied for British citizenship and was denied twice.

In the summer of 1997, he invited Diana and her sons to vacation with him and his family in St. Tropez, on his yacht the Jonikal. This is reportedly where she met and became close with his son, Dodi. They only dated for about a month before they both died in a car crash in Paris in August 1997.

Mohamed, who would go on to build a memorial to Diana and Dodi in Harrods, has long alleged that the crash wasn’t an accident, but a murder. He believes the couple were killed intentionally “because they still don’t accept that Dodi, my son, an Egyptian, a Muslim, can be the stepfather of the future king,” he said in a 60 Minutes Australia interview.