NEW YORK, NY.- There she is in her pink suit, pearl earrings and feathered shag.

There she is with her upcast eyes, unknowable sorrow and perfect sympathy.

There she is, that candle in the wind someone keeps relighting.

Though killed in a car crash in 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, turns up everywhere today, in plays, on television, in movies and even musicals. She’s entertainment gold: the perfect combo of stardom, tragedy and unanswerability.

Which makes her, like a Dickens novel, public domain.

In the last two years alone, I’ve spent more time with her than I did in the 36 she was alive. I saw her in a play called “Casey and Diana,” produced by the Stratford Festival in Ontario and now available to stream on Stratfest@Home. She was a spectral presence off-Broadway in “Dodi & Diana,” a marital drama that hijacked her story to lend oomph to its own.

The 2021 film “Spencer,” which I rewatched on Hulu over New Year’s, did much the same thing, trying to wring some ichor of glamour out of her corpse. On television, “The Crown” hung the breathless first half of its final season on the buildup to the crash, blithely making stuff up where the record is thin. (Netflix justified it as “fictional dramatization.”) And what can one say about “Diana, the Musical,” which had a brief run on Broadway in 2021 (but an ongoing one on Netflix), except that it, too, died in a disaster?

Reader, I cried at them all. (The musical because it was so bad.) I am thus part of the problem of her exploitation, seeking out more Diana content when there’s little left to say. Doing so establishes a kind of contract with the culture: In return for feeding my “feelings” about a celebrity, the culture has my proxy to do so however it pleases.

But what right do I or any of us have to feelings about Diana in the first place? Quite profoundly we did not know her, any more than most of us knew pop-biography grab bags like Elvis Presley, Judy Garland, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Leonard Bernstein, all of them falsified, fudged or “interpreted” in recent movies. History is not the point in such efforts, it is the impediment.

So is anyone — is everyone — fair game?

That’s the critic in me whining. The fanboy feels otherwise. To deny his feelings for Diana is to deny something fundamental about why she became famous. Even if her image was manufactured — she was, for a time, the product of a palace machine — it reflects something we could tell was true in her, and personally meaningful. As a gay man, I’ve been especially susceptible to depictions of her work for people with AIDS. Show her holding the hand of a dying man and — well, I was going to say “I’ll forgive you anything” but (here comes the critic again) that’s not true.

Because Diana is in a different category than Elvis and the others, whose lives, and deaths, came earlier. Their fictionalized biographies grate on me, but not very much. Peeling back the archaeological layers of celebrity exploitation, I get progressively less annoyed. Sanitized (and often de-gayed or de-Jewed) movies about musical theater greats like Cole Porter and George Gershwin, a generation or two further back, remain lost opportunities, but are campy fun. About 19th-century figures like Franz Liszt on film and Mark Twain onstage, however absurdly rendered, I have no historiographic outrage.

Is there a bright-line distinction? A point at which we might say, sure, go ahead, turn Liszt into a rock star, but leave Garland alone?

There is with Diana. She is still too blazingly alive to be dragooned into trauma porn, mauled with the excuse of reincarnating her.

Three Visits to the AIDS Ward

Which is not to say she cannot be portrayed. I admire the way “Casey and Diana,” by Nick Green, does it. The play takes place in 1991, when the princess, during a state visit to Canada, toured Casey House, a Toronto hospice, to spend some time with the men dying there.

That much is true. But because the drama within the hospice is invented, Green makes Diana, for most of the play, a figment.

She isn’t even the main character. That would be Thomas, one of the patients, who spends the week leading up to the visit imagining how it will go — if he lives that long. To the extent Diana (Krystin Pellerin) appears onstage until then, it is only as he hopes she will be, and as we hope, too: witty, dishy, warm, unafraid.

So when she does arrive, in a perfect pink suit, but with just 12 lines — each a polite formula like “It’s all my pleasure” — she is a rebuke to our projections. As she takes Thomas’ hand, her tragic energy is almost completely shifted to him, where it belongs. In the process, Diana is preserved as the inscrutable symbol and crowdsourced wish she really was.

Despite the good taste of that theatrical maneuver, “Casey and Diana” is not blameless; like all such representations, it inevitably trades on dramatic irony to beef up the emotional impact of its otherwise small-scale storytelling. Thomas does not know that Diana will die in six years, but we do — and, in that knowledge, we feel his tragedy shifting back a bit to her.

But at least “Casey and Diana” downplays the HIV-HRH irony. Other recent shows highlight it. In “The Crown,” Diana, on a visit to the United States in 1989, tours the AIDS unit of a Harlem hospital, where she hugs a 7-year-old boy about whom we are given no information. The drama is entirely in the princess’s goodness — and in what the series promotes as her own stigmatization and trajectory toward death.

Yet another hospital visit, this one in London in 1987, figures in “Diana, the Musical.” There she not only shakes patients’ hands without wearing gloves but also poses, doing so, for the press.

Though the gesture was momentous in its day, the musical’s authors do not rise to the moment. Instead, they force one of the patients, at first uncertain about being photographed, to sing a song that includes such vulgar lyrics as “I may be unwell, but I’m handsome as hell.” Diana, played as something of a schemer by Jeanna de Waal, promises to send him a case of eyeliner.

If the musical is deliberately coarse — in one scene, the princess and her rival are depicted in a boxing ring while a chorus of posh fans extols “the thrilla in Manila but with Diana and Camilla” — “The Crown” sets its goals higher. Certainly its astonishing production design suggests its intention to be a simulacrum of living fact. And Elizabeth Debicki, who plays the princess in her final years, comes closest of all the Dianas I’ve seen to the one familiar from tabloids and TV, with the shrug, the quarter-smile, the head-down, eyes-up, wise-child demeanor.

I admit to enjoying the reincarnation. Nor do I categorically object to the story’s composite characters, manufactured coincidences and hypotheticals presented as fact. Some seem like reasonable examples of dramatic license, based however remotely on public record.

But because there is no credible personal record, what Diana is made to say in private rings utterly false. Her dialogue is about as convincing as those videos in which cat owners blithely interpret the unknowable emotions — watch Puss-Puss fall in love with her new poodle sister! — of the least forthcoming creature ever.

Diana being in some ways the human version of that least forthcoming creature, something had to be done to fill in the blanks. The reticence that makes her interesting also makes her unknowable.

‘A Fable From a True Tragedy’

Of course, everyone in “The Crown” gets that treatment. The queen is at least as Frankensteined as Diana, behaving contradictorily, even erratically, to suit the needs of each season and episode.

But an invented Elizabeth is less objectionable than an invented Diana. In asserting their right to fictionalize the royals, the creators of “The Crown” (and “Spencer” and “Diana, the Musical”) allude to the prerogatives of art and entertainment while sidestepping those of morality. What this ignores is the difference between the exploitation of a tragic figure like Diana and an essentially triumphant one like Elizabeth.

Elizabeth was, after all, a long-lived queen, making her a worthy vehicle for inquiry into the nature and uses of power. A master of the kind of palace intrigue of which Diana was mostly a victim, she also makes good drama, as William Shakespeare might have told us. Depicting royals flatteringly (Henry V) or unflatteringly (Macbeth) to please his patrons and support the monarchy, he pioneered dramatic techniques that work equally well to attack it. Today’s royals are more typically conscripted into arguments about the legitimacy, cost and viciousness, in a democratizing world, of mountebanks disguised as Mountbattens.

“Spencer” does not waste any time announcing that theme. When Diana, portrayed by Kristen Stewart, arrives at Queen Elizabeth’s Sandringham estate for three days of Christmas in 1991, she immediately discovers that someone has left her a gift. Or is it a warning?

Zoom in on a dusty book in leather covers: “Anne Boleyn: Life and Death of a Martyr.” As holiday reading goes, the biography of a beheaded queen of Henry VIII is a bit on-the-nose for the spurned wife of Prince Charles. Watch your neck, girl!

The gift and the book itself are fictional. The 2021 film, directed by Pablo Larraín, is too, proceeding from the idea that where there’s a martyr there must be a monster. Elizabeth is a freeze-dried witch, Charles a snarling prig. Perhaps to avoid accusations of defamation, the filmmakers identify their story, in a prefatory caption, as “a fable from a true tragedy.”

A fable and a tragedy I grant you: The famous outline of Diana’s story, if not its unknowable guts, is Grimm indeed.

But the word “true” doesn’t belong anywhere near “Spencer.” No reputable history has suggested, for instance, that the princess ate a bowlful of pearls emancipated from a Flintstones-size necklace given to her by her unfaithful husband. Nor is she known to have hallucinated Boleyn, who urged her toward self-harm, or dismissed a lady-in-waiting, as one does, by saying, “Now leave me, I wish to masturbate.”

Well, surrealism is as convenient a fig leaf as any to hide one’s sins under. And at least “Spencer” means to be sympathetic, if sympathy can coexist with character assassination. Turning Diana into a martyr by stripping her of all decorum means turning her into a madwoman: a threat to herself and possibly her children. By the time she plants herself in the middle of a pheasant shoot, all but daring her family to kill her, our sympathy has started to reflux. Perhaps the monsters were on to something.

How Long?

Schemer, hysteric, victim, saint: It may be that Diana was any or all of these, as even a fanboy must concede. I did not, finally, know her. That doesn’t mean I can stand to watch writers, pretending they do, torture her as she was once tortured by paparazzi, only this time For Your Consideration as award bait. A woman whose bereaved children are still living is not primarily an artistic, let alone a financial, opportunity. Her value as gossip or as evidence in a political argument does not trump her right, even in death, to personal integrity.

At least not yet.

But compare her to that other royal martyr, Boleyn, so deep in the past we do not even know her age when beheaded. (She was younger than Diana, though.) Turning her into a suicide whisperer in “Spencer” — or, in the Broadway musical “Six,” an electropop snark — does no damage to her or anyone who knew her. Same with George Bernard Shaw’s Joan of Arc and those royals that Shakespeare had the good sense to leave alone unless they were long underground. Macbeth died in 1057; “The Tragedie of Macbeth” was first performed around 1606. It bears little resemblance to history, but I am not complaining.

So where between the thane and the princess do we draw the line?

Certainly, the living should be left alone. On the other hand, the Jewish teaching that moral accountability lasts seven generations is probably too strict. (Feel free to write about my great-great-great-great-grandfather Shmuel.) If artistic creations lose copyright protection after 95 years, should people be protected any less?

Let’s round up: 100 years. A century since a person’s death should be enough time to ensure that no one living loved her, or even, for the most part, her children.

Perhaps by 2097, then, the world will finally know enough, or have forgotten enough, to justify digging up Diana for art and commerce. Until then, let her rest. If she wasn’t a martyr in her lifetime, she certainly is one now.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.