Kevin Costner says Princess Diana was to star in The Bodyguard 2

Kevin Costner has revealed that Princess Diana was keen to play the lead role in a sequel to The Bodyguard, the 1992 Whitney Houston blockbuster movie.

Costner made the claim during an interview he’s just recorded for Anderson, a US ABC television talk show, which is due to be broadcast next month. According to the Guardian, the Hollywood actor and producer took delivery of the proposed screenplay for The Bodyguard 2 the day before Diana, Princess of Wales died in August 1997. Provisionally titled The Bodyguard 2, the storyline would have seen the Diana play “a princess who requires protection from paparazzi and stalkers”, mirroring her own life at the time. Costner would have returned as former-special-agent-turned-bodyguard Frank Farmer, the role he played in the Whitney Houston original. “Diana and I had been talking about doing Bodyguard 2 [and] I told her I would take care of her just the same way that I took care of Whitney,” TODAYonline reports Costner as saying. The Bodyguard was one of the highest-grossing films of the early 1990s, and its soundtrack sold in excess of 42 million copies world wide. The most famous track was Houston’s rendition of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You”. Princess Diana, the former wife to and mother of the two closest heirs to the British throne – Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, and Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, respectively – died in a car accident in Paris nearly 15 years ago, on August 1997. She was 36. Houston died earlier this year, age 48. Digital Journal reported in February that Naomi Watts (J. Edgar) is to play the Princess Diana in a biopic, Caught in Flight, which is to be directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel (Downfall). Houston, meanwhile, will appear, posthumously, in the Salim Akil-directed film, Sparkle. Previously, Ali directed 2011’s Jumping the Broom.