The Observer referred to Al Fayed as “the Phoney Pharaoh,” and Tom Bower, who wrote an unauthorized biography about Al Fayed, claimed that the controversial businessman had also shaved four years off of his age and added the Al to his name for a whiff of imperiousness. It wasn’t until 1990 that the UK’s Department of Trade and Industry revealed the truth: that Al Fayed, who had spun yarns about a coddled childhood with an English nanny and an elite education at “the Eton of the Middle East,” was actually the son of a humble schoolteacher who grew up in Alexandria. When Al Fayed and his brothers began their takeover battle for Harrods in the early 1980s, they claimed to descend from an established Egyptian family who were shipowners, landowners, and industrialists for over a century. The flashback is ironic given that the controversial figure-who restored Paris’s Ritz hotel and revamped London’s Harrods department store in the ’80s, allegedly manipulated the brief romance between his son Emad “Dodi” Al Fayed and Princess Diana in the ’90s, and sensationally accused the British royal family of plotting to kill the couple in the ’00s-spent much of his life trying to stamp out his actual origin story. Mohamed Al Fayed makes his grand entrance to The Crown’s lavish universe in the fifth-season episode “ Mou Mou,” which rewinds seven decades to the businessman’s humble beginnings selling Coca-Cola in the slums of Egypt.
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