Cuddling babies, inspecting the troops, even driving a tank: For Princess Diana it was all in a day's work. The most popular younger member of the royal family, she was also often the busiest, logging thousands of hours and air miles each year, making appearances, visiting the sick and elderly and raising funds for her 80 charities. (Her presence at a benefit could double an evening's take.) But Diana didn't do it for the adulation. Herself a child of a broken home, she brought to the job an empathic disposition that complemented her upper-class pedigree. "The princess is a person of compassion rather than a working royal who has so many events to get through a week," Roger Singleton, a children's charity official, once said.

Indeed, Di always seemed to go the extra kilometer, learning sign language to address a deaf association and penning personal notes to the families of hospital patients she had met. When many people shunned AIDS patients, the princess—who lost a close friend, art dealer Adrian Ward-Jackson, to the disease in 1991—literally embraced them, as she did the homeless, the battered and the drug-addicted. In so doing, Diana found her calling. "People think that at the end of the day a man is the only answer," said the princess last fall. "Actually, a fulfilling job is better for me."

A handshake from her is worth 100,000 words from us,' said a London AIDS doctor in 1989

NOT IMMUNE
The first Windsor to focus public attention on AIDS, Diana buoyed patients in a London AIDS ward in 1989 (right) and held HIV-positive children (above) in Brazil in 1991. "It's heartbreaking," she said.

FOOD FOR THE SOUL
During a 1992 tour of India, the princess traveled to Mother Teresa's Calcutta mission, where she praised the nuns' efforts to help the poor. "I think you are terrific," Di told them. "You bring light to people's lives."

SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER
In 1990 the unpretentious princess made a splash with a class of handicapped swimmers at an Ipswich, England, pool. "She has a keen sense of humor and puts people at ease," a charity director once said.

MAGIC TOUCH
Diana's engaging smile and natural warmth make her an ambassador worth her weight in ermine and tiaras. On one 1991 visit to a Somerset, England, center for the handicapped, a handshake turned into an ecstatic clasp.

ROYAL RUB
Touring New Zealand with Charles in 1983, Diana charmed well-wishers by adopting the traditional greeting of the Maori people: the hongi, or nose press.

TANK GIRL
Fetching even in army "denims," Di slipped through the hatch of an armored vehicle for a rumbling tour of Hampshire's Tidworth army barracks in 1988.

BRIEF LIVES
A blushing Diana couldn't help but grin as she bestowed an award on a team of lifeguards during her 1988 visit to Australia.