The Cheeky Thing Lily Collins Did To Princess Diana When She Was A Toddler

The perk of being a royal — okay, there's a lot of perks to being a royal — is that you get to meet a lot of celebrities. Case in point: one of Princess Diana's very best friends ended up being Elton John, who rewrote "Candle in the Wind" about Diana's untimely death, per Town and Country. Then there was that time Diana danced with John Travolta in a stunning black-and-white dress, photos of which you've no doubt come across on Instagram.

"We'd fall into conversation then we'd meet for tea," Liza Minnelli said of getting to know Diana, per Tatler. "My instinct was to protect her," she continued, adding that she and the princess bonded over the stresses of life in the spotlight. "All my life I've had people bowing and scraping ... Well, Princess Di got used to people bowing and scraping. So it was a relief to both of us that we could just be ourselves around each other."

Diana was also friendly with Phil Collins, who was a good friend of her husband, Prince Charles. Collins once described an uncomfortable run-in with Diana at his dentist's office, in which she reportedly suggested he get a colonoscopy, per Vanity Fair. Awkward royal run-ins seem to be par for the course in the Collins family, as Phil's daughter, star of "Emily in Paris," Lily Collins recently shared one of her own.

During a recent appearance on "The Late Late Show with James Corden," Lily Collins shocked fans by describing her childhood run-ins with the royal family as far from polite. Lily explained what was really going on in a famous photo of her handing Princess Diana a bouquet as a young child. "I'm giving Diana flowers," she explained to Corden. "But the second she went to take them, I then tried to pull them back." Phil Collins' daughter remembered that the other guests seemed horrified at the encounter. "So, as you can imagine, all the air was sucked out of the room," she said. "But then again, I was wearing a cute dress, so who's going to really punish me there?"

The royal faux pas didn't stop there, though. Lily also relayed a story about acting up in front of Prince Charles. "I was also told that when I was younger, I was playing with some toys with Prince Charles, and I proceeded to kind of throw something at him, like throw a toy telephone at his head," she laughed. Lily further explained that she spent so much time with the royals because her father and Prince Charles were friends and involved in the same charity work. However, when her parents divorced a few years later, she moved to Los Angeles with her mom and saw a lot less of the royal family, per People.