This was the name of two ruling queens of Portugal. It was also borne by the Habsburg queen Maria Theresa (1717-1780), whose inheritance of the domains of her father, the Holy Roman emperor Charles VI, began the War of the Austrian Succession.
Already growing in popularity due to Australian model Elle Macpherson (1964-), this name received a boost in the United States after the release of the 2001 movie Legally Blonde featuring the main character Elle Woods. In the United Kingdom the name was already fairly common at the time the movie came out, and it actually started declining there shortly afterwards. A famous bearer is American actress Elle Fanning (1998-).
As a given name, Diana has been regularly used since the Renaissance. It became more common in the English-speaking world following Walter Scott's novel Rob Roy (1817), which featured a character named Diana Vernon. It also appeared in George Meredith's novel Diana of the Crossways (1885). A notable bearer was the British royal Diana Spencer (1961-1997), the Princess of Wales.
The name was borne by a 17th-century English queen and also by the second wife of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn (the mother of Queen Elizabeth I), who was eventually beheaded in the Tower of London. Another notable bearer was the German-Jewish diarist Anne (Annelies) Frank, a young victim of the Holocaust in 1945. This is also the name of the heroine in the 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables by Canadian author L. M. Montgomery.
A famous bearer was the Cuban-French writer Anaïs Nin (1903-1977), known for her diaries.