Dame Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg was an English actress.
She was born on 20 July 1938.
She played Emma Peel in the TV series The Avengers; Countess Teresa di Vicenzo, wife
of James Bond, in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969); and Olenna Tyrell in Game
of Thrones.
She also enjoyed a career in theatre, including playing the title role in Medea, both in London
and New York, for which she won the 1994 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.
She was made a CBE in 1988 and a Dame in 1994 for services to drama.
Rigg made her professional stage debut in 1957 in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and joined
the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1959.
She made her Broadway debut in the 1971 production of Abelard & Heloise.
Her film roles include Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968); Lady Holiday in The
Great Muppet Caper (1981); and Arlena Marshall in Evil Under the Sun (1982).
She won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress for the BBC miniseries Mother Love (1989),
and an Emmy Award for her role as Mrs. Danvers in an adaptation of Rebecca (1997).
Her other television credits include You, Me and the Apocalypse (2015), Detectorists
(2015), and the Doctor Who episode "The Crimson Horror" (2013) with her daughter, Rachael
Stirling.
Rigg was born in Doncaster, which was then in the West Riding of Yorkshire, now in South
Yorkshire, in 1938, to Louis Rigg (1903–1968) and Beryl Hilda (née Helliwell; 1908–1981);
her father was a railway engineer born in Yorkshire.
Between the ages of two months and eight years Rigg lived in Bikaner, Rajasthan, India, where
her father was employed as a railway executive in the Bikaner State Railway.
She spoke Hindi as her second language in those young years.
She was later sent back to England to attend a boarding school, Fulneck Girls School, in
a Moravian settlement near Pudsey.
Rigg hated her boarding school, where she felt like a fish out of water, but she believed
that Yorkshire played a greater part in shaping her character than India did.
She trained as an actress at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art from 1955–57, where her
classmates included Glenda Jackson and Siân Phillips.
Rigg's career in film, television, and the theatre was wide-ranging, including roles
in the Royal Shakespeare Company between 1959 and 1967.
Her professional debut was as Natasha Abashwilli in the RADA production of The Caucasian Chalk
Circle at the York Festival in 1957.
She returned to the stage in the Ronald Millar play Abelard and Heloïse in London in 1970,
and made her Broadway debut with the play in 1971, earning the first of three Tony Award
nominations for Best Actress in a Play.
She received her second nomination in 1975, for The Misanthrope.
A member of the National Theatre Company at the Old Vic from 1972 to 1975, Rigg took leading
roles in premiere productions of two Tom Stoppard plays, Dorothy Moore in Jumpers (National
Theatre, 1972) and Ruth Carson in Night and Day (Phoenix Theatre, 1978).
Rigg appeared in the British 1960s television series The Avengers (1961–69) opposite Patrick
Macnee as John Steed, playing the secret agent Emma Peel in 51 episodes, replacing Elizabeth
Shepherd at very short notice when Shepherd was dropped from the role after filming two
episodes.
Rigg auditioned for the role on a whim, without ever having seen the programme.
Although she was hugely successful in the series, she disliked the lack of privacy that
it brought.
Also, she was not comfortable in her position as a sex symbol.
In the 1960s, Rigg lived for eight years with director Philip Saville, gaining attention
in the tabloids when she disclaimed interest in marrying the older, already-married Saville,
saying she had no desire "to be respectable."
She was married to Menachem Gueffen, an Israeli painter, from 1973 until their divorce in
1976, and to Archibald Stirling, a theatrical producer and former officer in the Scots Guards,
from 25 March 1982, until their divorce in 1990 after his affair with the actress Joely
Richardson.
With Stirling, Rigg has a daughter, actress Rachael Stirling, who was born in 1977.
Rigg was a Patron of International Care & Relief and was for many years the public face of
the charity's child sponsorship scheme.
She was also Chancellor of the University of Stirling, a ceremonial rather than executive
role, and was succeeded by James Naughtie when her ten-year term of office ended on
31 July 2008.
[Biography from Wikipedia]
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