Dame Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg, DBE is an English actress.
She is perhaps best known for the role of Emma Peel in the TV series The Avengers, which
she appeared in from 1965 to 1968.
She has also had an extensive career in the theatre both in Britain and America.
Rigg made her professional stage debut in 1957 in The Caucasian Chalk Circle and joined
the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1959.
In 1971, she made her Broadway debut in Abelard & Heloise.
She played Medea in 1992 at the Almeida and Wyndham's in London and again in New York,
where she won the 1994 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.
On television, she starred in the 1989 BBC miniseries Mother Love, for which she won
a BAFTA Award for Best Actress and the 1997 adaptation of Rebecca, which won her an Emmy
Award.
Her film roles include, Helena, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Countess Teresa di Vicenzo
in the James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Lady Holiday in The Great Muppet
Caper and Arlene Marshall in Evil Under the Sun.
Rigg was made a CBE in 1988 and a Dame in 1994.
She is considered a sex symbol and an icon of 1960s feminism.
Biography Early life and education
Rigg was born in Doncaster, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire, now in South Yorkshire
to Louis Rigg and Beryl Hilda; her father was a railway engineer who had been born in
Yorkshire.
Between the ages of two months and eight years Rigg lived in Bikaner, India, where her father
was employed as a railway executive.
Hindi was her second language in those young years.
She was then sent to a boarding school, the Moravian School in Fulneck, near Pudsey.
She disliked her boarding school, where she felt like a fish out of water, but she believes
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.
Theatre career Rigg's career in film, television and the
theatre has been wide-ranging, including roles in the Royal Shakespeare Company between 1959
and 1964.
Her professional debut was in the RADA production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle at the York
Festival in 1957.
Her role was Natasha Abashwilli.
A return to the stage and a nude scene with Keith Michell in the Ronald Millar play Abelard
and Heloise in 1970 led to a notorious description of her as 'built like a brick basilica with
insufficient flying buttresses', by the acerbic critic John Simon..
Following its success in London, she 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 and Ruth Carson
in Night and Day.
In 1982, she appeared in a musical called Colette, based on the life of the French writer
and created by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, but it closed during an American tour en route
to Broadway.
In 1987 she took a leading role in the West End production of Stephen Sondheim's musical
Follies.
In the 1990s, she had triumphs with roles at the Almeida Theatre in Islington, including
Medea in 1992, Mother Courage at the National Theatre in 1995 and Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?
at the Almeida Theatre in 1996.
In 2004, she appeared as Violet Venable in Sheffield Theatres' production of Tennessee
Williams's play Suddenly Last Summer, which transferred to the Albery Theatre.
In 2006, she appeared at the Wyndham's Theatre in London's West End in a drama entitled Honour
which had a limited but successful run.
In 2007, she appeared as Huma Rojo in the Old Vic's production of All About My Mother,
adapted by Samuel Adamson and based on the film of the same title directed by Pedro Almodóvar.
She appeared in 2008 in The Cherry Orchard at the Chichester Festival Theatre, returning
there in 2009 to star in Noël Coward's Hay Fever.
In 2011 she played Mrs Higgins in Pygmalion at the Garrick Theatre, opposite Rupert Everett
and Kara Tointon, having played Eliza Doolittle 37 years earlier at the Albery Theatre.
Film and television career Rigg appeared in the cult British 1960s television
series The Avengers playing the secret agent Mrs 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 of Emma Peel 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.
She also did not like the way that she was treated by the Associated British Corporation.
After a dozen episodes she discovered that she was being paid less than a cameraman.
For her second season she held out for a pay rise from £150 a week to £450, but there
was still no question of her staying for a third year.
Patrick Macnee, her co-star in the series, noted that Rigg had later told him that she
considered Macnee and her driver to be her only friends on the set.
On the big screen she became a Bond girl in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, playing Tracy
Bond, James Bond's only wife.
She said she took the role with the hope that she would become well known in America.
Throughout the filming of the movie, there were rumours that the experience was not a
happy one, owing to a personality clash with Bond actor George Lazenby.
The rumours may have arisen from a reporter witnessing her say "I'm having garlic for
lunch, George, I hope you are!"
before a love scene between the two.
However, both Rigg and Lazenby have denied the claims, and both wrote off the garlic
comment as a joke.
Her other films from this period include The Assassination Bureau, The Hospital, Theatre
of Blood, In This House of Brede and A Little Night Music.
She appeared as the title character in The Marquise, a television adaptation of play
by Noël Coward.
In 1981 she appeared in a Yorkshire Television production of Hedda Gabler in the title role,
and as Lady Holiday in the film The Great Muppet Caper.
The following year she received acclaim for her performance as Arlena Marshall in the
film adaptation of Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun.
She appeared as Regan, the king's treacherous second daughter, in a Granada Television production
of King Lear, which starred Laurence Olivier in the title role.
She costarred with Denholm Elliot in a television version of Dickens' Bleak House, and played
the Wicked Queen in the Cannon adaptation of Snow White.
In 1989 she played Helena Vesey in Mother Love for the BBC; her portrayal of an obsessive
mother who was prepared to do anything, even murder, to keep control of her son won Rigg
the 1989 BAFTA for Best Television Actress.
In the 1990s she appeared on television as Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, as well as the PBS
production Moll Flanders, and as the amateur detective Mrs. Bradley in The Mrs Bradley
Mysteries.
In this BBC series, first aired in 2000, she played Gladys Mitchell's detective, Dame Beatrice
Adela Le Strange Bradley, an eccentric old woman who worked for Scotland Yard as a pathologist.
The series was not a critical success and did not return for a second season.
From 1989 until 2003, she hosted the PBS television series Mystery!, taking over from Vincent
Price, her co-star from Theatre of Blood.
Her TV career in America has been varied; anomalously she starred in her own sitcom
Diana in 1973, but it was not successful.
She also appeared in the second series of Ricky Gervais's hit comedy Extras, alongside
Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe, and in the 2006 film The Painted Veil.
In 2013 she appeared in an episode of Doctor Who in a Victorian-era based story called
The Crimson Horror alongside her daughter Rachael Stirling, Matt Smith and Jenna-Louise
Coleman.
The episode had been specially written for her and her daughter by Mark Gatiss and aired
as part of series 7.
It was not the first time mother and daughter had appeared in the same production – that
was in the 2000 NBC film In the Beginning — but the first time she had worked with
her daughter and also the first time in her career her roots were accessed to find a Doncaster,
Yorkshire, accent.
The same year, Rigg secured a recurring role in the third season of the HBO series Game
of Thrones, portraying Lady Olenna Tyrell, a witty and sarcastic political mastermind
popularly known as the Queen of Thorns, the grandmother of regular character Margaery
Tyrell.
Her performance was well received by critics and audiences alike, and earned her an Emmy
nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for the 65th Primetime Emmy
Awards in 2013.
She reprised her role in season four of Game of Thrones, and in July 2014 received another
Guest Actress Emmy nomination.
Personal life In the mid-1960s, Rigg lived for eight years
with actor/director Philip Saville, causing some degree of scandal in the tabloids when
she disclaimed interest in marrying the older, already-married Saville, by saying she had
no desire "to be respectable".
Her marriage to Menachem Gueffen, an Israeli painter, lasted from 1973 until their divorce
in 1976, at which time Saville gave her moral support by phoning every day, while telling
the press "when a woman has been in your life a long time, she never really leaves it.
I hope to be seeing her often, but I have no plans to marry her."
She was married to Archibald Stirling, a theatrical producer and former officer in the Scots Guards,
from 1982 until they divorced in 1990.
The marriage broke up when Stirling had an affair with actress Joely Richardson.
With Stirling, Rigg has a daughter, actress Rachael Stirling, who was born in 1977.
Rigg was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1988 and a Dame Commander
of the Order of the British Empire in 1994.
Rigg is 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, being succeeded by James Naughtie
when her ten-year term of office ended on 31 July 2008.
Michael Parkinson, who first interviewed Rigg in 1972, described her as the most desirable
woman he ever met, who "radiated a lustrous beauty".
A smoker from the age of 18, Rigg was still smoking 20 cigarettes a day in 2009 but in
2011 she said she had given up smoking because "she had to".
Rigg received honorary degrees from the University of Stirling in 1988 and the University of
Leeds in 1992.
Filmography Film
Television Theatre
Awards and nominations References
External links Diana Rigg at the Internet Broadway Database
Diana Rigg at the Internet Movie Database Diana Rigg at the TCM Movie Database
DianaRigg.net, unofficial website