Diana Rigg
Dame Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg DBE (20 July 1938 – 10 September 2020) was an English stage and screen actress. She played Emma Peel in the TV series The Avengers (1965–1968); Countess Teresa di Vicenzo, wife of James Bond, in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969); and Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones (2013–2017). 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.
Early life and education
Rigg was born in what is now South Yorkshire, England in 1938, to Louis (1903–1968) and Beryl Hilda Rigg (née Helliwell; 1908–1981). Her father was a railway engineer. 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 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 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.
Film and television career
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 program. 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 an interview with The Guardian in 2019, Rigg stated that "becoming a sex symbol overnight had shocked" her. She also did not like the way that she was treated by production company Associated British Corporation (ABC).
For her second series she held out for a pay rise from £150 a week to £450; she said in 2019 — when gender pay inequality was very much in the news — that "not one woman in the industry supported me ... Neither did Patrick Macnee, (her co-star)... But I was painted as this mercenary creature by the press when all I wanted was equality. It’s so depressing that we are still talking about the gender pay gap." She did not stay for a third year. Patrick Macnee 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" (1969), playing Tracy Bond, James Bond's only wife, opposite George Lazenby. She said she took the role with the hope that she would become better known in the United States. In 1973–1974, she starred in a short-lived U.S. sitcom called "Diana".
Her other films from this period include "The Assassination Bureau" (1969), "Julius Caesar" (1970), "The Hospital" (1971), "Theatre of Blood" (1973), "In This House of Brede" (1975), based on the book by Rumer Godden, and "A Little Night Music" (1977). She appeared as the title character in "The Marquise" (1980), a television adaptation of play by Noël Coward. She appeared in the Yorkshire Television production of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1981) in the title role, and as Lady Holiday in the film The "Great Muppet Caper" (also 1981). The following year she received acclaim for her performance as Arlena Marshall in the film adaptation of Agatha Christie's "Evil Under the Sun", sharing barbs with her character's old rival, played by Maggie Smith.
She appeared as Regan, the king's treacherous second daughter, in a Granada Television production of "King Lear" (1983) which starred Laurence Olivier in the title role. As Lady Dedlock, she costarred with Denholm Elliott in a television version of Dickens' "Bleak House" (BBC, 1985) and played the Evil Queen, Snow White's evil stepmother, in the Cannon Movie Tales's film adaptation of "Snow White" (1987). 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 1990 BAFTA for Best Television Actress.
In 1995, she appeared in a film adaptation for television based on Danielle Steel's Zoya as Evgenia, the main character's grandmother.
She appeared on television as Mrs Danvers in "Rebecca" (1997), winning an Emmy, 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 series. From 1989 until 2003, she hosted the PBS television series "Mystery!", shown in the United States by PBS broadcaster WGBH, taking over from Vincent Price, her co-star i"n Theatre of Blood".
She also appeared in the second series of Ricky Gervais's comedy "Extras," alongside Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe and in the 2006 film "The Painted Veil" in which she played a nun.
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 the first time in her career her roots were accessed to find a Doncaster, Yorkshire, accent.
The same year, Rigg was cast in 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 paternal 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. In 2015 and 2016, she again reprised the role in seasons five and six in an expanded role from the books. The character was killed off in the seventh season, with Rigg's final performance receiving widely critical acclaim. In April 2019 Rigg said she had never watched "Game of Thrones", before or after her time on the show.
Personal life
In the 1960s, Rigg lived for eight years with director Philip Saville, gaining attention in the tabloid press when she disclaimed interest in marrying the older and already-married Saville, saying that 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 had a daughter, actress Rachael Stirling, who was born in 1977, five years before their marriage.
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 10-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 and who "radiated a lustrous beauty".[ A smoker from the age of 18, Rigg was still smoking 20 cigarettes (one pack) a day in 2009. By December 2017, she had stopped smoking after serious illness led to heart surgery, a cardiac ablation, two months earlier. She joked later, "My heart had stopped ticking during the procedure, so I was up there and the good Lord must have said, 'Send the old bag down again, I'm not having her yet!'"
In a June 2015 interview with the website The A.V. Club, Rigg talked about her chemistry with Patrick Macnee on "The Avengers" despite their 16-year age difference: "I sort of vaguely knew Patrick Macnee, and he looked kindly on me and sort of husbanded me through the first couple of episodes. After that, we became equal, and loved each other professionally and sparked off each other. And we'd then improvise, write our own lines. They trusted us. Particularly our scenes when we were finding a dead body — I mean, another dead body. How do you get round that one? They allowed us to do it." Asked if she had stayed in touch with Macnee (the interview was published two days before Macnee's death and decades after they were reunited on her short-lived American series Diana): "You'll always be close to somebody that you worked with very intimately for so long, and you become really fond of each other. But we haven't seen each other for a very, very long time."
Her first grandchild, a boy named Jack (born to Rachael Stirling and Elbow frontman Guy Garvey), was born in April 2017.
Death
Rigg died at her home in London on 10 September 2020, at the age of 82. Her daughter, Rachael Stirling, said that the cause of death was cancer, with which Rigg had been diagnosed in March.
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