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 Abelard & Heloise in 1971. Her role as Emma Peel made her a sex symbol. For her role in Medea, both in London and New York, she won the 1994 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. She was appointed CBE in 1988 and a Dame in 1994 for services to drama.
Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg was born on 20 July 1938 in Doncaster, in the West Riding of Yorkshire (now in South Yorkshire),[1] to Louis and Beryl Hilda Rigg (née Helliwell). She had a brother four years her senior.[citation needed] Her father was born in Yorkshire, worked in engineering, and moved to India to work for the railway to take advantage of the career opportunities there.[2] Her mother moved back to England for Rigg's birth. Between the ages of two months and eight years Rigg lived in Bikaner, Rajasthan, India,[1] where her father worked his way up to become a railway executive in the Bikaner State Railway.[2] She spoke Hindi as her second language in those years.[3]
She was later sent back to England to attend a boarding school, Fulneck Girls School, in a Moravian settlement near Pudsey.[4] 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.[5] She trained as an actress at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art[6] from 1955 to 1957, where her classmates included Glenda Jackson and Siân Phillips.[7]
Theatre career
Rigg's career in film, television and the theatre was wide-ranging, including roles in the Royal Shakespeare Company between 1959 and 1967, including Gwendolen in Jean Anouilh's Becket, Cordelia in King Lear and Adriana in The Comedy of Errors.([8]).[9] Her professional debut was as Natasha Abashwilli in the RADA production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle at the York Festival in 1957.[10]
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, in which she appeared nude with Keith Michell. She earned 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).[11][12]
In 1982 she appeared in the musical 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 (which transferred to the Wyndham's Theatre in 1993 and then Broadway in 1994, for which she received the Tony Award for Best Actress), Mother Courage at the National Theatre in 1995 and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Almeida Theatre in 1996 (which transferred to the Aldwych Theatre in October 1996).[13]
In February 2018, she returned to Broadway in the non-singing role of Mrs Higgins in My Fair Lady. She commented, "I think it's so special. When I was offered Mrs Higgins, I thought it was just such a lovely idea."[16] She received her fourth Tony nomination for the role.[17]
Film and television career
From 1965 to 1968 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. She replaced 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 and was not comfortable in her position as a sex symbol.[18] In an interview with The Guardian in 2019, Rigg stated that "becoming a sex symbol overnight had shocked (her)".[5] Neither did she like the way that she was treated by production company ABC Weekend TV. For her second series she held out for a pay rise from £150 a week to £450;[19] 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]... 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."[5] 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.[20]
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). In 1986 she played Miss Hardbroom in a Central Television adaptation of The Worst Witch, starring opposite Tim Curry. The following year, she played the Evil Queen, Snow White's evil stepmother, in the Cannon Movie Tales 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.[24] In 1995, she appeared in a film adaptation for television based on Danielle Steel's Zoya as Evgenia, the main character's grandmother.[25] 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 season.[26]
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,[27] her co-star in Theatre of Blood.
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.[29] 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 direct with her daughter and the first time in her career her roots were accessed to find a Doncaster, Yorkshire, accent.[3]
That 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.[30] 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.[31] She reprised her role in season four of Game of Thrones, and in July 2014 received another Guest Actress Emmy nomination.[32][33] In 2015 and 2016, she again reprised the role in seasons five and six in an expanded role from the books. In 2015 and 2018, she received two additional Guest Actress Emmy nominations. The character was killed off in the seventh season, with Rigg's final performance receiving wide critical acclaim.[34] In April 2019 Rigg said she had never watched Game of Thrones, before or after her time on the show.[35]
During autumn 2019 Rigg was filming the role of Mrs Pumphrey at Broughton Hall, near Skipton, for All Creatures Great and Small.[36] Rigg died after the filming of the first season had been completed. Her final performance was in the British psychological horror film Last Night in Soho, in which she had a major supporting role. The film was in post-production at the time of her death and is dedicated to her memory.
Personal life
Rigg in 2011
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".[37] She was married to Menachem Gueffen, an Israeli painter, from 1973 until their divorce in 1976.[38]
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,[6] and was succeeded by James Naughtie when her 10-year term of office ended on 31 July 2008.[41]
Michael Parkinson, who first interviewed Rigg in 1972, described her as the most desirable woman he had ever met and who "radiated a lustrous beauty".[42] A smoker from the age of 18, Rigg was still smoking 20 cigarettes (one pack)[43] a day in 2009.[44] 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!'"[45]
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."[46]
Rigg died at her daughter Rachael Stirling's home in London on 10 September 2020, at the age of 82.[49] Rigg's cause of death was lung cancer, with which she had been diagnosed in March that year.[50][51][52][53]
Honours
In 1999, Rigg was appointed as the Cameron Mackintosh Visiting professor of Contemporary Theatre at St Catherine's College, Oxford; she held the post for one year.[54]
On 25 October 2015, to mark 50 years of Emma Peel, the British Film Institute screened an episode of The Avengers; this was followed by an onstage interview with Rigg about her time in the television series.[56]
^"Where is All Creatures Great and Small filmed?l". Radio Times. 27 November 2020. Retrieved 26 February 2021. Channel 5 utilised the property for the home of wealthy local resident Mrs Pumphrey (played by Dame Diana Rigg), whose spoilt dog Tricki-Woo demands only the utmost attention from James Herriot.
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