Diana Rigg

At 82 years old, Diana Rigg has this physical status:

Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg (born 20 July 1938) is an English actress.

Emma Peel appeared in Game of Thrones (1965-68) and Olenna Tyrell (2013–17).

She has worked in theatre, including in Medea, where she was voted Best Actress in a Play in 1994.

She was appointed a CBE in 1988 and a Dame in 1994 for her contributions to drama. Rigg made her professional debut in 1957 in The Caucasian Chalk Circle and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1959.

In 1971, Abelard & Heloise made her Broadway debut.

Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968); Countess Teresa Di Vicenzo, James Bond's wife, in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1979); and Archer for Evil Under the Sun (1982).

She received the BAFTA Television Award for Best Actress for the BBC miniseries Mother Love (1989) and an Emmy Award for her role as Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca's version (1997).

She has appeared on television shows such as "You, Me and the Apocalypse (2015), Detectorists (2015), and "The Crimson Horror" (2013) with her daughter Rachael Stirling.

Early life and education

Enid Diana Rigg was born in Doncaster on July 20th, 1938, and later in the West Riding of Yorkshire (now in South Yorkshire), to Louis and Beryl Hilda Rigg (née Helliwell). She had a brother who was four years older than her. Her father was born in Yorkshire, worked in electronics, and then moved to India to work on the railway to take advantage of the country's career opportunities. Rigg's mother moved back to England for Rigg's birth. Rigg lived in Bikaner, Rajasthan, India, where her father worked his way up to become a railway executive in the Bikaner State Railway between the ages of two months and eight years. In those years, she used Hindi as her second language.

In a Moravian settlement near Pudsey, she was sent back to England to attend Fulneck Girls School. Rigg resentment at her boarding school, where she felt like a fish out of water, but she believed that Yorkshire played a larger part in shaping her character than India did. She studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art from 1955 to 1957, where her classmates included Glenda Jackson and Siân Phillips.

Personal life

Rigg spent eight years with director Philip Saville in the 1960s, gaining notoriety in the tabloid press when she denied her desire to marrying the older and already married Saville saying she had no intention to be courteous. She was married to Menachem Gueffen, an Israeli painter, from 1973 to their divorce in 1976, then to Archibald Stirling, a Scottish guard and former soldier, from 1981 to 1990, after her affair with actress Joely Richardson. Rigg's daughter, actress Rachael Stirling, was born in 1977, five years before their marriage, and was introduced to Stirling.

Rigg, a patron of International Care & Relief, was for many years the public face of the charity's child-sponsorship program. She was also chancellor of the University of Stirling, a ceremonial rather than executive position, and she was appointed by James Naughtie after her 10-year term of office ended on July 31, 2008.

Michael Parkinson, who first interviewed Rigg in 1972, described her as the most desirable woman he's ever encountered and who "radiated a lustrous beauty." Rigg was still smoking 20 cigarettes (one pack) one day in 2009. She had quit smoking two months before, two months earlier, after severe illness resulted in heart arrest, which had caused heart surgery, a cardiac arrest. "My heart had stopped ticking during the procedure," she joked later. 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., I discussed the A.V. "I sort of vaguely knew Patrick Macnee and he seemed to me and ostensibly accompanied me through the first couple of episodes," Rigg explained on The Avengers' relationship with Patrick Macnee. We became equal, respected each other, and inspired each other to be happy and encouraged each other. We'd then improvise and write our own lines. They trusted us. Particularly our scenes when we were discovering a dead body—I mean, another dead body.

How do you get round that one?

We were allowed 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 revived on her short-lived American series Diana): "You'll always be close to someone you worked with very closely for so long, and you'll always be close to someone that you were close to all the time, and you'll always be close to them." However, we haven't seen each other for a long time."

Rigg died at her daughter's house in London on September 10, 2020, the 82-year-old actress. Rachael Stirling, her daughter, said that the cause of her death was cancer, which had been diagnosed in March.

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Theatre career

Rigg's career in film, television, and the theatre included stints in the Royal Shakespeare Company between 1959 and 1967. Natasha Abashwilli made her RADA debut at The Caucasian Chalk Circle at the York Festival in 1957.

In 1970, she appeared nude with Keith Michell in the Ronald Millar play Abelard and Helo'se in London. She received the first of three Tony Award nominations for Best Actress in a Play. In 1975, she received her second nomination for The Misanthrope. Rigg, a member of the National Theatre Company of Old Vic, appeared in premier performances of two Tom Stoppard plays, Dorothy Moore in Jumpers (National Theatre, 1972) and Ruth Carson in Night and Day (Phoenix Theatre, 1978).

In 1982, she appeared in the musical Colette, which was based on the life of the French writer and created by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, but it was cut off during an American tour en route to Broadway. She appeared in Stephen Sondheim's musical Follies in 1987, playing a central role. She had triumphs with roles at the Almeida Theatre in Islington in the 1990s, including Medea (which moved to the Wyndham's Theatre in 1993 and then Broadway in 1994, which she received the Tony Award for Best Actress), Mother Courage at the National Theatre in 1995, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. In 1996, Almeida Theatre was transferred to the Aldwych Theatre (which was converted to the Almeida Theatre in October 1996).

Violet Venable appeared in Tennessee Williams' production Suddenly Last Summer, which was then transferred to the Albery Theatre in 2004, which was also in 2004. In 2006, she appeared in a drama called Honour, which had a limited but successful run. Huma Rojo played Huma Rojo in the Old Vic's production All About My Mother, which was based on Pedro Almodóvar's film of the same name.

She appeared in The Cherry Orchard at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 2008 and returned in 2009 to appear in No.l Coward's Hay Fever. Eliza Doolittle appeared in Pygmalion in 2011, opposite Rupert Everett and Kara Tointon, who appeared at the Albery Theatre 37 years ago.

In February 2018, she returned to Broadway in the non-singing role of Mrs Higgins in My Fair Lady. "I think it's so special," she said. I thought it was just such a sweet idea when I was offered Mrs Higgins. She was nominated for her third time for the role.

Film and television career

Rigg appeared in the British 1960s television series The Avengers (1961–69) opposite Patrick Macnee as John Steed, portraying the operative Emma Peel in 51 episodes. After filming two episodes, Elizabeth Shepherd was recalled with a very short notice when Shepherd was booted from the role. Rigg auditioned for the role on a whim, having never seen the movie before. Although she was a natural performer in the series, she disliked the lack of anonymity that came as a result. In addition, she was not comfortable in her role as a sex symbol. In an interview with The Guardian in 2019, Rigg said that "becoming a sex symbol overnight shocked" her. She also did not like the way she was treated by production firm ABC Weekend TV, which was not agreeing with it.

She went from £150 a week to £450 for her second series, saying that "not one woman in the industry supported me" in 2019—a time when gender pay parity was really in the news—not one woman in the industry understood me." Patrick [Macnee, her co-star]... By the time I was painted as this mercenary creature by the media, all I wanted was equality. It's so sad that we are already debating the gender pay divide." She did not stay for a third year. Patrick Macnee said that Rigg had later told him that Macnee and her chauffeur would be her only pals on the crew. In On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), Tracy Bond, James Bond's only wife, appears opposite George Lazenby, as the Bond girl on the big screen. She said she took the role in the hopes that she would be more well-known in the United States. Diana appeared on a short-lived US sitcom from 1973–74.

Julius Caesar (1969), The Hospital (1971), and A Little Night Music (1977) are among her other films from this period. In The Marquise (1980), a television adaptation of a play by Nol Coward, she appeared as the title character. She appeared in Hedda Gabler (1981)'s title role as the principal role in the film The Great Muppet Caper (also 1981). The following year, she received acclaim for her role as Arlena Marshall in Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun's film version, including barbs with her character's old rival, played by Maggie Smith.

In a Granada Television production of King Lear (1983), she appeared as Regan, the king's treacherous second daughter, starring Laurence Olivier in the title role. Lady Dedlock co-starred with Denholm Elliott in a television version of Dickens' Bleak House (1985) and played the Evil Queen, Snow White's nefarious stepmother in Cannon Movie Tales' film adaptation of Snow White (1987). Helena Vesey of Mother Love on the BBC played an obsessive mother who was willing to do everything, even murdering her son won Rigg the 1990 BAFTA award for Best Television Actress.

She appeared in a film adaptation based on Danielle Steel's Zoya as Evgenia, the main character's grandmother.

Mrs Danvers of Rebecca (1997), receiving an Emmy, as well as PBS' Moll Flanders, and Mrs Bradley in The Mrs Bradley Mysteries, she appeared on television as Mrs Danvers. Dame Beatrice Adela Le Strange Bradley, an eccentric old woman who worked for Scotland Yard as a pathologist, appeared in this BBC series, first broadcasting in 2000. The series was not a critical hit and did not return for a second season.

She appeared in The PBS television series Mystery! from 1989 to 2003, appearing in the United States by PBS broadcaster WGBH, taking over from Vincent Price, her co-star in Theatre of Blood.

She appeared in Ricky Gervais' second series Extras alongside Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe and in the 2006 film The Painted Veil, in which she appeared as a nun.

She appeared in an episode of Doctor Who in a Victorian-era based story "The Crimson Horror" with her children Rachael Stirling, Matt Smith, and Jenna-Louise Coleman. Mark Gatiss had specifically written for her and her daughter and it was broadcast as part of series 7. This was not the first time mother and daughter were in the same film, In the Beginning of 2000, NBC's In the Beginning, it was the first time she had worked with her daughter, but it was the first time she had worked with her daughter and the first time she had worked with her daughter, but it was not the first time she had worked with her daughter, and the first time she's been to find a Doncaster, Yorkshire accent.

Rigg appeared in a recurring role in the third season of HBO's Game of Thrones, portraying Lady Olenna Tyrell, a sarcastic and sarcastic political mastermind well-known as the Queen of Thorns, and Margaery Tyrell's paternal grandmother. Her appearance was well-reced by critics and fans alike, and she was named as Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for the 65th Primetime Emmy Awards in 2013. In July 2014, she reprised her appearance in season four of Game of Thrones, and she was given another Guest Actress Emmy nomination. She reprised her role in seasons five and six in an expanded capacity from the books in 2015 and 2016. In 2015 and 2018, she received two additional Guest Actress Emmy Awards. In the seventh season, the character was killed off, with Rigg's last appearance receiving acclaim. Rigg said she had never watched Game of Thrones before or after her time on the series in April 2019.

Rigg was filming Mrs Pumphrey at Broughton Hall, near Skipton, for All Creatures Great and Small during autumn 2019. Rigg died before filming of the first season had been completed. Her last appearance is in Soho, where she appeared in the main villain and elder version of Anya Taylor-Joy's character, posing with Thomasin McKenzie. Rigg's film was shot in London, where she later died and is dedicated to her memory.

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