Late TV icon Diana Rigg's daughter Rachael Stirling talks bringing mum's life story to life in hilarious new book

“I shall be reciting Katherine’s speech from The Taming of the Shrew,” announced Dame Diana Rigg. “And if I get a word wrong I’ll know you’ve f**ked it up!” It was a warning to the eminent surgical oncologist who had just informed the 82-year-old actress that she required CyberKnife surgery to the brain as part of a long list of procedures to fight the cancer that had spread throughout her body.

Feisty, hilarious, difficult, demanding, crusading, brave, defiant and brilliant: all words used to describe the iconic star of stage and screen during her eventful life – and all demonstrably present and correct as the curtain began to fall for the final time.

Thankfully, the above exchange was recorded by Rachael Stirling, Rigg’s daughter and a successful actress in her own right (Detectorists, The Bletchley Circle, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen). It first appeared in The Observer New Review guest-edited by film director Edgar Wright in October 2021 to coincide with the release of Last Night in Soho, Rigg’s last film and one that she wouldn’t live to see premiere.

“Mama had died the previous year,” remembers Stirling. “Edgar said, ‘We can’t interview your mum. Will you write something about her?’. So I did, and we had some amazing responses.” One of those was from a publisher, and All About My Mother: The Life of Diana Rigg is the result – by turns emotional, hilarious, inspiring, and an uncompromising demand to place Diana Rigg as both a major figure of the Swinging Sixties and a fearless champion of equal pay for women.

Between the re-telling of Rigg’s glorious anecdotes (“I was murdered at the end of the first act. Gordon Honeycomb… had to feel my pulse and declare me gone. One day I decided to surprise him with a large hot sausage in my hand”) and delicious bons mots (“Have I ever worked with Oliver Reed? Darling, I worked on Oliver Reed”), her daughter explains the pivotal role played by Rigg in shaping the decade that rewrote the rulebook.

In 1965, her Emma Peel replaced Honor Blackman’s Cathy Gale in The Avengers – a series watched by 20 million people in the UK, just as a lucrative American rights deal had injected cash into a production that was tailor-made for the advent of colour television. But more than that.

By that stage, and due to the original budgetary restraints, the sidekick to John Steed (played by Patrick Macnee) had originally been written for a male lead, Stirling explains. “Money and time were tight, so no lines in the scripts were altered to allow for the fact ‘he’ was now a ‘she’. The result was a television first: a man and woman whose relationship was one of equals – whose intelligence, wit and physical prowess were matched.”

The same, however, couldn’t be said for financial recompense. Rigg discovered that a cameraman was earning £120 per week, to her £90, and knew that her co-star Macnee must have been earning considerably more than both. “Any argument about money is ugly, but at the same time I felt I was being exploited and I had to put a stop to it,’ she told The Times. “If something is unjust you have to fight it.”

Her wages doubled and she was able to negotiate again for the next series. But the hitherto salivating British media turned to paint her as, she paraphrased, “a money-grubbing diva”. As unfair a portrayal as it was inevitable, she took it all in her elegant stride before following Honor Blackman into the Bond film franchise in 1968. Rigg was to play Contessa Teresa ‘Tracy’ di Vincenzo in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. “All the other Bond heroines have been played by ladies like Ursula Andress,” she told the press. “I’m different. I’m not exactly all tits and teeth, am I?’”

She was different and not just because she remains the only leading lady to marry Bond – but because she rescued the movie from George Lazenby’s alleged poor behaviour on set and his fractious relationship with the director. On account of unchivalrous comments he later made about her mother, Stirling refers to Lazenby as “POG” (Poor Old George) throughout the book. He decided he wanted no part in the Bond franchise, while Rigg went on to star in the West End and on Broadway, win a Tony and two BAFTAs and be nominated for four Olivier Awards and nine Emmys before playing Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones.

The book ends leaving the reader wanting more. “[Writing this book] has been so fulfilling and extraordinary,” Stirling says. “I’ve loved every minute of it, and I have a hunger for it now. There’s much more about my mother. I wasn’t allowed to put more than 95,000 words in a book. I was like, ‘What am I going to do with the other 200,000?’” Two more volumes please. As soon as possible.

• All About My Mother: The Life of Diana Rigg by Rachael Stirling is available to buy now

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