‘I didn’t expect to be portrayed as a cannibal’: Rachael Stirling on eating her mother Diana Rigg’s ashes

There have been headlines of late that make me out to be an ash-guzzling savage nightly devouring her mother’s charred remains. “Rachael Stirling eats mother Diana Rigg’s ashes before going on stage” declared a dozen news outlets last month, while others referred to the “strange habit only she really understands” and “Dame Diana’s daughter admits eating her ashes in bizarre tribute”. I’ve written a book about our relationship, All About My Mother, in which I do confess to nibbling a grain or two, but I didn’t expect to be portrayed as a matricidal cannibal by the press.

My mother was Diana Rigg, an iconic actor with a 60-year career. Young ’uns will know her as the Queen of Thorns from Game of Thrones, be-wimpled spouter of the best verbal roasts on television: “I’ve known a great number of clever men. I’ve outlived them all. You know how? I ignored them.” Old ’uns, meanwhile, go dewy-eyed at the memory of her leather-catsuited telly triumph as Emma Peel in The Avengers from the 60s, the first woman to perform kung fu on western television. She was also the only woman ever to marry James Bond. She appeared in The Great Muppet Caper because I was profoundly in love with Miss Piggy, and her child-murdering Medea was the toast of Broadway. She won an Emmy and a Tony, and had countless honours bestowed upon her for her many stage performances. She was a complete original and very witty to boot.

I missed her so intensely, I wrote the book to bring her back to life. Mum never wanted a biography in her lifetime, having been put off by a couple of limp jobs that managed to make her seem a bit dull or, worst of all crimes, earnest. My mother was not earnest. She was honest, sometimes eye-bleedingly so.

I was her only child, and followed her into the acting profession. She strongly disapproved of my career choice, and this caused some rumpuses, I can tell you. We ran the gamut of emotions from A to Z and eventually we made our way back to the love we’d had in the early years. In the end, the love bits between us did conquer all the awful bits, though there are some joyful and some jaw-dropping stories to share.

Which brings us neatly back to the subject of ashes and my ingesting of them.

Groucho Marx wished to be cremated, with one tenth of his ashes to be “given to my agent, as written in my contract”. Dying in the Covid lockdown, my mother wished to be cremated, too, but with no ceremony, and scattered in places she loved. Pragmatic to the last, she even made sure we’d paid for the cremation on her bank card before she died. However, we never thought to decide what receptacle her remains would be returned in, so it wasn’t until after her death that I found myself browsing the selection of “scatter tubes” on offer.

Scatter tubes are cardboard containers of varying sizes. Some are plain, others have images printed on them. These are pretty unoriginal, pictures of doves and sunsets – or was it a sunrise – and images that felt to me a bit sur le nez. It turns out most things are quite on the nose when it comes to death. There isn’t much of a market for irony. Not many skull and crossbones, or red stilettos, or tubes with “I told you I was ill” written on them. In the end I settled for a variety of receptacles in a variety of sizes, with the least offensive floral decorations on them. I needed quantity, as my mother had many places to go. She was to be scattered from the air across the green fields of England from a biplane by her aviator friend Tracey Curtis-Taylor; she was to be scattered in her garden in France and mine in London; and on the site of the actors’ church in Covent Garden.

I did not expect human ashes to be so heavy. But they are very heavy. I discovered this when my mother’s mortal remains were returned to me one bright September morning. The cremation company had told me, when organising delivery, that taking receipt of the ashes could be an emotional event. Certainly, the carbonised corpse of my beloved Ma was the strangest delivery I’d ever expected, and not one to be left on the porch or with a neighbour. So I sat waiting, like an obedient dog awaiting her mistress by the front door.

My mother was delivered to me by the gentlest of gentlemen from the cremation firm in Yorkshire, where my mother was born. He pulled her out of the boot in a box wrapped in plain cloth. With kind eyes searching my face, presumably to see if I was going to start bawling and drop her, he handed her to me with the tenderness with which one might hand over a newborn babe.

While cremation frees the family to celebrate the life of a loved one in the great outdoors and away from the stuffy formality of funerals, things don’t always go to plan. Everyone has seen a movie where the ashes are scattered and the wind picks up and blows them into the faces of the grieving party. The best story of an ashes mishap took place at a scattering of my father-in-law, Donald Garvey, Dad to seven glorious children, the sixth of whom is my husband, Guy Garvey. There we were to celebrate the greatly missed Don with his huge family at the Great Orme in Llandudno, the site of many a Garvey family holiday. Don had stated he wanted the day to emulate a painting by Jack Vettriano where a woman in a red dress dances with her partner in tails on a stormy day at the beach. Words were spoken on the clifftop, and an intrepid few descended to the shore. Granddaughter Lucie, in a scarlet off-the-shoulder dress, hoicked up her skirts and waded into the unusually clear and calm blue sea to scatter her beloved grandad, as per his specific wishes, in the Welsh tide. Job done, as Lucie solemnly made her way back to her family on shore, she piped up with the now immortal line, “I think I’ve got some of Grandad in mi’ knickers.”

The tiniest tube containing my mother was about three inches tall. I’d like to point out that I think scatter tubes are really badly designed. They open exactly the opposite way to the direction they look like they should, so you can easily scatter a loved one’s ashes by mistake. The contents of this tube had – mostly – gone where they were supposed to go, though it still contained the odd grain or 20 of my mother, so I couldn’t possibly throw it away. Plus it was conveniently pocket-size, so I took to carrying what was left of her with me everywhere I went. So far, so normal.

The next play I did was at the same theatre I had last performed at pre-Covid. It was the last show my mother ever saw, Love, Love, Love at the Lyric in Hammersmith. The new show, Scandaltown, was by the same writer, Mike Bartlett, and also at the Lyric. Everything felt eerily similar, yet between the two plays Ma had died and the whole world had turned on its arse. Now, here I was going to rehearsals in the same room, with some of the same people, but without Ma to chat to about how the play was going at the end of the day. Strange new world.

As I placed her tube in my rucksack on the first day working on the show, I remember thinking how thrilled she’d be, back in a rehearsal room once more. Nearer opening night, I decided she’d enjoy a permanent stint in my dressing room. My mother had used this same dressing room in 1985, when she was performing in Little Eyolf, a grim Nordic drama from 1894 by Henrik Ibsen. It is the “Number One” dressing room, the room nearest the stage, and here she was once again, sitting in front of a Hollywood mirror with its necklace of blazing bulbs, although this time in a tube. The only thing she missed out on was actually going on stage with me. That was her happiest place, after all, but I could not hide the tube anywhere in my tight-fitting gold lamé suit without having a very peculiar lump in my costume. So there she stayed, in her dressing room, waiting for the call to the stage that never came.

Actors are an emotional tribe at the best of times and come opening night I was a wreck. My maiden first night with no mother in the crowd made me sad, but this was a high-energy Restoration-style comedy so I had to pull myself together quick-smart. I looked at the small tube containing mama residue, and I don’t know what I was thinking, but I found myself opening it. The wrong way round. A few grains fell on to my dressing table and as I panicked and tried to put them back one by one with varying degrees of success, the PA system blared, “Miss Stirling, this is your call to stage.” It was time to make my entrance. The adrenaline started kicking in and now my heart was pounding. It was time to go.

In a panic, like a cocaine addict from a movie who can’t bear to waste a grain of the good stuff, I licked my finger, picked up the few spilt cinders, and popped her on my tongue. Grainy, in case you were wondering, but it didn’t feel wrong, it felt completely right. I laughed out loud at myself and the ludicrous situation. And then, just like that, my nerves disappeared.

I know this sounds batshit, but it made complete sense to me. After all, quite a lot of people think they are eating the body of Christ on a weekly basis, and at least this way I really could say I took her with me on stage that night, back on the boards where she belonged.

When I told a widow at the party afterwards what I had done, her eyes widened in recognition and she whispered urgently, “I do that, too!”

The difference is, she didn’t talk about it. No one talks about it. It’s secret animal behaviour and, let’s face it, most people do a lot worse in private. It’s just they keep shtumm. But it felt much more important to tell the truth – and I love feeling that some of her is on stage with me. She had refused to retire, after all, and this was my way of enabling her to keep on trucking.

I have done the same on every first night since then. As the five-minute call hits the PA before every press night, I open the tube – which I have become adept at – stick my finger in and whatever is collected goes in my gob. Some people listen to music before going on; some do press-ups. I eat the last vestiges of my mother. She was on stage with me on the opening night of Noël Coward’s Private Lives in 2023. Just knowing she was there gave me the confidence to play the part that night, to be joyful, to “Go Fly My Girl”, as she used to write in my first-night cards.

She’d have adored going on to the Hampstead theatre stage with me when I played Sarah Siddons in The Divine Mrs S, a play about the 18th-century actor whose revolutionary realism in performance caused her audiences to scream and faint. Ma used to quote Siddons to me. She’d say, “If it can be found in nature, I know it can be played” so of course she’d want to be with me under the spotlights as I said those exact words. Before the opening night of Giant at the Royal Court in 2024, the smash hit show about Roald Dahl’s antisemitism in which I played his wife, Felicity Crosland, to John Lithgow’s Roald, once more I nibbled on a crumb. I can’t not do it these days, even though there is hardly anything left; it’s the thought that counts.

She’s even been back to Broadway, baby. When Giant transferred to New York in March this year, my mother came with me. Oh, there’s no business like show business, and there was one terrible night when I returned to my dressing room post-show to find there had been a huge leak in the roof above my chair and everything was sopping wet. My first thought was, Oh no, Mother’s gone mushy! But in fact the outside of the tube was only a little damp and inside was bone dry.

Love is animal, and grief is certainly so. Dogs sniff bums by way of greeting; my mum bit mine on a regular basis and said as much on national television. “I sink my teeth into her flesh! I bury my nose in her stomach!” she declared to a bemused Michael Parkinson. Isn’t that sort of the same thing, and is it really so strange of me to put my mother, whence I came, back in the same mouth she formed in utero? It is my own act of faith. “Ashes to ashes, funk to funky,” as Bowie wrote. “I’ve loved all I’ve needed, love. Sordid details following … ”

Love made cannibals of us both. Despite a widow seeing the sense in my actions, judging by the looks on the faces of most people I tell, few others are in agreement. Reactions vary from sour lemon-sucking grimaces to downright disgust. Despite this, I will not be persuaded to give up the habit. I will die on the hill of my ash-eating, and to any who question my sanity, I reply, “It is natural! I’m sure it is, really! I promise I’m not going mad. It’s what she would have wanted!”