In a 1967 episode of The Avengers, the evil, whip-swishing, megalomaniacal German movie mogul Z Z von Schnerk pays tribute to his leather-clad adversary, Emma Peel: “You are a woman of courage, beauty and action. A woman who could become desperate, yet remain strong, become confused yet remain intelligent, who could fight back, yet remain feminine.”
These days, Dame Diana Rigg, long unzipped but essentially the same package, continues to defend civilisation. Last week she came out in support of chivalry, declaring that women who objected to traditional courtesies such as men opening doors for them were “stupid”.
“If a man holds a door open for me, or pulls back a chair so that this old bag can sit down, I’m delighted,” she said. “If they put an arm around a woman and say, 'You look good today’, they can find themselves in court. Women who carp about that are stupid. They find it belittling, but it’s just good manners.”
Naturally, this didn’t go down too well with everyone. The Guardian threw a minor fit, accusing Rigg of “laying into other women”. Columnist Suzanne Moore said the 74-year-old was a “Gosh, I’m so successful, I don’t need feminism” type. The BBC quoted a source that said that extending simple courtesies to women might indeed be “benevolent sexism” and “potentially harmful”.
Rigg has been sniffy about the Sisterhood for decades, declaring in the Sixties: “I find the whole feminist thing very boring. They are so much on the defensive that they dare not love a man because they feel assaulted by being dependent.”
Today, in prime old-bathood, the vulnerability isn’t obvious. Few actresses who have been voted The Sexiest Woman on Television can reasonably expect to be still working in their seventies. Yet Rigg is in strong demand, guest-starring in last night’s Doctor Who episode “The Crimson Horror” (a title which, while equally befitting of the steamed-up feminists, refers to alien mischief) with her daughter Rachael Stirling.
She’s also at large among the heaving bosoms, serpents and swordfights of the TV fantasy smash Game of Thrones, in the role of Lady Olenna Tyrell. Author George R R Martin, who wrote the best-selling books the show is based on, says landing Rigg was a fantasy in itself. “She was the hottest woman on television ever,” he sighed last week. “I was madly in love with her in The Avengers, along with virtually all the boys of my generation.”
The Avengers, a quirkily British, make-it-up-as-you-go-along spy-fi series, followed the adventures of John Steed, a bowler-hatted Old Etonian special agent played by Patrick Macnee, and his glamorous-but-deadly assistant played first by Honor Blackman, and from 1965 to 1967 by Rigg. The show was a hit – but it wasn’t where the career of the young Ms Rigg had seemed to be heading.
She joined the programme from the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she had triumphed as Cordelia in Peter Brook’s King Lear. “If she doesn’t waste herself on silly stuff, she could be quite good,” concluded Brook, but his words went unheeded. Diana has never really explained what made her take the Emma Peel role beyond saying that it was “a perverse decision in a long line of perverse decisions”.
She has always been impetuous and prone, as one interviewer recorded it, to “sudden and explosive temper”, and has long excelled at playing women with unsettling, obsessive characters – Mrs Danvers, the spooky housekeeper in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and the deranged Mrs Dedlock in the BBC’s Bleak House among them.
You might trace such traits to a lonely childhood, the daughter of what she describes as “rather Edwardian” Yorkshire parents, who took her to India at the age of two months when her father found a job as a railway engineer. She was later sent to a boarding school near Leeds, where she “felt like a fish out of water. I was quite a loner.”
She felt drawn to acting, won a place at RADA, joining the RSC soon afterwards. Her first marriage, in 1973, to an Israeli painter, lasted three years. Her second, in 1982, to raffish Scottish landowner Archie Stirling, produced her only child, Rachael, but ended in 1990 after he had an affair with actress Joely Richardson. She lives alone, but repels any suggestion that her life has been a disappointment. A decade ago, when a newspaper described her as an “embittered” recluse in France, she successfully sued.
Apart from anything, this was an ungallant observation to make about a lady who has adorned the stage for 50 years, winning awards in the West End and on Broadway. Manners matter in the world of Dame Diana. Take her coat, pull her up a chair, and don’t ask about feminism. Or she might just squeeze back into the old leathers and plant a spike heel in your nostril.
