Profile of Diana Rigg on Famous Like Me

Dame Diana Rigg, DBE (born July 20, 1938) is a British actress.

Rigg was born Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg in the South Yorkshire town of Doncaster to Beryl Helliwell and Louis Rigg, a newspaperman who had been born in Yorkshire. She lived in India between the ages of two and eight and then went to school at Fulneck in Leeds.

She is particularly known for her role in the British 1960s television series The Avengers, where she played the sexy secret agent Emma Peel. Her career in film, television and the theatre has been wide-ranging, including roles in the Royal Shakespeare Company between 1959 and 1964. Her professional debut was in The Caucasian Chalk Circle in 1955.

Rigg tried out for the role of Emma Peel in the Avengers on a whim, without ever having seen the program. Though she was hugely successful in the role, she did not like the lack of privacy television brought. She also didn't like the way she was treated by ITV-- after a dozen episodes, she discovered that she was being paid less than the cameraman. For the second season, she held out for a raise in pay (from 90 to 180 pounds) a week), but there was still no question of her staying for a third year. Patrick Macnee, her costar on the series, noted that Rigg had later told him that she considered him and her driver to be her only friends on the set.

After leaving The Avengers she returned to the stage, including playing two Tom Stoppard leads, Ruth Carson in Night and Day and Dorothy Moore in Jumpers. A nude scene with Australian-born actor Keith Michell in Abelard and Heloise led to a notorious description of her as "built like a brick basilica with too few flying buttresses," by the acerbic Serbian-American critic John Simon. In 1986, she took a leading role in the West End production of Stephen Sondheim's musical Follies.

On the big screen, she became a Bond girl in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), playing Tracy Bond. Her character, to date, is the only girl to officially marry James Bond. Her other films include The Assassination Bureau (1969), The Hospital (1971), Theatre of Blood (1973), and A Little Night Music (1977).

She lived with Peter Saville for some time but would not marry him (and he was married already). She did marry Menahem Gueffen, an Israeli painter, from 1973-1976, and Archibald Stirling, a theatrical producer, former officer in the Scots Guards, and a member of one of Scotland's grandest families, from 1982-1990. By Stirling she has a daughter, Rachael Atlanta Stirling, who was born in 1977, and is also an actress.

Dame Diana was made CBE in 1987 and appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire DBE in 1994.

In the 1990s she had triumphs with roles at the Almeida Theatre in Islington (north London), including Medea in 1993, Mother Courage in 1995, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1996. On television, she has appeared as "Mrs. Danvers" in Rebecca and as the amateur detective "Mrs. Bradley" in a series of mysteries.

From 1989 until 2003 she hosted the PBS television series Mystery!, taking over from Vincent Price, her co-star from Theatre of Blood.

In the 1980s, after reading stinging reviews of a stage performance she had given, Rigg was inspired to collect the worst theatrical reviews she could find into a tongue-in-cheek (and best-selling) compilation entitled No Turn Unstoned.

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