The Avengers actor Diana Rigg has always been forthright onstage and off
WHEN Diana Rigg realised she was being paid less than the camera man for her popular role as Emma Peel in The Avengers, she went into action.
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WHENactor Diana Rigg was hired to play Emma Peel in The Avengers in 1965 her pay was £90 — less than the on-set camera operators. The star of the series, English actor Patrick Macnee, playing the character John Steed, was earning more than £400 a week.
Rigg threatened to quit at the end of her first season, so her pay was raised to £180. But she always felt she was poorly treated by everyone on set and at the TV production company. She would later say her only friends were Macnee and the driver who picked her up to take her to the studio in the morning.
At the end of her second season she decided she had enough, she hated not being able to walk down a street without people calling her “Ms Peel” and to make matters worse she was still well behind most of the men in terms of pay. McNee convinced her to stay for one more season and executives upped her pay to close to parity with her co star.
It was all in keeping with her TV character, a forthright, strong independent woman who knew how to get what she wanted. It is something that has been repeated in many of her characters, including more recently the blunt Oleanna in Game of Thrones.
Rigg, who turns 80 today, has been admired by men and an inspiration to women for more than 60 years.
She was born Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg on July 20, 1938, in Doncaster, Yorkshire. Her father was an engineer and Diana spent part of her childhood in India while her father worked with the India Imperial Railways. Hindi became her second language. She was later sent home to Yorkshire to a boarding school which she hated.
She described feeling like a “big lumpy girl” while at boarding school, but fortunately a teacher recognised her talent as an actor and encouraged her to follow it as a career. The teacher also convinced Rigg’s parents, despite their objections, to send their daughter to drama school.
The teacher proved to be right; in 1955 Rigg successfully auditioned to get into perhaps England’s most prestige theatre school the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She even ended her engagement to a young man when her father told her to chose between RADA and marriage. She graduated in 1957, appearing in her first professional stage production, Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle at the York Festival.
Other roles followed and in 1959 she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, before signing a five-year contract in 1960. Her roles were mostly small ones for small pay, but in 1961 critics had begun to notice, naming her the most promising newcomer.
While still performing on stage she began appearing in TV shows in the early ’60s and also began an affair with married TV director Philip Saville.
In 1964 Honour Blackman left her role as Dr Cathy Gale in the hit action adventure series The Avengers and producers looked for a replacement. They cast Elizabeth Shepherd, but seeing that she lacked the dynamism of Blackman, she was dropped in favour of newcomer Rigg, who made her debut in 1965. Her charisma and chemistry with McNee was immediately apparent making the show a bigger hit.
But Rigg “made a bit of a stink” about her pay after making just 12 episodes. She later said, “at the time it was considered very bad form. Any argument about money is ugly but I felt I was being exploited and I had to put a stop to it.”
She also got producers to arrange production schedules so she could appear as Cordelia in a production of King Lear with the RSC.
After leaving The Avengers she returned to the stage, but also made some notable film appearances. She played Tracy Bond, the only woman to get super spy James Bond to the altar in the 1969 film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service opposite Australian actor George Lazenby. She took on the role to gain some exposure in America. And in 1970 she gained even more exposure in a nude scene in the play Abelard and Heloise on the London stage.
Bond fame led her to film and theatre in the US. In 1973 Rigg married Israeli painter Menachem Gueffen, enthusing “I have met my match. We fight all the time, but it’s a marvellous, marvellous relationship.” But they fought too much and divorced in 1976.
Still busy with stage and screen commitments, she met married millionaire theatre producer Archie Stirling and their daughter Rachael was born in 1977. She married Archie in 1982, the marriage ended in 1990.
Despite a brief break to look after her daughter, Rigg has never been far from the stage or the screen, whether it was winning an Emmy for her portrayal of Mrs Danvers in a TV production of Rebecca in 1997, playing the sharp-tongued Oleanna Tyrell in Game Of Thrones, or winning a Tony in 2018 for a role in My Fair Lady.