Comprehensive information and links about Diana Rigg

Diana 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 , 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 in 1955.

Rigg tried out for the role of Emma Peel in the Avengers on a whim, without ever having seen the programme. Though she was hugely successful in the role, she did not like the lack of privacy that television brought. She also didn't like the way that she was treated by I.T.V.; after a dozen episodes she discovered that she was being paid less than the cameraman. For the second series she held out for a rise 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 co-star in the series, noted that Rigg had later told him that she considered him and her driver to be her only friends on the set. [1]

After leaving ", which was based on a play by Noel Coward.

She also returned to the stage, including playing two Tom Stoppard leads, Ruth Carson in ion 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 (1969), playing Tracy Bond. Her character, to date, is the only girl to officially marry James Bond, though her character was killed off at the end of the film. Her other films include (1977).

She lived with Philip Saville for some time, but would not marry him (he was married already). She did marry Menachem Gueffen, an Israeli painter, which lasted 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, which lasted 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 and as the amateur detective "Mrs. Bradley" in a series of mysteries.

From 1989 until 2003 she hosted the PBS television series .

In the 1980s, after reading stinging reviews of a stage performance she had given, Rigg was inspired to compile the worst theatrical reviews she could find into a tongue-in-cheek (and best-selling) compilation, entitled