Diana Rigg

About Diana Rigg

Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg was an English actress. She is best known for playing Emma Peel in the 1960s TV series The Avengers (1965–68), Countess Teresa di Vicenzo, wife of James Bond, in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), and Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones (2013–17). She has also had an extensive career in theatre, including playing the title role in Medea, both in London and New York, for which she won the 1994 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. She was made a CBE in 1988 and a Dame in 1994 for services to drama.

Rigg made her professional stage debut in 1957 in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1959. She made her Broadway debut in the 1971 production of Abelard & Heloise. Her film roles include Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968); Lady Holiday in The Great Muppet Caper (1981); and Arlena Marshall in Evil Under the Sun (1982). She won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress for the 1989 BBC miniseries Mother Love, and an Emmy Award for her role as Mrs. Danvers in the 1997 adaptation of Rebecca. Her other television credits include You, Me and the Apocalypse (2015), Detectorists (2015), and the Doctor Who episode "The Crimson Horror" (2013) opposite her daughter, Rachael Stirling.

In the 1960s, Rigg lived for eight years with director Philip Saville, gaining attention in the tabloid press when she disclaimed interest in marrying the older and already-married Saville, saying that she had no desire "to be respectable". She was married to Menachem Gueffen, an Israeli painter, from 1973 until their divorce in 1976.

Rigg had a daughter, actress Rachael Stirling (born 1977), with Archie Stirling, a theatrical producer and former officer in the Scots Guards, and son of Bill Stirling. They married five years later in 25 March 1982, but divorced in 1990 after Archie's affair with the actress Joely Richardson.

Rigg died at her daughter Rachael Stirling's home in London on 10 September 2020, at the age of 82. Rigg's cause of death was lung cancer, with which she had been diagnosed in March that year.