[msb-alumni] Diana Rigg, Witty, Stylish Emma Peel of 'The Avengers,' Is Dead at 82 on September 10, 2020
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2020 14:19:48 -0400
BlankDiana Rigg, Witty, Stylish Emma Peel of 'The Avengers,' Is Dead at 82. By
Anita
Gates.
Ms. Rigg also played many classic roles onstage in both New York and London
and, late
in her career, found new fans on 'Game of Thrones. Diana Rigg, the British
actress
who enthralled London and New York theater audiences with her performances in
classic
roles for more than a half-century but remained best known as the
quintessential new
woman of the 1960s -- sexy, confident, witty and karate-adept -- on the
television
series "The Avengers," died on Thursday at her home in London. She was 82. Her
daughter, Rachael Stirling, said in a statement that the cause was cancer.
Ms. Rigg had late-career success in a recurring role, from 2013 to 2016, as the
outspoken and demanding Lady Olenna Tyrell on HBO's acclaimed series 'Game of
Thrones. 'I wonder if you're the worst person I ever met,' Lady Olenna once
said to
her nemesis Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey). 'At a certain age, it's hard to
recall.
But Ms. Rigg's first and biggest taste of stardom came in 1965, when, as a
26-year-old veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company, she was cast on the
fourth
season of ITV's 'The Avengers. As Emma Peel, she was the stylish new
crime-fighting
partner of the dapper intelligence agent John Steed (Patrick Macnee), replacing
Honor
Blackman, who had left to star in the James Bond film 'Goldfinger. (Ms.
Blackman died
in April.) Although Mrs. Peel, as Steed frequently addressed her, remained on
the
show relatively briefly, she quickly became the star attraction, especially
when 'The
Avengers' was broadcast in the United States, beginning in 1966. Reviewing the
1969
movie 'The Assassination Bureau,' in which she starred, Vincent Canby of The
New York
Times described Ms. Rigg in her Emma Peel persona as a 'tall, lithe Modigliani
of a
girl with the sweet sophistication of Nora Charles and the biceps of
Barbarella. She
had left the show by then for a luminous career in feature films. Her other
roles
included Helena in Peter Hall's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (1968), Portia in
an
all-star version of 'Julius Caesar' (1970), a free spirit who tempted George C.
Scott
in Arthur Hiller and Paddy Chayefsky's satire 'The Hospital' (1971), and the
cheated-on wife in Harold Prince's interpretation of the Stephen Sondheim
musical 'A
Little Night Music' (1978). But again it was for something of an action role
that she
received the greatest attention, when she played a crime boss's daughter in 'On
Her
Majesty's Secret Service' (1969), the only James Bond film to star George
Lazenby.
Her character had the distinction among Agent 007's movie love interests of
actually
marrying Bond, but she was killed off in the final scene, for the sake of
future plot
lines. Ms. Rigg returned to television, largely in more serious roles than
before,
among them Clytemnestra, Hedda Gabler, Regan in 'King Lear' and Lady Dedlock in
'Bleak House. And although she said that she was not a fan of mysteries
herself, she
was the host of the PBS series 'Mystery! from 1989 to 2003 and played Gladys
Mitchell's unconventional detective Adela Bradley on the BBC series 'The Mrs.
Bradley
Mysteries' from 1998 to 2000. Ms. Rigg never neglected the theater, where she
had
begun. She joined the National Theater Company in 1972 and went on to acclaimed
performances both on Broadway and in the West End, interpreting writers as
different
as Tom Stoppard ('Night and Day,' 'Jumpers') and Mr. Sondheim (a 1987 London
production of 'Follies'). She continued working in theater well into her 70s,
starring in 'The Cherry Orchard' in 2008 and 'Hay Fever' in 2009, both at the
Chichester Festival Theater. One of her final stage roles was as Mrs. Higgins,
the
protagonist's imperious but sensible mother, in a 2011 production of
'Pygmalion' at
the Garrick Theater in London. Thirty-seven years before, at what was then the
Albery
Theater, a few streets away, she had been the play's ing? nue, Eliza Doolittle.
(She
played Mrs. Higgins again in the 2018 Lincoln Center Theater revival of 'My
Fair
Lady.') Wherever Ms. Rigg went, honors seemed to follow. She received the 1994
Tony
Award for best actress in a play for her performance in the title role of
'Medea. In
London she had already received the Evening Standard Theater Award for the same
role,
an honor she received again, in 1996, for both Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf' and Bertolt Brecht's 'Mother Courage and Her Children. She
never won
the Olivier Award, London's Tony equivalent, but she was nominated three times:
for
'Mother Courage' (1996), 'Virginia Woolf' (1997) and Jean Racine's
'Britannicus/Ph?
dre' (1999). Her most notable British screen award was a 1990 best actress
honor from
Bafta, the British film and television academy, for 'Mother Love,' a BBC
mini-series
in which she played a murderously possessive parent. From 1967 to 2018 she was
nominated for nine Emmy Awards, including four for 'Game of Thrones. She won in
1997
as best supporting actress in a mini-series or special for her role in a
British-German production of 'Rebecca,' based on the Daphne du Maurier novel.
Mrs.
Peel had become Mrs. Danvers. Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg was born on July 20,
1938, in
Doncaster, Yorkshire, the daughter of a railroad engineer who soon moved his
family
to India for a job with the national railway. She returned to England when she
was 8
to attend boarding school and remained in the country to complete her
education. Ms.
Rigg entered the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at 17 and made her professional
debut
two years later, in 1957, in Brecht's drama 'The Caucasian Chalk Circle. As a
member
of the Royal Shakespeare Company (1959-64), she began in minor parts and
advanced to
meatier ones, including Lady Macduff in 'Macbeth' and Bianca in 'The Taming of
the
Shrew. Ms. Rigg was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1988
and a
Dame Commander in 1994. Her marriages -- to Menachem Gueffen, an Israeli artist
(1973-76), and to Archibald Sterling, a Scottish businessman and theater
producer
(1982-90) -- ended in divorce. Her surviving daughter, Rachael, from her second
marriage, is an actress. Ms. Rigg is also survived by a grandson. Although Ms.
Rigg's
career was distinguished, it had disappointing if not unpleasant moments. An
American
sitcom, 'Diana' (1973), in which she played a fashion designer on her own in
New
York, lasted only one season. And when she did a much-talked-about nude scene
on
Broadway in 'Abelard and Heloise' (1971), she was nominated for a Tony but
suffered
the particular slings and arrows of one critic, John Simon of New York
magazine, who
was notorious for criticizing actors' looks and described her as 'built like a
brick
mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses. Ms. Rigg fought back at critics
in
general by compiling similarly unkind criticism in a 1983 book, 'No Turn
Unstoned:
The Worst Ever Theatrical Reviews. Its reassuring examples included a
comparison, by
the Australian broadcaster Clive James, of Laurence Olivier's Shylock to the
cartoon
character Scrooge McDuck. In interviews, Ms. Rigg was both philosophical and
flexible
about her career. She suggested in the 1970s that 'it would have been death to
have
been labeled forever by that one TV series,' referring to 'The Avengers,' then
defended a return to television in the late '90s with the thought that 'being
doomed
to the classics is as limiting as doing a series for the rest of your life. But
when
she was appearing in 'Medea,' her love for the stage was evident. 'It's simply
to do
with an appetite now for really good work in the final third of my life,' she
told
The New York Times in 1994. 'The theater to me is home; in some curious way, I
don't
belong anywhere else.
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