British stage and screen actress, an attractive star who established her reputation in Shakespeare but gained international fame and popularity as karate-skilled secret agent Emma Peel in the TV action series The Avengers (1965–1968). Rigg’s other noted roles include Countess Teresa di Vicenzo, (the only ever) wife of James Bond, in spy film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) and the sharp-witted grandmother better known as “The Queen of Thorns” Olenna Tyrell in American fantasy drama TV series Game of Thrones (2013-2017).
Rigg won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress for the BBC miniseries Mother Love (1989), and an Emmy Award for her role as Mrs. Danvers in an adaptation of Rebecca (1997). In 1994 she won a Tony Award for Medea. She was made a CBE in 1988 and a Dame in 1994 for services to drama.
She starred briefly in her own American TV show Diana (1973-1974), and played Sutton in You, Me and the Apocalypse (2015), and opposite her daughter, Rachel Stirling, in Detectorists (2015). Her films range from Evil Under the Sun (1982) to Breathe (2017).
Rigg’s career in the theatre was wide-ranging, including roles in the Royal Shakespeare Company between 1959 and 1967. Her professional debut was as Natasha Abashwilli in the RADA production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle at the York Festival in 1957. On 1 April 1997, she finished a six-month stint on the London stage in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? calling it the most draining role she’d played.
In the 1960s, Rigg lived for eight years with actor/director Philip Saville, causing some degree of scandal in the tabloids when she disclaimed interest in marrying the older, already-married Saville, saying she had no desire “to be respectable”. She was married to Menachem Gueffen, an Israeli painter, from 1973 until their divorce in 1976, and to Archibald Stirling, a theatrical producer and former officer in the Scots Guards, from 25 March 1982 until their divorce in 1990. With Stirling, Rigg had daughter Rachael who was born in 1977.
Diana Rigg died at her home in London on 10 September 2020 at the age of 82 from cancer with which she had been diagnosed in March.
Link to Wikipedia biography