All About My Mother by Rachael Stirling review – a joyous love letter to Diana Rigg

The late actor Diana Rigg declined to call herself a feminist, noting: “Why would I burn my bra? I need my bra.” Nonetheless, her ideas on womanhood were ahead of their time. In an interview with Michael Parkinson, she observed how marriage was “all rather pagan, don’t you think? … A lot of women see it as security.

Well, I’m not a woman who yearns for security.” Taking over from Honor Blackman as the high-kicking Emma Peel in the 1960s spy series The Avengers, Rigg refused to play subordinate sidekick to Patrick Macnee’s Steed, turning her character into a beacon of female empowerment. When Rigg learned that not only was Macnee paid significantly more than she was, but the camera operator was too, she demanded a raise. She got it, but that didn’t stop the press from labelling her as a grasping diva.

Fifty years later, she told Newsnight: “Equal pay. That’s what feminism means to me, only that.” On the stage and screen, Rigg specialised in fierce, complicated women: Medea, Phèdre, Mother Courage, the wimple-clad Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones. Yet in life she refused to take herself or her job seriously.

Her fear of appearing earnest led her to decline offers of a biography. Now, six years after her death from cancer, her daughter, the actor Rachael Stirling, has taken on the task of documenting Rigg’s life. All About My Mother is a funny, intimate, often joyous and beautifully written eulogy to a woman who didn’t suffer fools yet remained blithely self-mocking and down to earth.

Asked what it meant to be made a dame, she replied: “I think it means I’m not supposed to say ‘fuck’ anymore.” Blending memoir and biography, Stirling builds a portrait based on her own recollections, plus research into Rigg’s performances, writings, recorded interviews and press cuttings collected and stashed in a trunk by her late grandmother Beryl. The book, Stirling says, “is not a detached narrative … This is what I know, what she said, what I’ve learned, what I want to write, what she wrote and what I think she wouldn’t mind my telling you.” Wild anecdotes of stars behaving badly include the time Rigg was lured to Benny Hill’s house with the promise of a party, only to find she was the sole guest. When he appeared in the garden proffering a drink and a semi-erect penis, Rigg turned away, shouted “LOOK!

George Lazenby’s claim – false apparently – that Rigg deliberately ate garlic before their love scene in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service led to a scathing war of words between the two actors via a series of open letters. As a youngster cutting her teeth on the stage, Rigg was a livewire: funny, rebellious, ambitious, given to corpsing from her own onstage pranks. Landing the role of Peel at 27, she found herself with a throng of male fans who wrote in their droves.