The actress Rachael Stirling’s vivid account of the death of her mother, The Avengers star Dame Diana Rigg, which concludes her new memoir of her life, is so heartfelt that the mere mention of it brings her to tears.
“I’m crying already,” she says when she speaks to HELLO!. “You write this thing, for the most part all on your own, and then it goes out into the world. It’s touching when it has an effect on people that you don’t know.”
It comes as Rachel, 49, publishes All About My Mother, a brutally honest account of life with the acclaimed actress Dame Diana Rigg, whose multi‑award-winning career covered more than 60 years of work on stage and screen before she died in 2020 aged 82.
© Dave Benett/Getty ImagesThe book is forensic, covering everything from her childhood in India, the huge fame – and royal adulation – she found as bombshell Emma Peel in The Avengers, her bust-up with George Lazenby on the James Bond set and those final days after she received a terminal cancer diagnosis in 2020. During this time, Diana moved in with Rachael, her only child, her musician son‑in-law, Guy Garvey – who is the frontman of the band Elbow – and grandson Jack, nine.
Rachael, who is celebrated for her roles in the BBC series Detectorists and on stage in the Olivier-winning play Giant alongside John Lithgow, began thinking about the book in 2021, when she opened a trunk owned by her grandmother Beryl, which contained a treasure trove of Diana’s school letters, press reviews and photos.
INSPIRED TO WRITE
It wasn’t until 2023, when she released a recording she’d made of her mother talking about how strongly she felt about the right to die, that the writing process “snowballed”, she says. “I wanted to write about her being alive. I missed her, and I wanted to bring her up again.”
She thinks her mother chose not to write her own memoir because she couldn’t bring herself to talk about herself with any seriousness, instead leaving “breadcrumbs” for Rachael to piece her story together.
It’s an affecting read, as the transcriber who typed up her mother’s letters told Rachael: “Doing this work has changed how I want to live my life,” the transcriber told her. “I want to seize every moment, I want to stop being timid, I want to be brave, be kind. I want to go out with all the boys. I want to live fully like your mum did.”
There were surprises in store; during her research for the book, Rachael discovered through her aunt that her mother had been engaged to an American GI at the age of 17. “That was a revelation,” she says.
She writes openly about her mother’s romantic life, in the same way they would talk when Diana was alive. “We both agreed we’d lost count!” she laughs of the number of lovers.
“There’s an endless stream of men. But, as she said, ‘You’re packed all so tight, stuffed in a girdle – no one’s getting in there.’ ”
© Getty ImagesDiana was married twice, first to the painter Menachem Gueffen, who Rachael describes as “an absolute wally”, between 1973 and 1976, and then to Rachael’s father, the theatre producer Archie Stirling, from 1982 until she discovered his affair with actress Joely Richardson in 1990.
Diana and Archie remained lifelong friends, and he would host lunches for her whenever she received recognition from the Palace.
“I remember her being nervous,” Rachael says of her mother going to get her damehood from Queen Elizabeth II in 1994 after she had finished a play in New York. “She loved the Queen. I remember she said the Queen had said to her, ‘What are you up to Diana?’ And Mama had said, ‘Well, your Majesty, I’m an unemployed dame.”
Diana was a great fan of Charles and Camilla, now the King and Queen, and Rachael has a collection of letters from the monarch, including one he wrote to Diana after she sent him an anthology of British countryside poetry she had edited, and one he wrote to Rachael after her mother died. “He’s obviously fond of her,” she says. “He wrote to me after Mama had died and said that he never missed an episode of The Avengers and that he loved her.”
CHALLENGING YEARS
Rachel is unflinching in her account of the rollercoaster relationship she had with her mother. Diana was not pleased when, aged 16, Rachael told her she wanted to become an actress. “She’s going to get no f***ing help from me!” Diana said to John Lithgow, her co-star at the time, with whom Rachael would later act in Giant. Although she forbade her from going to drama school, Rachael was accepted into the National Youth Theatre. Following Rachael’s performance in Othello, Diana presented her with a paperback copy of the play, complete with “fifty yellow sticky notes on which she had written all the things I had done wrong, scene by scene”.
She adds: “I was devastated, although it is funny to think of now.”
After drama school, their relationship disintegrated; Rachael describes her youngers self as “an arrogant arse”. She includes an excerpt from a letter her mother wrote, saying, “I love her profoundly, but there are times when I really don’t like her, which is sad.”
“I think she was probably frightened for me,” Rachael says now. “I think that the fear invariably does come across as disapproval or anger.”
It wasn’t until Rachael turned 45 that she thinks she finally got her mother’s approval, when she starred in a play called Plenty. “Mum was sitting next to Guy, and the interval came, and Mum, sobbing, turned to Guy and went ‘She’s a leading lady!’ I think the fact it was a long climb made it worth it when I got there in the end.”
Now, she cherishes the memories of Diana’s relationship with her grandson Jack in her final years, captured in “precious videos” that Rachael and Jack now watch together. “She really liked it when he was naughty – her favourite was when he was having a really bad tantrum. That was Mum’s idea of complete heaven, and about the more trivial thing, the better.”
Before the opening night of a play, Rachael says that she indulges in a unique ritual, by which she eats “a grain” of her mother’s ashes from a “tiny pot” she brings to the theatre. “I have a little grain and I just take her with me on stage,” she says. “And I know that she’d love it, because she’s up there rehearsing in the sky.”
There could be yet another book on Diana to come, about her love of the countryside and fishing, Rachael adds. “She liked being solitary and liked standing with a rod by the side of a river.”
© Alamy Stock PhotoIt’s a big year for Rachael, who will appear in the Disney+ hit Rivals, which returns with the second half of the second series later this year. “I feel so grateful to be there,” says Rachael, who will play Lady Monica Baddingham’s sister.
Rachael reveals that she initially auditioned for the part of Monica, played by Claire Rushbrook, dressed up with two of Jack’s toy rabbits on her shoulders. “Everyone knows how lucky they are,” she says of the set. “I’ve never been so happy in my life.”
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