Diana Rigg: Channel 5 film to celebrate the career and life of Yorkshire actress who starred in All Creatures Great and Small, Avengers, James Bond’s On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Game of Thrones

Dame Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg was an actress whose career spanned multiple platforms from film to stage performances.

She made her professional stage debut in 1957 in The Caucasian Chalk Circle and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1959. Diana made her Broadway debut in Abelard and Heloise in 1971.

Diana starred in numerous TV shows and films including playing Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1968), Lady Holiday in The Great Muppet Caper (1981), Arlena Marshall in Evil Under the Sun (1982) and won a BAFTA for her role in the BBC miniseries Mother Love (1989). She won an Emmy Award for her role as Mrs Danvers in Rebecca (1997).

She has also appeared in a Doctor Who episode ‘The Crimson Horror’ (2013) and originally played Mrs Pumphrey in the 2020 adaptation of All Creatures Great and Small, she portrayed the role of Teresa di Vicenzo, wife of James Bond, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones (from 2013 to 2017) and Emma Peel in 51 episodes of the 1960s TV series The Avengers. Her final role was in Edgar Wright’s 2021 psychological horror film Last Night in Soho.

Diana was born in Doncaster to Louis and Beryl Hilda Rigg and had a brother four years her senior. Her father was an engineer born in Yorkshire and moved to India to work for the railway. Her mother moved back to the UK for Rigg’s birth, though between the ages of two months and eight years, Diana lived in Bikaner, Rajasthan, India, where her father worked up the career ladder to railway executive in the Bikaner State Railway. Diana spoke Hindi as her second language during those years.

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She was later sent back to England to attend a boarding school, Fulneck Girls School, near Pudsey. She trained as an actress at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art from 1955 to 1957.

A film called Diana Rigg: From Avengers to All Creatures: A Celebration chronicling her life and career on Monday, December 23, 2024 at 10.15pm on Channel 5 and My5.

Diana Rigg was one of Britain’s finest actors; she achieved almost instant stardom in 1965 when she was cast in The Avengers, which was considered the biggest TV show of the time. She starred in two seasons before landing her first major film role, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service opposite George Lazenby’s James Bond.

In this film charting her extraordinary life and career, Diana’s work is reflected upon by her peers and admirers including Game of Thrones stars Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Charles Dance, Jonathan Ross, Elaine Paige, Samira Ahmed and Edgar Wright, the director of Dame Diana’s final work on screen in the film Last Night in Soho and Nicola Walker will narrate.