#also dame Emma said hi to me and one of the new knights (???) was doing crowd work and she pet my wolf head :3 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

sparklywaistcoat · 4 years ago

Text

I find the online version of the 1967 TV Times interview with Diana Rigg unreadable online, so I’m reproducing it here for anyone else who has difficulty with accessibility due to the web page’s design.

The Girl Behind Emma Peel, TV Times, 12/10/1967 (reprinted here from http://deadline.theavengers.tv/tvt1067a.htm)

...the two worlds of actress Rigg... above, as Emma Peel of THE AVENGERS; a series seen in 40 countries; men feast their eyes on her while muttering endearments in 22 languages. Right, Diana as she is to herself...

Diana Rigg has returned to Shakespearean acting - she is the female lead in a film version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream".

As far as she was concerned, it was the most wonderful thing that had happened to her in years.

She had been Emma Peel's alter ego so long she had to get away - - or else.

"I had become paranoid," she assured me, "with an underlying urge to pack and run. It is a curious thing. People who have never been subjected to it can never really understand what it means.

"I can only describe it as a sense of panic that seizes you when you are Diana to yourself and you are walking down the street. An instant later, you are somebody else to a lot of people who behave as if you belong to them.

"If you are quite a private person, which I am, this seems an intrusion on my privacy. I just have to run.

"Mind you," she adds, with an apologetic smile, "I am not ungrateful. I will be the last to minimise what television has done for me. It is a phenomenon, a miracle medium, that can accomplish in six months what takes years on the stage. Suddenly, you are famous. Suddenly, everybody knows you.

"The point is, though, that you are not yourself. Only the other person you portray in the series. That person is, of necessity, imposed by television, one-dimensional. You ask yourself - - is it worth it?

It should be. In the three years that Diana Rigg has spent in THE AVENGERS she has been catapulted into a position of bargaining power.

Hollywood producers have offered £100,000 to work in one film. It seem they would go higher, if that is what she wants. But she has turned them down.

"So far I have not been offered anything I want," she says. "I don't want a long-term contract. As an actress I will work where and for whom I want, if the script is exciting enough.

"If a script is good and they have a director I can trust, then I will do it."

Really it is a matter of time. The big, international film-makers are confident they will have lassoed this high-spirited long-legged English girl long before Emma Peel loses her hold on the masses - if she ever does.

THE AVENGERS is eagerly watched each week in 40 countries, and Emma Peel (Mrs.) is the series' irrepressible whimsical Amazon of the jet set. Men feast their eyes on her while muttering endearments in 22 languages, and their women try to emulate her - - but they never will, of course.

Consumption of champagne the world over has been increasing ever since John Steed and Emma Peel began toasting each other in bubbly stuff, from the television tube.

"Avengerwear" - - Emma's fancy "cat" suits and things - - is reaching the shelves and racks of department stores all over the world.

"Emma Peel's" international fan mail, still growing by leaps and bounds, promises to assume astronomical figures before the winter is out.

Diana never touches this mail and has enlisted mother, in Leeds, to head the Emma Peel fan mail operation.

Says Diana: "We have this room at home, measuring 20ft. by 15ft., and it is full of letters. More are delivered each day - all addressed to me.

"I am supposed to answer them. But I can't, and that worries me deeply. I get persecuted by the mere thought that there's an obligation which I am not willing to fulfil.

"That is where mother comes in. She reads, and she answers. And I feel ashamed. But I can't help it.

"People have made up their minds to identify me with a fantasy of theirs on television. In their minds they want to have a relationship with me based on fantasy which can take any form.

"I have heard from my mother that there have been letters from children saying: "You look like my dead mother and so I write to you." I think that is terrifying."

The story of Diana Rigg is, in a way, the story of two women - the real one and the imaginary one. They are identical twins.

The conflict within this beautiful and intelligent young woman, who is just a little older than 29, reminds me of the case of Sean Connery, alias James Bond.

In Connery's case, though, there was resentment. Connery, the man, gradually developing such a passionate hatred for the image he had created that he refused to continue as Bond even at a million dollars a throw.

He made his last two Bond films under protest. Bond made him a multi-millionaire, but you cannot escape the feeling that he would settle for half this amount if his identity remained - that of himself and not that of the slick, women-loving, superb and deadly Secret Agent 007.

Emma Peel has some of the same qualities as 007, well-screened and suppressed, to fit into a family-watching hour on television.

The innuendo, contained in the name has been a source of Rigg's unconcealed unhappiness.

Asked what innuendo, she blushes and confides in a conspiratorial whisper: "Believe it or not, Emma Peel is a phonetical transposition of "M Appeal", the M in this case standing for Men. In other words, "Men Appeal." Isn't it a scream? Sorry that I blush."

She adds wistfully: "I wanted to be Lady Peel, not for any grandiose reasons, but simply because it seemed to get some rather good comments over on the English aristocracy. Of course they wouldn't do it."

"They" being the producers who have been running the show like a tightly-run ship.

Not unlike Sean Connery after "Goldfinger", Diana Rigg said goodbye to THE AVENGERS on the last day of a contractual stay at an ITV studio in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, last August 31st.

"They" were highly hopeful that she would be back, if not immediately, then later.

The production schedule could be stretched to accommodate her, she was reminded. A new regime was taking command of the series, and this, it was felt, would offer Diana an incentive.

She was not sure. But on the last day of the last batch at the close of shooting at 5.20pm she produced a bottle of champagne to toast her co-star and co-workers.

They had become a closely-knit family, and she would miss them if she were not to come back.

"I am devoted to Patrick," she says, referring to co-star Patrick Macnee, who plays John Steed. "I'm frightened of minimising him by talking about him, because it always sounds so glib, but he's an extremely generous and gentle and marvellous man."

They are comrades-in-arms on television. Off screen they are the best of friends, but that is all. Macnee married a second time during the series. Again to quote her, she is "totally committed" to another man.

Diana is simply devoted to a number of other people on the series, including her stand-in, Diana Enright, and her double, stunt-woman, Cyd Child, who resembles her so much that all three directors of the series have dared to have Cyd perform her stunts in full-face and semi-close-up.

Viewers have yet to write to complain that the girl hurling herself through the air at an adversary is not Diana Rigg.

And then, there's Diana's studio chauffeur, John Taylor, who is also her "Man Friday".

"I wouldn't know what to do without him," she says. A confidante, he also does her shopping while she is working, and has the ability to always be there when needed.

Diana didn't join the series under duress. She was tested for the role, as were others after John Steed's leading lady Cathy Gale (actress Honor Blackman) left the series - - ironically for a Bond flick, "Goldfinger".

Why did a promising young Shakespearean actress offer her services to a television series Shakespearean actors have looked down on with patronising dismay? To quote the lovely Diana: "I did it because I had left the Royal Shakespeare Company knowing that if I renewed my contract and stayed on for three or four years, I would have progressed and played good parts, but I was yearning for additional scope.

"To accomplish this I would have to plunge into the deep end, and nothing seemed deeper than this. I was right. Nothing is deeper."

Before dawn in a delightfully feminine bedroom the phone jangles. The young woman sleepily answers. Then struggles out of bed, just like a scene from THE AVENGERS.

But the call was from the telephone service Diana Rigg instructed to wake her. It is still only 6.30 a.m. She gropes through the house, takes her luke-warm bath, drinks a glass of lemon juice. Into the street by 6.50 a.m. - without a touch of make-up. "I've got no vanity at that time of the morning."

North London's suburb of St. John's Wood is still fast asleep and there's no one to catch sight of Diana Rigg below her perfectly-groomed best. Except John Taylor, her chauffeur. He arrives a few minutes earlier, but his instructions are to wait .... about two lines are incoherent here...

"I'm never late," she shudders, "comatose that I still am, and I hate that sound of the bell - at this ghastly hour."

Off to the studios in Borehamwood, Herts. She reads the morning paper on the way.

"It isn't my paper," she says, "It's John'. I don't like it but it's the only paper there, so I read it. Every morning." Apparently it had never occurred to her to ask John to bring her a paper. And so... another day in the life of Emma Peel.

This has been her routine since she became a television star. Diana moved to this house, a lot more compatible with her status, from an old mews cottage she has lived in for five years. Not that she was so concerned with status symbols. Diana Rigg couldn't care less about such things.

She simply fell in love with the old house in St. John's Wood. And her accountant approved of the move.

At her new address previously lived the artist Augustus John; and once Dame Laura Knight.

There, Diana Rigg now lives in the style and comfort of her private world revolving around a specially designed kitchen and window boxes sprouting home-grown herbs.

The house is out of bounds. Except close friends. Not that she is a recluse. She feels that her life is her "own ruddy business". But when in the mood, she will readily explain that she is every jealous of preserving her own privacy.

She insists on leading a life she considers right for her; not concerned with what she defines as "other people's social consciousness. I like to do because I wish to, not because I ought to."

Diana was born in Doncaster, in Yorkshire, on July 20th, 1938. She had spent the early part of her life at Jodhpur in Rajputna. Her family was in the Indian Government Service. Later, she was sent home to school at Great Missenden in Bucks. Eventually, her parents returned to Yorkshire to settle in Leeds, where they now live.

There, Diana finished her education at Fulneck Girls' School, enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (The RADA) and two years later graduated to an acting career. Was she withdrawn as a child? "No, I don't think so. I had the ability to withdraw and I still have it. But above all I always has a strong sense of personal identity.

"One thing that I never did was dream. I was always very practical. I grew interested in the theatre when I was small but not because it offered me an entrance to a world of fantasy, but because it gave me a chance to assert myself. And I loved its freedom. I thought of it as a challenge."

Diana reflects: "I can still remember the first time I met an audience on these terms. I was an understudy at Stratford-on-Avon, when I was called on to replace the principal in 'Alls Well That Ends Well'. Her name was Priscilla Morgan.

"They gave me maybe an hour's rehearsal. By a coincidence my parents were out front that night. I didn't tell them that I was going on, so that when I came out and started shaking, they thought I was just walking on. Then they realised, and sort of clutched each other in absolute fear.

"My fear was of a different kind. I was simply not sufficiently prepared and so I was annoyed with myself. Still, the audience was very kind as it always is when an understudy takes over and doesn't want to make a complete mess of the play, and I was led forward and allowed to take a solo bow.

"I played it for about a week, I guess. And it was about the end of the week only that I began to enjoy it."

Then Diana was 20 years old and earning £7 10 shillings a week. "To make ends meet, I was living on faggots, scraps of meat put inside intestines you still get at the butchers in the provinces. Poor people's food. They cost fourpence each.

"Four times a week, my dinner would consist of two faggots and maybe some potatoes and another vegetable, and fruit. And you know what? I was very healthy. And very happy."

Diana had an old second-hand bicycle for transport around Stratford. "And not only did I make the £7 10s stretch, but I could never do without perfume. I guess I was so very young and this particular perfume was very heavy and musky and made me feel extremely sensual ... I never changed my perfume in all these years!"

Her faggot-eating period came to an end when she moved to London to appear in the London productions of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The bicycle went. Now she drives a green Mini. She lived in the mews cottage, all this still modestly. No more faggots, but all the perfume that she felt was required, by a young actress, not too bad-looking.

She took a small bottle when she travelled to the United States, appearing in 'King Lear' and 'The Comedy of Errors' on alternate nights.

The company also toured the Continent, as far as Moscow. From her experience on this tour comes Diana's boundless admiration for actor Paul Scofield.

"He's been my ideal since I first saw him on the stage. I was working with him in 'King Lear' when I became aware of his sense of identity, a strong totally compromising identity."

She says: "The beauty of it is that here is a man who has just won an Oscar in an Oscar-winning film and Hollywood is after him. What does he do? He's gone back to Stratford. Obviously, he doesn't care for the money. And he's right. Of course, it's your beliefs that matter.

"In a way I followed his example when I agreed to film "A Midsummer Night's Dream". Peter Brook was doing it and I believe in him and I grew up with him, so I had to answer his call. Professionally speaking, I am part of his troupe.

"Even though I think I'm too bad for the part. The pay? Obviously a pittance by comparison with what I'm making, but then, money is so transitory ... I will not forget that I could, when forced to, live on £7 and 10 Shillings.

Tourists at Athens airport could swear that the young woman killing time in the long drab waiting room by stopping at souvenir counters to inspect, for the umpteenth time, the pseudo-Grecian vases for sale was... Emma Peel.

She wore her auburn hair loose, letting it flow to her shoulders in the manner of the star of THE AVENGERS. And her mini-skirt revealed a pair of very feminine, familiar and beautiful legs.

"It was not easy to say I was not Mrs. Peel," Diana Rigg recalls, "because I dislike lies. But I would have had to explain why and what I was doing there, and it was a long story."

Actually, she was changing planes, going from London to a little-known place in Western Greece.

Eventually a shaky little plane which flies up into the mountains over some breathtakingly lovely countryside delivered her there, to make the trip worth her while.

Two days later, she took the same route back to London and Borehamwood, Herts., to resume where Emma Peel had left off.

It was an unconventional way to spend two days off the series. "I go to the craziest places for the weekend," she said, dismissing all attempts to explain herself.

In the case of the Greek place, a British film unit was there shooting "Oedipus, The King", and lots of friends were there.

One weekend last winter she flew to Zurich, rented a car at the airport and set out, a map in her lap, for Klosters, the Swiss ski resort.

"I drove through the night, with the craziest Swiss drivers whizzing past me over the ice-covered road," she said. "It twisted its way through the mountains, and I just hung on the wheel and prayed. I could have turned back, but I didn't. Too proud."

Until this experience, she had never motored on the Continent before, much less had snow-covered mountains by herself.

All of which seems to indicate that, not unlike Emma Peel, Diana Rigg is a rather unusual person.

It was she - and not Emma Peel - who helped to launch the mini-skirt, in an attempt to be different.

"The designer and the other men were horrified," she said, chuckling at memories of production executives looking aghast at the abbreviated skirt she was wearing and which she wanted Emma to wear.

"They pulled their hair ... said you can't do that, it's impossible ... I argued that one must look forward and not back and by wearing these brief skirts, one was looking forward.

"In fact, one was creating fashion very avant-garde, rather than remaining at the tail end of last year's styles. And it turned out that I couldn't have been more right."

Not that she has profited financially from the so-called "Avenger-wear" that mirrors her ideas. After all, she's an actress!

Nor does she care to identify with an image. "I never wear the clothes in the series outside," she said.

"But there's a style there that I think is common to both of us, and I have no intention of changing my appearance after Emma Peel is no more. After all, it was I who affected her."

She has no intention either of abandoning the mini-skirt, which, as far as she is concerned, was from the beginning Diana Rigg expressing herself.

Where the tastes of Emma Peel and Diana Rigg meet is champagne. Emma loves it, Diana loves it. And, for the record, she loved it before she became Emma Peel.

"I'm always very well stocked," she said, "but I never drink it at the studio.

"The stuff Patrick Macnee and I drink on camera is bubbly lemonade, very harmless. I don't touch the stuff then. You mustn't when you work. At home, well, that's another story ..."

Diana's secret passion is to cook, and to have friends come to her house in London's St. John's Wood to enjoy her meals, without much ceremony, exquisitely prepared with the help of her home-grown herbs.

"I'm not joking," she proudly expounded on the subject of her herbs. "They are all mine, and they all grow in window boxes outside my kitchen. Every window has its own herbs.

"Left to right, I have sage, thyme, marjoram, rosemary, which is very beautiful, chervil, and two kinds of mint, sorrel and my bay trees.

"Bay tree leaves are marvellous for fish ... true mine are more like baby trees. And basil, and fennel, and chives. And that's it. Except that they all live and prosper, outside my kitchen windows in London." The secret passion of Diana Rigg ...

"I had always wanted to grow my own herbs," she said. "This was my obsession. So I got the address of a herb farm 95 miles out of town, and one morning I went there.

"A little old lady took me around and she muttered under her breath and said they would never grow in the London smoke. I said I'd like to try anyway. So, she shook her head and gave me what I wanted.

"They came in little pots, as I brought them back to London they were all looking sad and sick.

"So I put them in larger pots and stuck them in my window boxes and every day I watered them out of a jug. And the miracle came to pass."

Diana Rigg has become enriched as an actress in the years at Stratford-on-Avon; on tours and the three years that she has played Emma Peel in THE AVENGERS.

She tells about the director she met at a party who told her he had a marvellous script for her. She had it sent over.

"Well, if I wasn't the girl who comes tearing through the door with a gun in one hand and a flame-thrower in the other," she reported in mock despair, "I was the sexy siren sneaking through the door in Veronica Lake style. I lost my temper, for the first time.

"I sent them a message saying that I couldn't do it."

#diana rigg #tv times #emma peel #the avengers

12 notes · View notes