It was announced Thursday that the actress Dame Diana Rigg has died. She is perhaps best known now for her role in Game of Thrones but first hit the TV screens replacing Honor Blackman as “John Steed’s” assistant in the UK series “The Avengers” in 1965. The scene reflects the atitudes of the times.
“The Avengers” was intended by Lew Grade, the chief of the UK commercial TV broadcaster Associated Televison for international sales. Later series were made in color but broadcast in black and white in the UK. He would go on to produce movies including “Raise The Titanic” about which he remarked “it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic”.
Dame Diana is currently on British TV in a remake of “All Creatures Great and Small” about a Yorkshire vetinary, also broadcast by PBS in its Masterpiece strand. Her 55 year career included an episode of “Dr Who” specially written for her and her daughter. She was born in Doncaster, South Yorkshire but moved to India as a toddler when her father got a job on the railways. She would return to be educated in a boarding school run by the Moravian church in Yorkshire, with Hindi as her second language.
On leaving school, she trained as an actor at the prestigeous Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. After she joined the Royal Shakespear Company and was praised for her performance as Cordelia in a touring production of King Lear. She continued her stage work, at one point spending four hours on the Avengers set and then travelling to Stratford Upon Avon to play Regan opposite Laurence Olivier’s Lear. After “The Avengers” she played opposite George Lazenby’s Bond in the 007 movie “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service ”.
Her credits are long and various. Fellow actors remember her for her wry sense of humor that pervades her performances from Emma Peel to Mrs. Pumphrey in “All creatures ….” She will be much missed.