Diana Rigg played women who were quicker than the men around them and never bothered to hide it. On television and once in a Bond film she made that quickness look like good manners, and it took a partner as easy as Patrick Macnee to keep up.
Fi1m perspective
Emma Peel is told something ridiculous, and Diana Rigg does not blink. She takes in the threat and the joke at the same time, and she lets you watch her decide which one deserves her attention. That was what she did on screen that others did not: quickness worn as courtesy. The men around her, Patrick Macnee excepted, generally needed a beat to catch up, and she was too polite to wait.
She came to television from the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she had spent 1959 to 1966 playing Cordelia among other parts, and joined The Avengers in 1965, four years into its run. She stayed two series and left in 1968. Then On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), and then, for most of the next thirty years, the stage: the National Theatre, Broadway, Medea in 1992. Television had her again in Mother Love (1989) and, much later, as a run of sharp-tongued older women in Victoria (2016-17) and Game of Thrones (2013-17), where she was Olenna Tyrell.
Tracy Di Vicenzo is the best evidence of what she could do when a film needed rescuing. Tracy is a rich man's damaged daughter who drives too fast and does not want rescuing herself, and Rigg plays her with the same dry quickness she had brought to The Avengers. George Lazenby cannot act, and Peter R. Hunt's film has to work around him. Rigg does most of that work. She is better than he is in every scene they share, and instead of sinking him she carries him. The scene at Draco's birthday party, with Gabriele Ferzetti playing the worry under the comedy and John Barry's We Have All the Time in the World coming in underneath, is where we stopped keeping score against Connery and started watching the film, and it is her doing. Marjory Cornelius put her in a fur-trimmed ski suit that is unmistakably hers, and the costume is the least of it.
The caveat is how little of it there is. She made two things for the screen that we would send anyone to, both in the sixties, and then went back to the theatre, where the classical parts she was known for happened in rooms none of us can revisit. What survives on film is one partnership and one Bond girl, and the phrase does her no favours. Her Emma Peel and her Tracy are the same woman in different coats, alert to the danger and the absurdity at once, and that woman was not written often enough.
Start with The Avengers, with Macnee, and watch how each of them leaves room for the other's reaction. Then On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and be patient with the man in the suit. She was.
Biography
Dame Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg was an English actress. She played Emma Peel in the television series The Avengers (1965–1968) and Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones (2013–2017).
Rigg made her professional stage debut in 1957 in The Caucasian Chalk Circle and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1959. She made her Broadway debut in the 1971 production of Abelard & Heloise. Film roles include Tracy di Vicenzo in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), Lady Holiday in The Great Muppet Caper (1981) and Arlena Marshall in Evil Under the Sun (1982).
She won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress for Mother Love (1989) and an Emmy Award for Rebecca (1997). She was appointed CBE in 1988 and DBE in 1994 for services to drama.
