All About My Mother by Rachael Stirling review – a joyous love letter to Diana Rigg

Beautifully written by her daughter, this is a funny and intimate eulogy to the 60s star of The Avengers who went on to specialise in fierce, complicated women The late actor Diana Rigg declined to call herself a feminist, noting: “Why would I burn my bra?

I need my bra.” Nonetheless, her ideas on womanhood were ahead of their time. In an interview with Michael Parkinson, she observed how marriage was “all rather pagan, don’t you think? …

A lot of women see it as security.

Well, I’m not a woman who yearns for security.” Taking over from Honor Blackman as the high-kicking Emma Peel in the 1960s spy series The Avengers, Rigg refused to play subordinate sidekick to Patrick Macnee’s Steed, turning her character into a beacon of female empowerment.

When Rigg learned that not only was Macnee paid significantly more than she was, but the camera operator was too, she demanded a raise. She got it, but that didn’t stop the press from labelling her as a grasping diva.

Fifty years later, she told Newsnight: “Equal pay. That’s what feminism means to me, only that.” Continue reading...

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  All About My Mother by Rachael Stirling review – a joyous love letter to Diana Rigg