A (Yorkshire) lass unparallel'd

Boast thee, Death…. Downy windows close

In Antony and Cleopatra, Charmian closes the eyes of her asp-poisoned mistress with the following words:

So, fare thee well.
Now boast thee, Death. In thy possession lies
A lass unparallel'd. Downy windows, close;
And golden Phoebus never be beheld
Of eyes again so royal!

And thus spake Jenny Michelmore to Diana Rigg at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 1985. Thirty-five years later, on September 10th 2020, that same majestic Cleopatra, Dame Diana, took her last bow. Born in Doncaster, Diana Rigg always paid tribute to her Yorkshire roots. Her father was a railway engineer who was transferred to work on the railways in India where Diana learned Hindi as a second language. In later years, when an interviewer expected her to cite India when asking “where did you develop your ingrained sense of justice?”  Diana’s answer was “Yorkshire.” Although feeling she didn’t fit in when she returned to school in Leeds, Diana’s drama teacher at Fulneck, Sylvia Greenwood, instilled a love of Shakespeare and performing and Dame Diana returned to Leeds to receive an honorary degree and visit her old school.

Mistress of Theatre, TV, Cinema

At school Diana appeared as Orlando in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Emily Brontë in The Brontës. She went on to be crowned with plaudits, winning BAFTA, Emmy, Tony and Evening Standard Awards in her time. (And striking out – successfully – for equal pay with her co-star in The Avengers at a time when it was rare for women to highlight inequality.) Highlights included:

• In Theatre: Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle and Mother Courage, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Twelfth Night, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra (as Cordelia, Viola, Lady M and Cleopatra), Ronald Millar’s Abelard and Helouise, Stoppard’s plays Jumpers and Night and Day, both Eliza Dolittle and Mrs Higgins (twice) in My Fair Lady, Sondheim’s Follies, Euripides’ Medea, Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer and Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard
• On TV: Shakespeare’s King Lear (as Regan), The Morecambe and Wise Show, Clytemnestra in The Oresteia, Ibsens’s Hedda Gabler, the 1985 Bleak House, her BAFTA-winning turn in Mother Love, Moll Flanders, Mrs Danvers in 1997’s Rebecca, Oleanna Tyrell in Game of Thrones, and cameos in popular programmes like Victoria, Detectorists, Doctor Who and the forthcoming Black Narcissus. But she will always be associated with her groundbreaking performance as Emma Peel in 51 episodes of The Avengers
• On film: Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Julius Caesar (as Helena and Portia), Mrs Tracey Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Theatre of Blood, A Little Night Music, The Great Muppet Caper, Evil Under The Sun, The Painted Veil and the forthcoming Last Night in Soho

As well as her Shakespeare roles, I was most affected by (on TV) her performances in The Avengers, Mother Love, Moll Flanders, Game of Thrones and Detectorists; on film the shock of her fate in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; but I was lucky enough to see her grimy, cackling, pipe-smoking, funny, grotesque Mother Courage on stage at the National Theatre in 1995 – a character full of grim energy at the beginning, dragging her enormous cart around the stage, quipping, dominating, manipulating; and, by the end of the production, a zombified hollowed-out shell of a woman, emblematic of all people shattered by the effects of needless war. An extremely un-vain performance. An acting legend.