Evergreen Avenger

DIANA Rigg keeps smiling, even when you mention The Avengers.

It is 20 years since she played Emma Peel and since then she has done everything from the Muppet Movie to Shakespeare.

But Diana, a stunningly beautiful 48-year old mother and stepmother is philosophical about the fact that she is likely to be linked to the 60s adventure series for the rest of her days.

Although she is one of the top actresses in the country, when is stared at as she passes along the street she knows it as Emma she is recognised and not Heloise, Lady Macbeth or even Eliza Doolittle.

But she says, "I have the best of both worlds. I have a well-known face, even if these days I am not exactly pursued."

As she posed for press photographs with her husband Archie Stirling outside Bath's Theatre Royal where she opened last night in Wildfire, several people stopped to stare.

Diana was clearly recognised by a woman in her late fifties and two men in their early twenties.

Although her hoe with Archie and their nine-year old daughter Rachael and two stepsons is in London, a lot of time is spent as a family at their home in Scotland.

There she manages to escape the Avengers, if not at provincial press conferences. The Scots, she says, are a discreet race and there she is known simply as Mrs Stirling.

Wildfire, a play by Richard Nash, who wrote The Rainmaker, which was both a Broadway and West End success is co-produced by Archie. After this week in Bath, it moves to the Phoenix Theatre, London.

Diana admits she is looking forward to returning to the West End - she was last there in 1983 with Rex Harrison - because she loves the lifestyle.

It has, she says, its pros and cons. The pros are that she can do things like take Rachael to and from school. One of the big cons is that she often collapses on Sundays unable to do anything very much.

She tends not to look directly into the future, although she wants to keep on working steadily for the rest of her life.

"One is always looking for new parts, classic roles. But it depends who is directing and what their ideas are - what it is that justifies a revival."

When she did Pygmalion it was because it had not been done like that before. It was a straight play done in an anti-romantic way.

She says playing the part of a woman who has at last come to grips with her own unhappiness at being in a corrupt society as she does here in Bath, is rather different from her other classic roles or, come to that, to the witch she played on television last weekend. Was there any of Diana Rigg herself in the part?

"Yes, a bit. the bit that finds our society deeply corrupt." Diana Rigg is still smiling.

From The Bath Advertiser, England, 5 November 1986.

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