Diana Rigg was born July 20, 1938 in Doncaster, Yorkshire. She has one younger brother. When she was two months old, her family moved to Jodhpur, in northwest India, whereshe lived until she was eight years old, when she was sent back to England to boarding school. She first attended Great Missenden in Buckhinghamshire, and three years later transferred to Fulneck Girl's School in Pudsey, Yorkshire.

The rebellious Rigg was not overly fond of Fulneck Girl's School, and Fulneck was probably not overly fond of her. It was at Fulneck, though, that she discovered her interest in acting, through the tutelage of at least one sympathetic teacher, Mrs. Sylvia Greenwood, who helped channel her rebellious nature into an interest in poetry and the stage. Another influence was her grandfather, with whom she visited during school vacations, and who encouraged her interest in T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare and the English lyric poets.

After graduating from Fulneck at the age of 17, and after a short-lived engagement, Rigg auditioned for and was accepted at, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1955. She was still a rebel, and even R.A.D.A. was too confining. Nevertheless, she and R.A.D.A. managed a compromise and she made her professional debut with R.A.D.A. in 1957 as Natella Abashwili in The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Over the next two years she worked in repertory theatre , acting in walk-on roles to get her Equity card, and working as an assistant stage manager. In 1959, she signed a five-year contract with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford and began to gain recognition.

At the end of her RSC contract, in late 1964, she auditioned for the role of Emma Peel in The Avengers the role which she will always be associated with. Her move to television was criticized by many of her contemporaries in the theatre as a waste of her talents. In effect, she was a pioneer of a trend that is quite common now, of actors going back and forth between stage and television/films. Ever a rebel, Diana threatened to leave unless she received a raise at the end of the black and white season (she had discovered she was being paid less than the cameraman!). Her time as Emma was fraught with conflict, and at the end of the colour series she left. For the role of Emma Peel, Diana Rigg received two Emmy Award nominations as Best Actress in a Dramatic Series in 1967 and 1968.

After leaving the Avengers Diana found she was being offered roles which typecast her as a gun-carrying action character. The serious roles she desired seemed to go to Glenda Jackson and Vanessa Redgrave. However, the 1970's featured Diana in some of her best stage work (prior to the 1990's). She starred as Dolly in Tom Stoppard's Jumpers, in Abelard and Heloise which earned her a Tony Award nomination, in Macbeth (as Lady Macbeth to Anthony Hopkins' Macbeth) and in The Misanthrope (which earned her a Tony award nomination) and Phaedra Brittanica.

Among the many feature films and made-for-tv films she appeared in during the 1980's are Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun, The Great Muppet Caper, (which greatly impressed her daughter), Mother Love, Witness for the Prosecution, and Ibsen's Little Eyeoff, but her stage career lagged. Although she appeared in the short-lived musical, Collette, in 1981 and, in 1987 in the London revival of Sondheim's Follies, she devoted time to raising her daughter, Rachel, and to her marriage.

In the 1990's Diana Rigg returned to the stage and since then has played the most difficult and demanding roles of her career. She made her return via the Almeida Theater in Islington, which has gained a reputation as an artistic powerhouse, working for Equity minimum of £165 a week. Her string of hits in the 1990's started with Dryden's All for Love, where she played the role of Cleopatra, and continued in 1993 with the spectacular Medea. In 1995/1996, she appeared in Brecht's Mother Courage for which she was nominated for an Olivier Award and received the London Evening Standard Drama Award for Best Actress. In 1996/1997 she was again awarded the London Evening Standard Drama Award for Best Actress for her role in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf..

She has also taken character roles in several films: Mother Love, A Good Man in Africa, Running Delilah, Moll Flanders, and Rebecca. With the exception of Mother Love and Rebecca, the roles seem to have been selected to fill in the nooks and crannies of time between her major roles on stage.

Rigg has edited two books: "No Turn Unstoned: The Worst Ever Theatrical Reviews" and "So to the Land," a collection of English country lyric poetry.

She is a co-founder and has has served as director of United British Artists. She has received honorary degrees from Stirling University (1988) and Leeds University (1992) for her accomplishments in the theatre and in film.

She was decorated a Commander of the British Empire in the late 1980's and, within days of accepting the Tony Award for Medea in 1994, was created a Dame.

More recent achievements are two new installments of The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries on TV, and becoming Cameron MacIntosh Professor of Theatre at Oxford.

In 1973, Rigg married Menahem Gueffen, an Israeli painter. It was a stormy, difficult relationship. They separated for a time early in the marriage and then divorced in 1976. In 1982, she married Archibald Stirling and they have a daughter, Rachel, now attending university. Rigg and Stirling are now divorced. An avid angler, Rigg is one of a growing number of women in England who are taking fly rods in hand and invading the male bastions of trout and salmon streams. When not acting or angling, she likes to walk in the countryside, to write and to read.

NEWS... March '01
It has just been announced that Diana will return to the National Theatre to star in Humble Boy by Charlotte Jones. She will appear at the Cottesloe Theatre in August.