Dame Diana Rigg (20 Jul 1938 – 10 Sep 2020)

It’s very rare for me to publish 2 posts in 2 days, and possibly unprecedented to publish 3 in less than a week. However, I couldn’t let this pass, for a number of reasons. Arguably, Dame Diana Rigg has had little to do with philosophy but quite a lot to do with culture and, of course, storytelling, which is a topic close to my heart.

In one of the many tributes that came out, there is an embedded video (c/- BBC Archives, 1997), where she talks about acting in a way that most of us don’t perceive it. She says, in effect, that an audience comes to a theatre (or a cinema) because they want to ‘believe’, and an actor has to give them (or honour) that ‘belief’. (I use the word, honour, she didn’t.)

This is not dissimilar to the ‘suspension of disbelief’ that writers attempt to draw from their readers. I’ve watched quite a few of Diana Rigg’s interviews, given over the decades, and I’m always struck by her obvious intelligence, not to mention her wit and goodwill.

 

I confess to being somewhat smitten by her character, Emma Peel, as a teenager. It was from watching her that I learned one falls for the character and not the actor playing her. Seeing her in another role, I was at first surprised, then logically reconciled, that she could readily play someone else less appealing.

 

Emma Peel was a role before its time in which the female could have the same hero status as her male partner. She explained, in one of the interviews I saw, that the role had originally been written for a man and they didn’t have time to rewrite it. So it occurred by accident. Originally, it was Honor Blackman, as Cathy Gale (who also passed away this year). But it was Diana Rigg as Emma Peel who seemed to be the perfect foil for Steed (Patrick Macnee). No one else filled those shoes with quite the same charm.

 

It was a quirky show, as only the British seem to be able to pull off: Steed in his vintage Bentley and Mrs Peel in her Lotus Elan, which I desired almost as much as her character.

 

The show time-travelled without a tardis, combining elements of fantasy and sci-fi that influenced my own writing. I suspect there is a bit of Emma Peel in Elvene, though I’ve never really analysed it.