Book reviews by Samuel L. Leiter…
Casual notes on show biz books, memoirs, and studies, dust gatherers and hot off the presses.
49th and 50th editions
Kathleen Tracy, Diana Rigg: The Biography (BenBella Books: Dallas, 2004). 281 pp.
Herbie J. Pilato, One Tough Dame: The Life and Career of Diana Rigg (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2022). 214 pp.
If you were to ask ChatGPT about what biographies exist of the late British actress, Diana Rigg, you might be disappointed to be told pointblank that no such books exist. However, if you had before you Kathleen Tracy’s bio, Diana Rigg: The Biography, and Herbie J. Pilato’s One Tough Dame: The Life and Career of Diana Rigg, you would likely feel compelled to throw these titles in your AI assistant’s face. In return, of course, you’d get a heartfelt apology for such an egregious oversight.
Not that either of these books is an outstanding example of the genre. Tracy’s book, which I read in paperback, was published in 2004, 16 years before Rigg, 82, died in London in 2020. Consequently, this prolific star gets cut off in the prime of her career, before she was cast in some of her greatest roles, like Olena Tyrell in “Game of Thrones.” Her last film came out posthumously in 2021, when she made Last Night in Soho, filmed while Rigg—an inveterate smoker—was dying of cancer.
Rigg, who cared little for the gossipy side of theatrical careers, and didn’t like the way her own private life was distorted by the press, once insisted she’d never write her autobiography, so we’re left with these two journalistic accounts patched together from extensive sources in published and recorded sources. Even if its premature contents were not reason enough to skip Tracy’s account, it would be natural to do so when put side by side with Pilato’s, which includes documentation of his sources, an extensive chronological appendix covering Rigg’s prolific career on stage, film, and TV, and an index. Tracy gives just a partial chronology.
However, neither gets the brass ring for biographical writing, since neither ever interviewed their subject themselves, despite her prospective availability into her 80s. And those they did actually speak to are extremely limited in number, so you must depend on a quilt work of quotes from hundreds of print, video, and online sources. Tracy, in fact, seems not to have spoken directly to anyone in Rigg’s orbit. And whereas a first-rate biographer would offer personal analyses of the plays, movies, and TV shows Rigg did, these writers, Pilato, in particular, are content to quote, often quite extensively, from published or posted commentaries, many from little-known critics or websites.
Neither Tracy nor Pilato is a particularly stylish writer, in the vein, say of Simon Callow writing about Orson Welles, and they rarely go deep unless they have someone to quote. Both are hagiographic, rarely having anything seriously negative to say about their heroine, and Pilato (as well as his copyeditor) is guilty, for a book published by a university press, of far too many typos of spelling, grammar, and syntax. If anyone wishes to contest this, let me know and I’ll provide a list that will end the debate at once.
Fans, however, will appreciate the many excellent black and white photos in Pilato’s book, a feature that instantly puts the book head and shoulders above Tracy’s effort. And Rigg’s head and shoulders make lovely viewing, she once having been the epitome of lithe British grace and fine-boned beauty. Few would have guessed that this tall, lissome brunette, with her pert little nose perched high above her lips, would have evolved from her breakthrough role as Mrs. Emma Peele—high-kicking martial arts spy on the popular late 60s TV series, “The Avengers”—into one of that circle of titled actresses named Dame this and that, like Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, and Maggie Smith.
But, with a year of provincial rep and five years of training at the Royal Shakespeare Company, she had not only the striking looks but the velvet voice, witty insouciance, and insightful intelligence to play not only Shakespearean women, but Medea, Phaedra, and Mother Courage. Rigg, whose early years were spent growing up in India under the Raj (her dad was an engineer for a railroad company), then back home in her parents’ native Yorkshire (to which she attributed many of her forthright positions on things), became a thorough professional admired by most of those with whom she worked.
Each book provides the expected background on Rigg’s family, education, and upbringing, her two failed marriages, her extensive career, her occasional failures, her chancellorship of Scotland’s Stirling University, her devoted daughter (actress Rachael Stirling), her romances, and so on. We get the fan mag stories on what it was like to work with actors as problematic as George Lazenby, her costar when she played Mrs. James Bond in Casino Royale, and as impressive as Sir Laurence Olivier, against whose King Lear she was a wicked Regan. (She preferred playing “baddies.”) Her difficulty finding ways to break free from the kind of type casting that followed The Avengers is explored by both authors, and so, among so many topics, is where she stood as a liberated woman amid the feminist positions of her time, not all of whose tenets she believed in.
Looking at those eternally young and cocky photos of the exquisite Diana Rigg on the covers of Tracy and Pilato’s books brings back the power of her presence with piercing poignancy. Her beauty, which she refused to nip and tuck as she aged, may have altered but nothing could change the potency of character behind her skin and bones.
As I’ve indicated, neither of these books is first-rate, but they cover the ground well enough to give us a fair enough picture of who Diana Rigg was and what she accomplished. Still, there’s no contest between these books for those seeking as full a telling of her story as we’re ever likely to get.
