After shooting her first 12 episodes in the role of Mrs. Emma Peel in The Avengers, Diana Rigg discovered that her weekly salary as the female lead in an already highly successful series was £30 less than what the show’s cameraman earned. Rigg had not even been the first choice to replace the popular Honor Blackman as secret agent John Steed’s accomplice; the first actress cast had been sacked after two weeks. The role then fell to Rigg, whose television résumé at the time consisted only of a guest appearance on The Sentimental Agent and a performance of Donald Churchill’s The Hothouse.

Rigg’s stage experience, however, was solid. After joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1959, the same year as Vanessa Redgrave, Rigg had steadily amassed a strong list of credits, including playing Cordelia to Paul Schofield’s Lear. Years later, Rigg described the rationale for her turn to television: “The trouble with staying with a classical company is that you get known as a ‘lady actress.’ No one ever thinks of you except for parts in long skirts and blank verse.”

Rigg’s salary complaints were quickly addressed, and American audiences, who had never been exposed to Blackman’s Avengers episodes (which did not air in the United States until the early 1990s), quickly embraced Rigg’s assertive, upper-class character. Peel’s name may have been simply a play upon the character’s hoped-for “man appeal,” but Rigg’s embodiment of the role suggested a much more utopian representation of women. Peel demonstrated that women can be intelligent, independent, and sexually confident. After three seasons and an Emmy nomination, Rigg left the series in 1968, claiming “Emma Peel is not fully emancipated.” Still, Rigg resisted publicly associating herself with feminism; to the contrary, she flippantly claimed to find “the whole feminist thing very boring.”

Following Blackman into James Bond films (in 1964 Blackman had been Goldfinger’s Pussy Galore), Rigg’s presence in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) as the tragic Mrs. James Bond added intertextual interest to the film. Paired with the unfamiliar George Lazenby as Bond, it was Rigg who carried the film’s spy genre credentials, even though her suicidal, spoiled character displayed few of Peel’s many abilities. However, the British spy genre had already begun to collapse, followed by the rest of the nation’s film industry, and Rigg’s career as a movie star never soared.

Rigg did not immediately return to series television. In fact, she publicly attributed her problems on film to having learned to act for television only too well; she had become too “facile” before film cameras, a trait necessitated by the grueling pace of series production. Apparently, her stage skills remained unaffected, and Rigg went on to a wide range of both classical and contemporary roles as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, and on Broadway. However, while Rigg has originated the lead roles in such stylish works as Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers (1972), the stage work she performed for television broadcast tended to fit more snugly into familiar Anglophilic conventions. In the United States, her television appearances in the 1960s included The Comedy of Errors (1967) and Women Beware Women (1968) for NET Playhouse; in the 1980s, they included Hedda Gabler, Witness for the Prosecution, Lady Dedlock in a multipart adaptation of Bleak House (1985), and Laurence Olivier’s King Lear (1985).

During the decade between, however, NBC attempted to capitalize upon what Rigg jokingly called her “exploitable potential” following The Avengers. After one failed pilot, the network picked up Diana (1973–74), a Mary Tyler Moore Show-inspired sitcom, and Rigg returned to series television as a British expatriate working in New York’s fashion industry. As if to acknowledge the sexual daring of her first series, Rigg’s character became American sitcom’s first divorcée (Moore’s character had been initially conceived as divorced, but that scenario was altered before The Mary Tyler Moore Show aired). In Diana, Rigg’s comedic talents, which television critics had once praised as wry and deliberately understated, did not shine; instead, she appeared rather bland, and the series provided no Steed for verbal repartee. (Perhaps even more damning, Diana showed few traces of The Avengers’ always dashing fashion sense.) NBC programmed Diana during what had once been The Avengers’ time slot, but the sitcom shortly disappeared.

A year later, Rigg successfully played off both her previous roles and her sometimes bawdy public persona in a sober religious drama, In This House of Brede (1975). Portraying a successful businesswoman entering a convent, Rigg’s combination of restraint and technique seemed quintessentially British and earned her a second Emmy nomination.

In 1989, Rigg succeeded Vincent Price in hosting the PBS series Mystery!, and in 1990 she impressed American audiences as the star of an Oedipal nightmare, Mother Love, a multipart British import presented on that program. In her role as the series’ host, Rigg has in a sense become that “lady actress” she had once entered television to avoid: ensconced in finely tailored suits and beaded gowns, her performance as host displays all the genteel, ambassadorial authority of a woman now entitled to be addressed as Dame Rigg (having been named Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire, in 1994).

In addition to her hosting duties on Mystery!, Rigg was busy in the 1990s playing a range of notable stage roles, including the leads in Medea (for which she won a 1994 Tony Award), Mother Courage (1995–96), and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1996–97). She also took on a number of character roles on television. These latter parts were frequently villainous to some degree, whether in bodice-rippers (A Hazard of Hearts, 1987), light comedy (Mrs. ’arris Goes to Paris, 1992), or edgy comedy such as the Holocaust farce Genghis Cohn (1994). For her portrayal of Mrs. Danvers in the miniseries Rebecca (shown in the United States in 1997 on ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theatre), she won an Emmy Award for outstanding supporting actress in a miniseries. Since 1998, she has also played the title role in The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries, a crime drama set in the 1920s, which debuted on the BBC and has since aired in the United States (on Mystery! and the cable channel BBC America) and Australia (on ABC).