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Nothing Personal
I want tuna! I want liver! I want cash prizes!
Pets sing songs, McCain writes book, Hillary dances around surgery question ... Everybody's an artist!
By Amy Reiter
[09/14/99]

Nothing Personal
This is Sly's mom on crack
Also, Tarzan is from Mars, Jane has a show on E! What's air traffic control got to do with it, got to do with it? Welcome to Washington -- what are you wearing?
By Amy Reiter
[09/13/99]

People Feature
The not-a-biography of Richie Havens
The man who sang "Freedom" at Woodstock tells his life story, but forgets to include his life.
By Lorenzo W. Milam
[09/13/99]

People Feature
A star is born ... prematurely
Famous for not being famous? If you act now, you too can have a fawning celebrity profile -- rich in essential adjectives -- at just a fraction of the cost!
By Jen Banbury
[09/11/99]

Leo Castelli
A widely influential figure in the American art world, the legendary gallery owner was always in the right place at the right time.
By Tom DiEgidio
[09/11/99]

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Diana Rigg | page 1, 2, 3

And she did. Viewers were glued to the set, watching Emma cavort in her black leather jumpsuits. Though they defined sartorial cool, these mainstays of Emma's wardrobe were called fighting suits by the show's designers. They had created them to give the show's heroine something to run around in that wouldn't tear. On the one hand, the cat suits were practical, just another part of Emma's crime-fighting equipment. On the other, she looked great in them. "Sometimes I see photographs of myself," Rigg recently told an interviewer, "and think, God I really was quite tasty. But I didn't know it at the time."

As rare as iconoclastic characters such as Emma Peel are today, they were nonexistent on TV in the '60s. About the same time Emma was delivering the world from evil robots, Samantha's husband, Darrin, on "Bewitched," was forbidding her to employ her witchly powers, reducing her to vacuuming.

Not only had Rigg's character broken all the rules that said good girls don't hit their attackers, she also exercised a bold new sexual and social freedom, living alone and quite independently. ("It was a case of life imitating art," Rigg once said. "I was like that myself to a degree.") Indeed, what you don't know about Emma is as interesting as what you do. Mrs. Peel is obviously a woman of means -- she drives a Lotus. What's never clear is why she wants to devote her time to fighting crime. Or where she learned to throw men twice her size. Viewers were encouraged to wonder about the limits of her relationship with Steed. Her availability is somewhat ambiguous, but by virtue of being married (though her husband is always "away"), she's sexually experienced -- an element not lost on the audience any more than it is on Steed.

Emma Peel was indisputably a once-in-a-lifetime character. So where does an actress go once her days of chasing Eastern Bloc villains are over? When the robots and cybernauts and the people with sinister electronic devices who are trying to take over the world have been put in their place? Unlike many actresses who were sex symbols in their youth, Rigg survived professionally through middle age and beyond, despite never having a substantial career in Hollywood. What's fascinating about Rigg is that she has been able to navigate a life in both high art and pop culture, no less at home as a Greek anti-heroine on the stage than she was flinging wisecracks as a Cold War operative in swinging London.

In the three decades since she played Emma Peel, Rigg, 61, has gone on to become a dame of the British Empire, a Tony winner (for "Medea" in 1994), an Emmy winner (for her role as Mrs. Danvers in a 1997 "Masterpiece Theatre" version of "Rebecca"), a mother (once) and a wife (twice). In 1982, at 43, she married her longtime live-in lover, Scottish businessman Archie Stirling (their daughter, Rachael, was then 4), and is still married to him. Preceding that were an eight-year relationship with married British TV director Philip Saville, and an 11-month marriage to flamboyant Israeli artist Menachem Gueffen. "Very curiously, morality says you shouldn't live together outside the state of wedlock," she told People in 1986. "And I say, until you are prepared to make the vows and stick by them, then that's the only thing to do. I do care about marriage passionately. When it comes to a vow, I'm very proper."

Rigg is also passionate about her acting career. She's been the host of "Mystery" on PBS since 1989, when she took over from Vincent Price. Last year, she was named Cameron MacIntosh Professor of Theater at Oxford. The actress returns to television this fall, in the title role of "The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries," a series set in the 1920s that chronicles the adventures of a woman detective. (No, she's nothing like Emma Peel.) Next spring, Rigg will star in the "Masterpiece Theatre" adaptation of Henry James' "The American."

Chances are TV watchers now fall into two categories -- those who think of her as a PBS fixture and those who still fantasize about Emma Peel. (She was voted "sexiest TV star of all time" in a recent TV Guide poll.) Rigg has said repeatedly that she's surprised people still love "The Avengers." Asked if she finds it annoying or pleasant to still be introduced as Emma, the actress tends to parry the question with the sort of finesse you'd expect from her famous character. "I think one of the important things is to be known," she said to a roomful of TV critics on the eve of coming aboard "Mystery." "And to be entirely practical. Whatever you're known for you should be grateful for. Providing you're not ashamed of it, which I'm not."

Emma Peel lifted Rigg from the relative obscurity of the British theater, but the role has hardly been a road map for the rest of her career. Her one foray into American television, a short-lived NBC sitcom and "Mary Tyler Moore Show" clone called "Diana," flopped in 1973. Her list of films -- which includes "The Assassination Bureau" (1968), "A Little Night Music" (1978) and "The Great Muppet Caper" (1981) -- is unremarkable.

Rigg's most riveting work has been on the London stage and on the BBC, two mediums that have allowed her to forge an idiosyncratic second act. After "The Avengers," Rigg rejoined the RSC at Stratford, then the National Theatre, but like most actresses, then and now, she found a paucity of roles for women in their 30s and 40s except as girlfriends and wives of male protagonists. In 1975, Rigg reappeared on TV, starring in the "Hallmark Hall of Fame" production "In This House of Brede" on PBS. The series was based on the Rumer Godden classic about a businesswoman who decides to becomes a Benedictine nun.

A nun? After Emma Peel? Perhaps there really was nowhere to go after Emma. Still, Phillipa Talbot, woman of the cloth for "In This House of Brede," is a much happier sort than most of the roles Rigg took on in middle age, a collection that might be described as poisonous women and toxic mothers. "I had to swallow the fact that my career has now reached the point where I play a mother," she told TV critics in 1990 as she launched "Mother Love," a miniseries for "Mystery." In a role that has cast shadows over the rest of her career, she played a smothering, psychotic parent named Helena, an unstable woman whose husband had left her years earlier for another woman.

Next page | "She sucks his blood to stay alive"