Review: 'One Tough Dame: The Life and Career of Diana Rigg'

Diana Rigg seemed to take the most gratification from her stage work, but her screen genre work was what made her an icon. Say the name and one is most likely to picture her as Bond's one and only bride in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Vincent Price's costume-changing coconspirator in Theatre of Blood, the ceaselessly scheming Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones, or most probably, the karate-chop dishing Emma Peel of The Avengers.

Farewell, Diana Rigg

We Americans had Batman and Batgirl. The British had John Steed and Mrs. Emma Peel. I won't argue over who was cooler, but both dynamic duos brought groovy-mod style, flash action, and buckets of irony to mid-sixties TV. Mrs. Peel was not Steed's first partner, but she's the one Avengers fans tend to remember most fondly, largely because of Diana Rigg's unforgettably bemused performance.

A discussion of Diana Rigg's career will likely begin with the pop-art ka-pow that first made her household name, but her career hardly hinged on The Avengers. She was Vincent Price's mustachioed co-conspirator in Theatre of Blood. She was the only woman to marry James Bond (if ever so briefly) in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. She was memorably miscast as plain-Jane Helena in the boffo 1968 adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. She starred Paddy Chayefsky's bizarro medical-drama/monster movie The Hospital, cameoed in The Great Muppet Caper, hosted PBS's Mystery!, and proved she was still unimaginably cool when she played Lady Olenna Tyrell on Game of Thrones.

No matter the role, Diana Rigg always imbued it with her innate charm and the gravitas of a first-rate actor. Sadly, she died today of cancer at the age of 82.