Rigg, Diana

Rigg, Diana (1938– ), English actress, who had spent some time in provincial repertory companies before joining the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre company in 1959. She made her first appearance in London with the company, renamed the RSC, in 1961, in Giraudoux's Ondine, and remained with it until 1964, making her first appearance in New York in that year as Adriana in The Comedy of Errors and Cordelia in King Lear. She returned to the RSC in 1966 to play Viola in Twelfth Night. After starring opposite Keith Michell in Ronald Millar's Abelard and Heloise (1970; NY, 1971) she joined the National Theatre company, where she displayed a gift for comedy in handling the verbal pyrotechnics of Stoppard's Jumpers (1972) and showed her versatility as a striking Lady Macbeth (also 1972) and an enchantingly frivolous Célimène in Molière's The Misanthrope (1973; NY, 1975). In 1974 she played Eliza Doolittle to Alec McCowen's Professor Higgins in a revival of Shaw's Pygmalion, and she then returned to the National Theatre in Phaedra Britannica (1975), a transposition of Racine's Phèdre to 19th-century British India. In 1978 she was in another play by Stoppard, Night and Day, in which she played the intelligent, bored wife of a mining engineer in an African state. She was seen in Shaw's Heartbreak House in 1983, and in 1985 in Ibsen's Little Eyolf and, at Chichester, as Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra. In 1987 she further extended her range by appearing in Sondheim's Follies.