Final curtain: Dame Diana Rigg

It’s been a sad, bad week. On Tuesday I heard that one of my favourite playwrights - and one of my favourite people - Sir Ronald Harwood had died, aged 85. He was an Oscar-winner screenwriter, a fine biographer (his life of Sir Donald Wolfit is definitive) and an award-winning dramatist best known for “The Dresser”, his funny and moving play about a great actor in the Wolfit tradition (played by Albert Finney in the film) and his long-serving dresser (played by Tom Courtenay). “The Dresser” was Ronnie’s big hit - “You only need the one,” he used to say - but the range of his work was considerable - and impressive. I have a book coming out in October that owes a lot to Ronnie: “The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes.”. No one (apart from the late, great Donald Sinden) knew more theatre stories than Ronnie Harwood. He was a lovely man - human, humane, humorous, wise and warm - and quite simply the best company.

And now, as if the Green Room in heaven wasn’t crowded enough, Sir Ronald Harwood has been joined by Dame Diana Rigg. She died today, aged 82. I met her a few times when I was young and then, twenty years ago, I went to interview her and, after we had a fun lunch together, got to know her better. Here’s my account of that lunch. To amuse her, I wrote it up as a kind of play . . .

CONVERSATION PIECE

A PLAY FOR TODAY STARRING DAME DIANA RIGG

The scene is a table set for two in the Mezzanine Restaurant at the Royal National Theatre on London’s South Bank.  The year is 2001.  The month is July.  It is one o’clock and the celebrated actress Dame Diana Rigg has taken a break from rehearsals to have lunch with a middle-aged journalist who arrives, breathless, flustered, and holding his stomach in.   Gyles Brandreth has had complicated feelings about his lunch companion since 1965 when he was sixteen and first saw her as the leather-clad karate-chopping Emma Peel in the television series, “The Avengers”.

GB:  Hello.

DR (she looks up and turns her head slightly to one side): We’ve met before.

GB:  You remember?   (He laughs)  How are you?  You’re looking wonderful.

DR (she smiles): Thank you.

GB:  No, I mean it.  You are looking very beautiful.

DR (wide-eyed):  You astound me.  I am sixty-three.  This week.

GB:  I don’t think I would have believed, until this moment, that the day would come when I would fancy a sixty-three year old, but you are incredibly fanciable.  (They both laugh)  What’s it like?

DR (she hesitates):  Growing older?  Well, you can’t eat spinach any more because of the risk of that Limpopo green smile.  You can’t get on top of your lover in broad daylight.  And some days you wake up feeling 104 and you have to treat yourself very, very nicely.  I smoke, I love wine, I take the dog for long walks.

(Her eyes are amused.  Her skin is peachy.  Her hair is fair, cut short.  She looks modern, but has the manner of a leading lady from an earlier generation.  She is not grand, but she is theatrical.)

DR (taking a deep breath):  And then there are the droops – the bosoms, the bottom, the jowls.  (She sees his raised eyebrow.)  I had a nip about ten years ago, but I can’t be bothered now.  I let Coral Browne [beautiful Australian actress] be a warning.  She had her face done to the extent that when she smiled it was a terrible effort to get the lips back over her teeth again.

GB:  Tell me about your parents.                                                             

DR:  I’d much rather gossip.  (Food is being served)  What are you having?  Pumpkin risotto.  Doesn’t it look wonderful?   Do you still see Glenda [Jackson]?  Is she happy? Is she sad?  I bet she’s fastidious about her work in the constituency.  Do give her my love.

GB (with mock reproof):  Your parents.

DR (waving her fork in the air):  They were great.  They came from Doncaster.  My dad was particularly wonderful.  He was very clever, won a scholarship as an apprentice engineer, got all the qualifications.  He answered an advertisement for an engineer to go to India and ended up in what was then Raj Putana, building railways for the local Maharajah.

GB (adjusting the microphone he has balanced in the bread basket):  When was he born?

DR (mouth full):  I have no idea.  I’m not good on dates.  He was called Louis Rigg.  He did a five-year term in India and was then sent back home to get a wife and found my mother in the local tennis club.  She was the daughter of the manager of the gentleman’s outfitting department at Doncaster Co-op. 

GB:  They were happily married?

DR:  Completely.  Totally.  (She beams)  So nice.

GB:  Then there is the awful pay-off at the end of a good marriage when one of them dies.

DR:  Yes.  (She looks towards the window overlooking the Thames)  My mother was just marking time after my father went.  She was very much of that generation whose life was her husband.  I wonder if women nowadays are going to be quite as bereft when their husbands die?  I don’t think so.  (Suddenly pulling herself together and cracking on.)   My older brother, Hugh – he was in the RAF, testing Harriers – a good man - he was born in India, in a military hospital, but my mother had such a terrible experience that she came back here to have me.  I went out to India with her when I was two months old and stayed until I was seven, when I was sent to a small preparatory school in Little Missenden.  It was filled with children whose parents were abroad.  I didn’t see mine for about eighteen months.  In the holidays I stayed in Doncaster with a rather reluctant grandmother who was quite cross at having two kids to look after.   Eventually, with Indian independence looming, my father decided to come back home.  I went on to another boarding school, in Yorkshire.  I did my school certificate, then I auditioned for RADA when I was sixteen.   I was mad keen to be an actress.

GB:  Why?  Was it in the blood?

DR:  No, not at all.  It was Mrs Greenwood.  It’s always down to a teacher, isn’t it?  Sylvia Greenwood was my amazing elocution teacher and she was determined I was going to be an actress.  She had white hair, even at forty, wonderful skin, big blue eyes.  She was plump, and passionate about Shakespeare.  She died this year.

GB:  And she just felt you had it?

DR:  She just did.  She persuaded my parents who were incredibly doubtful about the whole thing.  Anyway, I came up to London, the city of sin, accompanied by Mrs Greenwood and my mother.  And I got into RADA.   Sian Phillips was in the same year.  Peter O’Toole was in the year above, with Albie [Finney].  Susannah York was in the year below.  I’m still in touch with three or four from the class, not all are still actors.   My digs were in Queensbury Place,  SW7.   It was a proper boarding house run by a Mrs Aplin who served breakfast and dinner.    I was the youngest person there by many years.   I sat in the dining room surrounded by fierce old spinsters and bank clerks.  I had a tiny room at the top of the house, and in my room there was a trunk covered with a bit of matertial.  One day Mrs Aplin asked me if I had ever wondered what was in the trunk.  She opened it up and there was her wedding dress - all cream satin, covered in pearl embroidery, bunches of grapes and vine leaves.  It was exquisite.  It must have cost so much money and here she was reduced to taking in lodgers in South Kensington.

GB:  At sixteen were you aware that you were beautiful?

DR (without hesitating):  I had no idea.   My upbringing was very Yorkshire.  If my grandmother caught me looking in a mirror, she’d say, “Vanity, vanity.”   I remember at Sunday supper she always served pickled beetroot and I put a tiny bit of beetroot on my fork and rubbed it over my lips and tried to sneak a look to see what I looked like with lipstick.  I was caught and slapped down mightily.

GB:  When you left RADA –

DR: Eventually I got a job as an ASM [Assistant Stage Manager] with walk-on parts at Chesterfield Rep, £ 4 a week.  I was sent around the town to collect all the props.  We had one sofa and two chairs, and each Saturday, with tacks and glue, we’d re-cover the sofa for the next week’s play.  I lived in a house with a young widow and her son.  It had an outside lavatory and when I wanted a bath the widow filled a zinc tub in front of the fire.  It was very D H Lawrence.  I loved every minute.  And then I did the summer season at York, and then I got to Stratford.

GB:  In 1959, doing walk-ons with Eileen [Atkins] and Vanessa [Redgrave].

DR:  Isn’t it wonderful about Eileen becoming a Dame?  [Eileen Atkins received the DBE in the 2001 year’s list of Birthday Honours.]

GB:  Yes.  She gave us supper last week to celebrate.  Eileen, Vanessa, Julian [Glover, the actor, Eileen Atkins’ first husband.]   We talked about you.  And how Julian understudied Paul Robeson as Othello.

DR:  I was living in digs with an actress called Edna Landor.  I thought she was a Lesbian, but she went on to have an affair with Paul Robeson.  He was living at a place called Shottery Lodge and Edna would say, “Paul wants me to hear his lines.  Will you come with me?”   So I used to sit in the kitchen at Shottery Lodge, with Paul’s secretary, truly believing that Edna was in the bedroom hearing his lines.  It’s a wonderful euphemism, isn’t it?  I was so naïve, so innocent.  (She takes a cigarette from its pack.)   I was a slow starter.  (She lights the cigarette.)  All I wanted was to earn enough money to buy my father a bottle of whisky a week, and eventually I did.  They were wonderful at Stratford in those days.  They nurtured you.   I was a walk-on, then I had small parts and all the time you had voice lessons, verse lessons, Michel Saint-Denis taught us Chekhov, so when the time came [1962] and I got the part of Cordelia in Peter Brook’s King Lear with Paul Scofield and one of the leads in Comedy of Errors, I was ready.

GB (sensing he is running out of time):  How do you think you are perceived by the public?

DR (deliberately, with conviction):  I don’t care.

GB:  You’ve done everything, all these great classic roles, Shakespeare, Shaw, the Greeks, you’re a Dame, and yet, still . . .

DR:  Yes, still, we talk about The Avengers.  I don’t mind.  It was more than thirty years ago, but I really don’t mind.

GB:  We haven’t talked about men, husbands.

DR:  I haven’t had a husband for twelve years.  As soon as I could afford it, I had a housekeeper.  Lucinda has been with me now for twenty years.  And I have a dog called Mabel.  My last husband was Archie Stirling, landowner, father of my actress daughter Rachel Atalanta – so called because at birth she had very long legs.  Considering my background and my parents’ stable, loving marriage, I’m rather appalled that mine didn’t work.  There was an earlier husband too.  I contracted this mad passion and married an Israeli painter [Menachem Gueffen].  Don’t ask.  It was doomed.  It lasted two minutes.  Now I’ve bought a house in France.  I want to press ‘rewind’.  I want to find ‘rural’ and you can’t in England, so I’ve found it in France, in Landes, in a village without a shop, just a handful of houses and a tenth century church.  I don’t feel the lack of a man.   When I was young, women were considered incomplete without a husband, and it has taken me years and years and years to come to the tranquil conclusion that life can be complete without a man.

GB (trying to look boyish):  That means . . .

DR (smiling indulgently):  I am not on the prowl.  There is nothing worse than a woman on the hunt.  But I am always open . . .  the door is always open.  Always.

Dissolve.