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Carol Riggs Biography & Facts

Dame Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg (20 July 1938 – 10 September 2020) was an English actress of stage and screen. Her roles include Emma Peel in the TV series The Avengers (1965–1968); Countess Teresa di Vicenzo, wife of James Bond, in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969); Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones (2013–2017); and the title role in Medea in the West End in 1993 followed by Broadway a year later. Rigg made her professional stage debut in 1957 in The Caucasian Chalk Circle and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1959. She made her Broadway debut in Abelard & Heloise in 1971. Her role as Emma Peel made her a sex symbol. For her role in Medea, both in London and New York, she won the 1994 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. She was appointed CBE in 1988 and a Dame in 1994 for services to drama. Rigg appeared in numerous TV series and films, playing Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968); Lady Holiday in The Great Muppet Caper (1981); and Arlena Marshall in Evil Under the Sun (1982). She won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress for the BBC miniseries Mother Love (1989) and an Emmy Award for her role as Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca (1997). Her other television credits include You, Me and the Apocalypse (2015), Detectorists (2015), the Doctor Who episode "The Crimson Horror" (2013) with her daughter Rachael Stirling, and playing Mrs Pumphrey in All Creatures Great and Small (2020). Her final role was in Edgar Wright's 2021 psychological horror film Last Night in Soho, completed just before her death. Early life and education Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg was born on 20 July 1938 in Doncaster, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire (now in South Yorkshire), to Louis and Beryl Hilda Rigg (née Helliwell). She had a brother four years her senior. Her father was born in Yorkshire, worked in engineering, and moved to India to work for the railway to take advantage of the career opportunities there. Her mother moved back to England for Rigg's birth. Between the ages of two months and eight years, Rigg lived in Bikaner, Rajasthan, India, where her father worked his way up to become a railway executive in the Bikaner State Railway. She spoke Hindi as her second language in those years.She was later sent back to England to attend a boarding school, Fulneck Girls School, in a Moravian settlement near Pudsey. Rigg hated her boarding school, where she felt like a fish out of water, but believed that Yorkshire played a greater part in shaping her character than India did. She trained as an actress at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art from 1955 to 1957, where her classmates included Glenda Jackson and Siân Phillips. Theatre career Rigg's career in film, television and the theatre was wide-ranging, including roles in the Royal Shakespeare Company between 1959 and 1967, including Gwendolen in Jean Anouilh's Becket, Cordelia in King Lear and Adriana in The Comedy of Errors.(). Her professional debut was as Natasha Abashwilli in the RADA production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle at the York Festival in 1957.She returned to the stage in the Ronald Millar play Abelard and Heloïse in London in 1970 and made her Broadway debut with the play in 1971, in which she appeared nude with Keith Michell. She earned the first of three Tony Award nominations for Best Actress in a Play. She received her second nomination in 1975, for The Misanthrope. A member of the National Theatre Company at the Old Vic from 1972 to 1975, Rigg took leading roles in premiere productions of two Tom Stoppard plays, Dorothy Moore in Jumpers (National Theatre, 1972) and Ruth Carson in Night and Day (Phoenix Theatre, 1978).In 1982, she appeared in the musical Colette, based on the life of the French writer and created by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, but it closed during an American tour en route to Broadway. In 1987, she took a leading role in the West End production of Stephen Sondheim's musical Follies. In the 1990s, she had triumphs with roles at the Almeida Theatre in Islington, including Medea in 1992 (which transferred to the Wyndham's Theatre in 1993 and then Broadway in 1994, for which she received the Tony Award for Best Actress), Mother Courage at the National Theatre in 1995 and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Almeida Theatre in 1996 (which transferred to the Aldwych Theatre in October 1996).In 2004, she appeared as Violet Venable in Sheffield Theatres' production of Tennessee Williams's play Suddenly Last Summer, which transferred to the Albery Theatre. In 2006, she appeared at the Wyndham's Theatre in London's West End in a drama entitled Honour which had a limited but successful run. In 2007, she appeared as Huma Rojo in the Old Vic's production of All About My Mother, adapted by Samuel Adamson and based on the film of the same title directed by Pedro Almodóvar.She appeared in 2008 in The Cherry Orchard at the Chichester Festival Theatre, returning there in 2009 to star in Noël Coward's Hay Fever. In 2011, she played Mrs Higgins in Pygmalion at the Garrick Theatre, opposite Rupert Everett and Kara Tointon, having played Eliza Doolittle 37 years earlier at the Albery Theatre.In February 2018, she returned to Broadway in the non-singing role of Mrs Higgins in My Fair Lady. She commented, "I think it's so special. When I was offered Mrs Higgins, I thought it was just such a lovely idea." She received her fourth Tony nomination for the role. Film and television career From 1965 to 1968, Rigg appeared in the British 1960s television series The Avengers (1961–69) opposite Patrick Macnee as John Steed, playing the secret agent Emma Peel in 51 episodes. She replaced Elizabeth Shepherd at very short notice when Shepherd was dropped from the role after filming two episodes. Rigg auditioned for the role on a whim, without ever having seen the programme. Although she was hugely successful in the series, she disliked the lack of privacy that it brought and was not comfortable in her position as a sex symbol. In an interview with The Guardian in 2019, Rigg stated that "becoming a sex symbol overnight had shocked (her)". She also did not like the way that she was treated by production company ABC Weekend TV. For her second series, she held out for a pay rise from £150 a week to £450; she said in 2019 – when gender pay inequality was very much in the news – that "not one woman in the industry supported me... Neither did Patrick [Macnee, her co-star]... I was painted as this mercenary creature by the press when all I wanted was equality. It's so depressing that we are still talking about the gender pay gap." She did not stay for a third year. Patrick Macnee noted that Rigg had later told him that she considered Macnee and her driver to be her only friends on the set. On the big screen, she became a Bond girl in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), playing Tracy Bond, James Bond's only wife, opposite George Lazenby. She said she took the role with the hope that she would become better known in the United St.... Discover the Carol Riggs popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Carol Riggs books.

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  • The Lying Planet synopsis, comments

    The Lying Planet

    Carol Riggs

    Promise City. That’s the colony I’ve been aiming for all my life on the planet Liberty. The only thing standing in my way? The Machine. On my eighteenth birthday, this mysterious, ...