Dame Diana Rigg’s daughter has a way of ensuring her late mother is part of every performance she does.
And it’s eating her ashes.
Actress Rachael Stirling, 49, has followed in her mum’s footsteps as her only daughter, pursuing a career in showbiz and landing roles in some of television’s biggest shows.
Her acting credits include BBC drama Tipping the Velvet, ITV series The Bletchley Circle, and guest roles in Lewis and Doctor Who, the latter she appeared in alongside Dame Diana.
Dame Diana died in 2020, aged 82, at her daughter’s home. It was later confirmed that she had lung cancer.
Now, two-time Olivier Award nominee Rachael has opened up about Dame Diana’s life and their intensely close bond in her book, All About My Mother, which includes one surprising revelation.
When starring in ITV’s Victoria as the Duchess of Buccleuch, Dame Diana, then 79, had a special clause written into her contract, requiring a daily bottle of chilled Prosecco at the end of shooting.
But instead of drinking the sparkling beverage herself before or after a job, Rachael has chosen something… different.
She writes in the memoir, as quoted by the Daily Mail: ‘I would love to have a nightly glass of champagne before going on stage, but these days it would equate to a drinking problem.’
Instead, Rachael has chosen ‘a grain or two of my mother’s ashes’ on the opening night of a new play.
‘Although it shocks people when I tell them,’ she writes, ‘it feels absolutely natural to me.’
Dame Diana was cast in the second series of Victoria as the Queen’s new Mistress of the Robes, with the show’s creator, Daisy Goodwin, revealing at the time that she ‘drinks just one glass and shares the rest with the make-up team’.
In the final two months before her death, Rachael acted as her primary carer, a period that brought them even closer, having described their relationship as ‘co-dependent’ already.
Initially, Dame Diana withheld her cancer from her daughter when she was diagnosed in March 2020, as she was appearing on stage in Love Love Love at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith.
When her health declined and she was hospitalised, it was Rachael who strongly advocated for her, notably at the time her name got ‘lost on the system’ during Covid.
‘I found her eventually. I basically had to break into the hospital. She was in a room on her own. She couldn’t get out of bed,’ she told the Telegraph in an interview promoting her book, adding that ‘nobody had helped her’ to open things when she tried to eat.
‘So that was that. I took her home with us,’ she said, and for the rest of her time, Dame Diana lived with Rachael.
Recalling her childhood, Rachael pens in her memoir, which is very much a love letter to Dame Diana, that she would weep when dropping her off at boarding school.
During school holidays, they were inseparable.
‘I suppose we became what you could call co-dependent, though I didn’t know the word for it then,’ she shares.
On forging her own acting career, she admits that Dame Diana could be critical of her work, and she would, as the Guardian reports, treat her more like a ‘personal assistant’ than a ‘co-star’ on the few occasions they worked together.
Still, Rachael saw the humour in it.
‘I am cloaked in her, shielded and shrouded by her,’ she declares of her mother’s legacy. ‘I am her.
‘My mother is my superpower. She always was.’