All About My Mother
Rachael Stirling
John Murray £25
Simon Williams reviews All About My Mother, a new book by Diana Rigg's daughter, Rachael Stirling.
The title is modestly disingenuous.
This story is actually about two women – both top-class actors (formerly known as actresses), a mother and daughter struggling to love each other. Diana Rigg (1938-2020) v Rachael Stirling (b 1977), with no holds barred.
It is a memoir, a eulogy, a thank-you letter and an apology – a funny, fascinating and touching book. Two biographies for the price of one.
As in her acting, there’s a twinkle and spontaneity in Rachael’s writing. Emotions and wit are quietly understated, as she whisks us back and forth between her mother’s childhood and her own – via India, Doncaster, Kensington, Scotland and France.
Her mother’s early days at RADA were surprisingly chaste: ‘We wore girdles, for God’s sake.’ She danced to Chubby Checker and ate spaghetti Bolognese. Asked how she kept lecherous men at bay, Diana replied, ‘Scorn works a treat.’
We are taken through all the usual rites-of-passage stuff – the weekly rep, the hilarious cock-ups, her adoration of Richard Burton, the lucky breaks, the heartaches, her first meeting with ‘Larry’ Olivier etc.
Diana’s direction of travel was straightforward: ‘I would have to be a leading lady or nothing.’ As ever self-deprecating, she muses, ‘I’m not exactly tits and teeth, am I?’
Nevertheless, in 1970, we all queued to see Diana naked in Abelard and Heloise. She was reticent about the nudity, telling Michael Parkinson, a fellow Yorkshire native, ‘Nobody takes their clothes off in Yorkshire – except on Friday night.’
In her scurrilous compilation of stinking reviews, No Turn Unstoned (a great stocking-stuffer for actors, btw), she includes a humdinger of her own from that show: a Broadway critic described her physique as being ‘like a brick mausoleum, with insufficient flying buttresses’.
I played opposite Diana once in Noël Coward’s Hay Fever in Chichester. One night in our two-handed scene, she dried – stone-dead. But, with her unerring survival instinct, she gave me that beguiling smile of hers and said sweetly, ‘Why don’t you say something?’
Just as she did with people, she approached each role with honesty and bravura. Her speciality was strong women: Emma Peel, Mrs James Bond, Medea, Mother Courage, the Queen of Thorns. She didn’t do ‘warm and cosy’ – she left that to Judi Dench (aka ‘Mrs F**king Tiggywinkle’). It was written into Rigg’s contract that a bottle of Prosecco be left in her dressing room every evening.
She always went for quality writing, from Shakespeare to Stoppard. There was a sense of adventure in all her choices. She never stopped enjoying her work and she loved actors – though not George Lazenby, who behaved like ‘a spoilt child’ during his brief spell as 007.
The relationship between Diana and Rachael was fierce and sensual. There were no no-go areas between them – viz, digging out each other’s blackheads. On her first visit to the gynaecologist, Diana tells Rachael, ‘He’s lovely, darling. He’s been up Princess Diana’s jacksie!’
They shared a sense of humour and adventure and an addiction to cigarettes. They laughed a lot and rowed constantly: ‘an older woman arguing with a younger version of herself’. Mid-battle, Diana would scream at her daughter, ‘BUT I MADE YOU!’
Rachael had to seek professional help to survive the volatility of their relationship. ‘It’s all too easy to carelessly wound the person you love the most.’
Foremost among the men Dame Diana enchanted in her life is Rachael’s father, Archie Stirling, the charismatic laird who easily matched her wit and élan; as a couple they ‘really did light up any room they entered’.
But, alas, Archie was caught with his pants down and blew the family apart. Rachael writes, ‘I know he feels awful about fucking it up … but, through Herculean grace, my mother eventually forgave my father and their friendship endured until the end of her life.’ Like Rachael, I kept wishing they had stayed married.
Rachael leads us intriguingly through Dame Diana’s busy life – she’s been her mother’s child, pupil, protégée, co-star, buddy, carer – and biographer. She concludes that she is now ‘cloaked in her, shielded and shrouded by her’.
Rachael is a chip off a fine old block. ‘My mother raised me to feel beautiful, and that is how I feel, most of the time.’ Quite right too.
Yes, there’s a whiff of Gypsy Rose Lee in the mix, but I do hope that the writing of this lovely, loving book has been cathartic for Rachael, as it may well prove for many mothers and daughters.
On her deathbed, her mother tells Rachael, ‘We are now sort of the same person.’
Therein lies the nub of it.
Simon Williams played James Bellamy in Upstairs, Downstairs
