This idyll was shattered when Rigg was sent, aged eight, to boarding school in England. Stirling’s chin wobbles as we discuss her mother’s brave-face letters home from Fulneck Girls’ School. “I’ve basically been sobbing for two years since reading those,” says Stirling, who believes that James and Beryl’s “abandonment” of their daughter reprogrammed the child. “That little person, who was eight, came to expect everybody would leave her, betray her at some point.” Rigg was sad for 10 months and then rebuilt herself. She’d found the fun in life again, but “she was a different little girl. She had become a survivor.”
Stirling was saddened to learn that the future sex symbol didn’t like her body as a young teenager. She quotes Rigg’s recollection of finding herself “insufficient” at 14, “hoping that something inside was going to pop out and was going to be better. Had to be”. She also gives a delicious account of her mum’s early career, raging through bit parts at the RSC. The director Peter Hall remembered her as “the rudest walk-on I have ever seen. I remember very well her Roman Citizen [in Coriolanus] glowering from under her helmet at Vanessa Redgrave, who had been given a part with lines.”
Coming of age in the pre-MeToo days, Rigg learnt that “scorn works a treat” when it came to fending off the lechers and gropers. She also saw the absurd side of some men’s entitlement. Stirling eye-rolls at George Lazenby, who had little acting experience when he was cast in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Rigg found him ‘ghastly’). When I mention Benny Hill, Stirling guffaws. In 1958, when the comic invited Rigg to his home for a drink, she hadn’t realised that she would be the only guest. Nervously studying the herb garden while he fetched a drink, she was astonished to see him return with her glass in hand and a semi-erect penis on display. Panicking, she pointed at the ground and exclaimed: “Look! Parsley!” Hill zipped himself up and showed her out.
Seven years later, Rigg was cast in the Avengers as Emma Peel, the swashbuckling brainiac who never let a man get the better of her. But in real life, Rigg didn’t get the romantic commitment she deserved. Stirling shakes her head over her mother’s devotion to early boyfriend, director Philip Saville, whose “appalling absenteeism” reduced her to frequently penning pining letters. But Stirling is full of admiration for the nobility with which Rigg conducted herself through her divorce from Stirling’s unfaithful father, theatre producer Archie Stirling. “Mama wore her suffering – bereavements, divorce – so honourably. She just got on with life.”