A biography for Diana Rigghasn’t been written yet.
“I was nice and well-mannered because I was taught manners. I was very imaginative and quite adventurous. I was a tomboy, and I was always jealous that my older brother Hugh had bigger toy aeroplanes than me. I was always playing with boys' toys; I don't remember owning any dolls.”
“All these old images of me floating across the screen, the terrible chasm of what you were and what you are. I know who I am, but these people who see me as I was then don't.”
“They do say that the profession gets increasingly difficult, but my career seems to have been inside out. I'm playing the biggest parts now that I'm older. That's probably right, because I wasn't ready for them before.”
“I think women of my age are still attractive.”
“I made a bit of a stink. At the time, it was considered very bad form.”
“I cry all the time. Remembrance Day in particular. In fact, anything to do with veterans makes me sob.”
“I find the whole feminist thing very boring. They are so much on the defensive that they dare not love a man because they feel assaulted by being dependent.”
“I would like to keep working forever. As long as they will have me.”
“I don't generally give interviews unless I have to promote a play and had sworn years ago, having been bitten once too often, never to be interviewed by a woman again.”
“There were no prototypes for me - the telly was full of little blonde juveniles.”
“I've been in the business 60 years, and it's taken me this long to play a scene with a monkey. That's what happens if you stick around.”
“There is always one thing that turns you into an icon, an iconic image: in my case, a catsuit. But the icon 40 years later doesn't really want to know because it's not relevant to me.”
“Once, when I was playing a nude scene in an indifferent play in New York, a critic wrote, 'Diana Rigg is built like a brick basilica with too few flying buttresses.' Do you think that's fair?”
“It would be nice if they didn't make me get up at 5 A.M. for a 12-hour day. My caravan is never big enough to lie down. There is no little doze. You are knackered by the time you get home. Knackered.”
“Critics have to sit through an awful lot of rubbish, and you feel really sorry for them. In fact, I've been in a play where I felt sorry for the critics.”
“I have no way of comparing myself to other people my age; I can't compare myself with Jane Fonda, can I? I haven't had the work done. I admire the discipline of someone who maintains that degree of beauty, but I'm not prepared to do it.”
“It's particularly exhausting because Medea is defined by her determination. The role is all about endeavour.”
“You'll always be close to somebody that you worked with very intimately for so long, and you become really fond of each other.”
“I have always thought of myself as rather a happy person. Apart from a few knocks along the way, I consider myself to have been extremely lucky.”
“In actual fact, I doubled 'Twelfth Night' and 'The Avengers'. I was going backwards and forwards to Stratford. I played matinees Wednesday, matinee and evenings Saturdays, and the other days of the week, I was filming in Elstree.”