Rachael Stirling has revealed that she eats “a grain or two” of her late mother’s ashes before going onstage for opening night of a play.
The British actor is the daughter of Diana Rigg, known for her roles as a Bond Girl opposite George Lazenby’s 007, in the Sixties TV series The Avengers, and in HBO’s fantasy series Game of Thrones. Rigg died of cancer aged 82 in 2020.
Stirling, 49, has written a new memoir about her mother and their relationship, titled All About My Mother, in which she revealed that she ingests her mother’s ashes on the first night of a new play.
“Although it shocks people when I tell them,” she writes, as per The Telegraph, “it feels absolutely natural to me. I am cloaked in her, shielded and shrouded by her. My mother is my superpower.”
The book details key moments from across Rigg’s early life, such as when she was sent to boarding school in England, aged eight, having grown up in India where she was raised largely by a nanny who spoke to her and her older brother Hugh in Hindi.
“I’ve basically been sobbing for two years since reading those,” Stirling said of the letters her late mother sent to her parents in India.
“That little person, who was eight, came to expect everybody would leave her, betray her at some point.” When she returned home, Stirling said, “she was a different little girl. She had become a survivor.”
Stirling also recounted how her mother frequently had to fend off entitled men in her younger years, including the late comedian and actor Benny Hill.
When Stirling had a disastrous failed attempt to join the Bond franchise herself, opposite Daniel Craig in 2006’s Casino Royale (she had a bad case of diarrhoea during her audition), Rigg apparently told her daughter that it was “for the best”.
Stirling also said she took inspiration from Rigg when telling her then-boyfriend, now-husband, Elbow frontman Guy Garvey, that she wanted children. “I told him: ‘I want to have your babies. So, you’ve got to make a decision. If you’re not into that then I’m off.’ And then I took all my clothes off and walked into the sea,” she said, recalling Rigg’s famous Bond scene when her character Tracy Bond strides into the ocean at the beginning of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
Against her mother’s wishes, Stirling followed in Rigg’s footsteps as an actor, and has been nominated twice for a Laurence Olivier Award for her stage work. Her film roles include the 2009 period drama The Young Victoria, and the 2012 blockbuster Snow White and the Huntsman.
Stirling’s book All About My Mother is out on 10 September.
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