Acting with Honour

Diana Rigg smokes like a trooper. She's the type who looks like they only eat so that they can light up afterwards. God knows what she'll do when it's outlawed. Probably continue. It's impossible imagining anyone daring to tell her she can't.

She is one of our greatest classical actresses, regardless of the fact that an entire male generation brought up on The Avengers will always remember her for simply looking good in a leather catsuit. Rigg also has an alarming reputation as an interviewee, rumoured to be both intimidating and to dislike female journalists.

As tends to be the case, this reputation is far from accurate but does contain a grain of truth: Rigg is friendly in the way a slightly eccentric aunt might be. She answers questions slowly, sometimes not at all.

Fortunately the female journalist thing seems to be untrue, at least if her willingness to talk conspiratorially about being a woman, a wife and a mother is anything to go by.

Which is handy, since all three are crucial to her new role in Joanna Murray-Smith's 2001 play Honour. Rigg plays Honor: a mother and former poet whose 32-year marriage to an academic abruptly finishes when he announces he has fallen for another woman. The play was first performed with Eileen Atkins and it was Atkins from whom Rigg sought advice before taking the role.

'She pointed out how rare it was for parts like this to come along for women our age,' says Rigg, blowing out smoke. 'And that clinched it.'

Rigg admires the play for its 'extraordinary' honesty. 'It takes a woman to write about a woman,' she says. 'Honor valued the things in her marriage so highly in order to justify her sacrifices. She gave up her career for her marriage. But then as Claudia [the other woman] tells her, women also owe it to themselves to realise whatever potential they have.'

It's impossible not to acknowledge the fact that the play treads close to Rigg's own life: her second husband left her for the considerably younger actress Joely Richardson. 'Oh yes, of course there's some common ground,' she says airily. 'Doing the play is an emotional journey. But it would be pathetic if by now I hadn't moved on. I always find everything I do emotionally draining. It's high time I did a comedy.'

As though to deliberately move as far away from catsuits as possible, Rigg has embraced a string of formidable female roles throughout her career, peaking in the theatre during the 1990s with Mother Courage, Medea, Phaedra and Martha in Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?.

'I want to do what I'm doing well,' she explains but insists she has never plotted a career path. 'The idea of living your life waiting for things to happen and when they happen waiting for the next thing, makes no sense to me at all.'