Dame Diana Rigg, the legendary British actress whose career spanned Shakespeare, James Bond, and Game of Thrones, spent her final days recording a searing indictment of Britain’s assisted dying laws, revealing in posthumously published tapes that she begged her daughter to “push me over the edge” as cancer ravaged her body.
The 82-year-old icon, who died on September 10, 2020, used a cassette recorder given to her by her son-in-law, Elbow frontman Guy Garvey, to document her harrowing final months with the same unflinching candor that defined her six-decade career. In recordings made public in December 2023, Rigg described losing control of her bowels as “the most dehumanizing thing that can happen” and called for urgent legal reform to grant terminally ill patients true agency over their own deaths.
“I have cancer and it is everywhere and I have been given 6 months to live and I’m not frightened of describing the least attractive aspects of my condition,” Rigg stated on the tapes, her voice still carrying the crisp authority that had commanded stages from Stratford to Broadway. The recordings, which her daughter Rachel Stirling took three years to listen to before publishing them in the Observer, have reignited Britain’s national debate on assisted dying exactly as Rigg intended.
The Yorkshire-born actress, who rose to fame as the leather-clad Mrs. Emma Peel in the 1960s spy series The Avengers, explored every avenue for a dignified exit, including the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, which proved bureaucratically impossible given her timeline. She and Rachel discussed hiring “a swanky house and a dodgy doctor,” howling with laughter at the absurdity of their situation, but ultimately concluded that “it’s impossible to pop your own clogs without it being plainly barbaric or painfully inefficient.”
The day before her death, Rigg fixed her daughter with a stare and delivered her final command: “Rai, it’s gone on too long. Push me over the edge.” She had already told Rachel, “Fair is fair, Rachie.
I’ve always spoken out,” framing her final recordings as one last act of defiance from a woman who had never shied from controversy.
Rigg’s death came after a lifetime of battles, both personal and professional. She had fought for equal pay in the 1960s when she discovered she was earning less than the cameraman on The Avengers, a fight that earned her the label “money-grabbing” from a press that offered no support from fellow actresses. “There was no sisterhood,” she said with lasting bitterness.
“In those days, you were on your own.”
Her final years had been marked by both triumph and decline. In 2013, at age 74, she was cast as the Queen of Thorns in Game of Thrones, a role that brought her four Emmy nominations and a new generation of admirers. She delivered her first scene’s monstrously long speech in a single take, knowing the producers were testing “an old actress to see if she can get it into her head.”
She did it, then told them, “Thank you. Go away.”
But the smoking habit she had maintained since age 18 finally caught up with her. In 2017, she underwent heart surgery during which her heart stopped, nearly killing her on the table. When she pulled through, she joked, “The good Lord must have said, ‘Send the old bag down again.
I’m not having her yet.'” She stopped smoking after that, but the damage was done.
In March 2020, as the world shut down for COVID, Rigg received her terminal diagnosis. She moved into Rachel’s home in London, surrounded by favorite pictures, a radio by her bedside, and bottles of Narcisse perfume sprayed in lavish abundance. Her son-in-law, who had recorded his own father’s final words, suggested she do the same.
The recordings began as memories of her early days with the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she had played Cordelia opposite Paul Scofield’s King Lear before she was 25. But as her prognosis became certain, her subject shifted to dying, to the law, and to one last chance to speak out against what she saw as a barbaric system that forced the terminally ill to suffer needlessly.
Rigg’s career had been extraordinary by any measure. The daughter of a railway engineer, she spent her first eight years in Bikiner, India, where Hindi was her second language, before being brought back to a damp, rationed, gray England in 1945. She hated her boarding school, feeling like “a fish out of water,” but discovered acting there, finding the one place where being different was an advantage.
She joined Peter Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Company in 1959, part of a brilliant nucleus that included Judi Dench and Ian Holm. When she left for television, Hall was dismissive, predicting she would “waste herself in television and silly movies.” Instead, she became a cultural phenomenon as Emma Peel, a widow who was independently wealthy, intellectually brilliant, and fluent in both martial arts and cutting one-liners.
The role made her a 𝒔𝒆𝒙 symbol, a status she found deeply uncomfortable. “It was very, very intrusive in those days because I was instantly recognizable,” she said. “I found it very discomforting.”
She never went to premieres, never strutted red carpets. “It’s just boring having to scrub up,” she said with characteristic Yorkshire deflation.
In 1969, she became the only woman to marry James Bond on screen, starring opposite George Lazenby in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The tension between them became legendary, with Lazenby feeding negative stories to the tabloids, including the claim that Rigg had eaten garlic before their love scenes. She denied it publicly with heat, but the rumor entered Bond mythology anyway.
Her stage career continued to flourish, culminating in her Tony Award-winning performance as Medea in 1994, a role that seemed almost written for her. “The Greeks believed that their lives were pre-ordained by the gods,” she said. “Fuck that.
I’m not having it. I’m going to live my life the way I want. That is why I like women who stride out.
They are the interesting ones.”
She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1994, the establishment finally catching up with the girl who had left the RSC against Peter Hall’s wishes. She took it in stride, as she took most things, with dry wit and a refusal to be impressed.
Her personal life was marked by two failed marriages. Her first, to Israeli painter Menachem Geffen, lasted about a year and ended after he threw her luggage from a hotel window during an argument. Her second, to Scottish lawyer Archibald Sterling, ended in 1990 after he conducted an 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 with actress Joely Richardson.
Rigg’s response was to donate his collection of bespoke Savile Row suits to Oxfam, an act of such cold, precise fury that it entered the lore of celebrity revenge.
She never married again, describing herself as a devoted mother grateful for the rich inner life that kept her from loneliness. She and Sterling eventually became amicable co-parents, but the wound was deep. She had trusted twice, been burned twice, and drew her own conclusions.
In her final recordings, Rigg spoke of patients who starve themselves to death because they have no other means of control, and called for a change in the law to give human beings true agency over their own bodies at the end of life. The tapes, published in the Observer, have become a powerful testament in the ongoing debate over assisted dying in Britain.
Her daughter Rachel Stirling, who published her mother’s words, said Rigg had spent her final months “joyfully reflecting on her extraordinary life” and that she would miss her “beyond words.” The recordings were Rigg’s final manifesto, her last fight, waged from a bed in her daughter’s house with the same fury she had brought to every battle before it.
Director Jonathan Kent perhaps said it best: “Her combination of force of personality, beauty, courage, and sheer emotional power made her a great classical actress.” Tom Stoppard called her talent “luminous.” But she was also, and above all, what Stoppard named her in his tribute: “a trooper, capital T, with her sleeves rolled up and a smile for everyone.
And heaven help anyone foolish enough to get in her way.”
Even from beyond the grave, she was making a bit of a song and dance about something that mattered. Her final screen performances were released posthumously, Black Narcissus in late 2020 and Last Night in Soho in 2021, dedicated to her memory. She is still there on screen in the last frames of a long career, alert, commanding, that Yorkshire fire undiminished.