My Emma

‘Life is a movie; death is a photograph.’
Susan Sontag, The Benefactor (1963)

There have been many Emmas, both fictional and real. There was Jane Austen’s handsome, clever and rich Emma Woodhouse; there was Gustave Flaubert’s bored, disappointed and adulterous Emma Bovary. I even went out with a girl named Emma, briefly, when I was nineteen. But the first and most important Emma for me was Emma Peel, a character portrayed by Diana Rigg in the 1960s’ television series, The Avengers. When she appeared on the box in the corner, it was first love, at first sight. I was four.

The Avengers is exactly the same age I am, debuting in January 1961. I grew up in a house with the television always on – and we had UTV as well as RTE. The series began life with Ian Hendry as Dr. David Keel, aided by fellow investigator John Steed, played by Patrick Macnee, a mysterious undercover agent who became increasingly suave, wielding a steel-rimmed bowler hat and a brolly with a concealed rapier. While the show started off as a crime thriller series with tough, gritty storylines, a proto The Sweeney, it found a new style after Hendry’s departure, and the arrival of Honor Blackman’s emancipated anthropologist Catherine Gale. I was too young to remember her contribution but, by all accounts, with her stylish leather catsuits and ability to handle herself in a fight, she stunned early sixties viewers, and was the Ur-Emma.

It was with the 1965 arrival of Rigg as Blackman’s replacement, Mrs. Emma Peel, the wife of a missing pilot, that the show first came to my childhood attention. Steed and Peel’s adventures grew more bizarre than those that had gone before, as they encountered karate-chopping killer robots and vegetable monsters from space. The Rigg/Macnee episodes are the most oft-repeated and fondly remembered, typified by their inventive, sci-fi-tinged storylines, their crazy villains and eccentric characters, and the intriguing, understated (but all the more powerful because of that) sexual chemistry between the two leads.

Camp before anyone – except Oscar Wilde or Ronald Firbank (or, much later and almost contemporaneously, Susan Sontag) – knew what camp meant, and full of mischievous humour, the show helped to extend the realms of TV fantasy fiction. It is no coincidence that both Blackman and Rigg went on to star in what were at the time the most extravagant of latter-day big screen fairytales, the Bond movies: Blackman as Pussy Galore in Goldfinger; and Rigg as Contesse Teresa di Vicenzo in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (the only woman ever to entice 007 up the centre aisle).

What was it about Rigg’s Mrs. Peel that made her my four-year-old self’s first small screen goddess? Apart from the obvious fact that she was an extraordinary beauty (clearly, I had a male gaze before I knew I had a male gaze), I must have figured that she was my kind of girl (or, as a female friend has suggested on learning of my crush, it was Emma who made me realise what kind of girl I liked – making the attraction happily mutual if at the same time entirely one-sided) because when she wasn’t busy effortlessly demonstrating her formidable self-defence skills by beating up baddies without batting an eyelid, she was usually to be found relaxing by dipping into a hefty tome on astrophysics. She also seemed completely unruffled, no matter how dangerously tense the situation in which she found herself. As thespian contemporary Vanessa Redgrave has observed, ‘The world just wasn’t ready for Diana Rigg when she appeared on the scene because she was as ravishing as she was intelligent at a time when women weren’t supposed to be both.’ Perhaps having Diana Rigg play Emma Peel was a touch of typecasting, in the sense of casting an actor in a part calling for the same characteristics as those possessed by the performer, rather than the attendant converse meaning of repeatedly casting an actor as the same type of character – since Rigg was a newbie to television and, with the exception of the above-mentioned Catherine Gale, there was no remotely comparable previous character type for her to be typecast as. (Okay, so Irma Vep from Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires (1915) – revisited by Olivier Assayas in his eponymous 1996 meta-movie and subsequently in his recent HBO meta-meta-series (2022) – had embodied the erotic allure of a black-catsuited woman; but she was a criminal rather than a crimebuster, and decidedly French rather than quintessentially English.) In short, arguably more so than the writers, Rigg created Emma. When she left the series after two seasons in 1967, I was heartbroken. But I sent her a Bon Voyage card wishing her well for the future, and was overjoyed to be rewarded with an autographed photograph in return.

She quit the role which had made her name to return to her first love, the theatre, with the Royal Shakespeare Company – despite taking a hefty pay cut. ‘Playing in The Avengers is a commercial thing,’ she said at the time. ‘Appearing in Shakespeare means more than money.’ In fact, during her first series, Rigg had learned that she was being paid less than the cameraman, and demanded a raise to put her on more of a par with her co-star, or she would leave the show. The producers gave in, largely thanks to the programme’s huge popularity in the U.S., and so an early blow was struck in closing the gender pay gap. Aside from her stint as a Bond babe, she took on leading stage parts in many of the Bard’s most famous plays, as well as appearing in works by Ibsen, Brecht, Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams at the English National Theatre. Her many subsequent TV performances included turns as Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, the villainous Mrs Gillyflower in the Doctor Who episode ‘The Crimson Horror’, and her swan song as the wily, acerbic matriarch Lady Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones.

After Rigg’s departure, Macnee’s new partner was Linda Thorson, a Canadian fresh out of drama school, in the role of Tara King. The duo took on strange cases involving highly improbable threats to national security, but the show had passed its halcyon days, and I began to lose interest.

The series was cancelled early in 1969 but was revived briefly for two seasons in the mid-seventies as The New Avengers, when it reached its nadir. Macnee returned as Steed alongside Gareth Hunt as Mike Gambit, a younger man contrived to appeal to younger women, and Joanna Lumley as Purdey, a too traditionally feminine woman to cut it as an Avengers girl. Lumley has since proved, with Absolutely Fabulous, that her forte lies more in broad comedy than the subtlety of reserved wit. But as a product of the sixties, a decade it could be said it helped to define, The Avengers could not be rebooted to suit the more sombre seventies.

 

About that problematic, if nascent, male gaze: in cinematic and televisual representations of women, the male gaze is said to deny a woman’s human agency and identity, and so transform her from person to object – someone to be considered only for her face and her figure – that is, her sex appeal – as defined in Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1973). This theory propounds that cinematic images tend to portray gender in patriarchal terms, reinforcing the classic division between passive femininity and active masculinity. However, this was hardly the case with Emma and me. For a start, even if I was in some ways a particularly precocious four-year-old, I was not yet at the erection stage, and the mad hormonal rush of puberty was still a long way off. So this fascination was the rapt wonderment of a ‘Boy Child’.

But also: maybe it made me realise, at an age before self-consciousness had hit – and so therefore precognitive and perhaps innate – that there were different ways of looking, and seeing – to recast the title of John Berger’s 1972 TV series and subsequent book which gave us the term ‘the gaze’, setting the stage for Mulvey to add the contentious qualifier ‘male’. Emancipated heterosexual females could also be the recipients of heterosexual male regard, as much for their intelligence as for their looks (vide Redgrave) – rather than inculcators of castration anxiety who had to be distanced by insecure males in heteronormative discourse. Similarly, such regard need not necessarily be construed as sexist, emanating from unreconstructed sexual opportunists: respectful, non-predatory Mr. Nice-and-Decents could do their fair share of eyeballing (rather than ogling) too – albeit discreetly and non-threateningly.

Here, it is worth distinguishing between ‘to look’, ‘to stare’ and ‘to gaze’. All three of these verbs describe modes of visual perception. They differ only because they tell you about the intentions and emotional experience of the person who is seeing something or someone; and also about those of the object of their attention, if it is a sentient person. The extent to which the seer is responsible for the reactions of the seen is difficult to quantify, and is open to subjective interpretation, which is dependent on many factors (specific context, social and cultural norms, etc., which themselves are never stable and are subject to change).

Of the three, looking is the most neutral, in terms of emotion. It communicates only the idea that a person chooses to turn their eyes towards something. Compare this with to see, which can be involuntary. If you are wating at a bus stop, you may see cars passing by on the street (if any are passing), but only because your eyes are there to witness them passing in the first place. You cannot help but the see the cars, if your eyes are open and functioning. (You could, of course, opt simply to close your eyes – in which case you could stop reading this tiny exegesis at this point.) But you choose to look at your smart phone, by holding it in your hands in front of your eyes, because you have chosen to see it so that you can doomscroll. You look at your footwear to see if it is clean and presentable (if that is something which is important to you) – here looking means you choose to see your shoes for a reason. (There is an aural analogy to this visual process with the verbs ‘to hear’ and ‘to listen’, in terms of intentionality and focus. However, while your eyelids may do you sterling service in blocking out unwanted sights, you cannot close your ears to unwanted sounds: you would have to stuff them, with your fingers or earplugs.)

Starring is volitional, you choose to do it, and you do it for some length of time. You might stare at the man on the bus because you are surprised at how much he looks like your late uncle. You might stare at the floor of the bus because you feel uncomfortable amidst this bunch of strangers surrounding you, invading your intimate space. Men stare at women (and, sometimes, vice versa) for a variety of reason, for example because they find them attractive, or want to intimidate them, or out of curiosity or surprise (or some crazy mix of these motivations), and so on. The stare may be returned, involving eye contact – though usually not for very long, unless it turns into a ‘who blinks first’ competition. This is why responsible parents tell their children that it is rude to stare: it has a negative emotional connotation.

To gaze is to look at something (or someone) with curiosity, interest, joy, thoughtfulness or emotions related to appreciation. Gazing does not connote any feelings of hostility, like anger, jealousy, and suchlike. If you gaze out the bus window, it may be because you are a little bored (Andy Warhol: ‘I like boring things. When you just sit and look out of a window, that’s enjoyable. It takes up time.’ – from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975)), or are curious about the scenery, or enjoy watching the people outside going about their business. You may gaze at the scenery because it brings back memories of another city where you once lived. In general, it might or might not be enjoyable to gaze at something, but it is not something you choose to do because you feel strong, possibly negative emotions. It is a more neutral or possibly happy stare. You can gaze at something (or someone) sadly, or happily, but you do not do it in anger and it is never intended to provoke or offend or intimidate anyone. It is all about your inner, personal, emotional experience. Of course, a person being gazed at will have their own inner, personal, emotional experience of being gazed at, too – if the gaze is too obvious.

All of the above is without taking into consideration the manifold differences between looking, staring and gazing at someone in ‘real’ life, and someone on a screen (where they cannot possibly be offended as an individual).

So, to return to me and Emma, there you have it: I was an unwitting prodigy of sexual and gender equality. TV gave me my Lacanian Mirror Stage, or helped to refine and extend it. Gazing is central to Jacques Lacan’s celebrated theory, where the subject appears to achieve a sense of mastery by seeing themselves as an ideal ego in their own reflection. By viewing themselves in the mirror, subjects begin their assimilation into culture and language, becoming aware of their own subjectivity through the ideal image inside the mirror, an image that they can yearn towards for their lifetimes (a secure, coherent iteration of the self at variance with the chaotic drives and desires of our corporeal bodies). That mirror image of oneself can be occupied by others at various times whom we may strive to emulate in our adult lives (role models, love objects); in short, anyone whom we set up as a reflection of ourselves in what is, at heart, a narcissistic relationship.

Incidentally, while writing this piece it occurs to me that, however unusual it was to have access to this non-Irish material at the time, it was even stranger to have parental permission to watch it, at such a tender and impressionable age. Indeed, it could lead you to assume that my folks were some sort of proto-hippie liberals, whereas in point of fact they were both conservative cradle Catholics (like the majority of Ireland’s population back then), who had never got further than primary school. Perhaps they thought that, at a period in Irish history when you had to come out as straight as much as gay, any budding heterosexual inclination was entirely innocent and healthy, and definitely preferable to any alternative. More likely, though, is that their laxness can be attributed to their undiminished sexual naivety, which remained intact despite having produced three children (and two stillbirths). After all, as Fine Gael politician Oliver J. Flanagan had it, in 1967, ‘There was no sex in Ireland before television.’

Apropos of this observation, I further recall that subsequently, when I was in my teens, whenever a sex scene came on the television (and by then we also had BBC 1, BBC 2 and Channel 4, so there was a lot more of ‘that kind of thing’ on offer) and I was unfortunate enough to be in the sitting room with him, my father would fall to averting his gaze by consulting the mantelpiece clock, and checking it against his wristwatch, repeatedly, until the scene was over. Today, this behavioural trait would probably be classified as symptomatic of OCD, or ADHD, or some such contemporary condition. Back then, it sent a message, more powerful in its own way than any outright censorship would have been, that there was something reprehensible going on here. ‘Le nom du père’ was indeed ‘le non du père.’

So TV was my best educator – more so than parents or teachers, or censorious, sex-negative religious types whose strictures have since been replicated by a specific strain of feminist critique, if for entirely different reasons. Emma brought out something latent in me that I did not know was there. Quite a breakthrough, at four – although obviously I did not recognise it as such at the time. I thought my reaction was perfectly normal – if also completely mind-blowing – in that it would have been standard procedure for anyone and everyone. Well, the male audience, at any rate. I would be interested to hear what a woman – any woman – who was a little girl of similar age at the time, would have made of Emma. A positive role model, certainly, if only because this character is portrayed as something other than a mere fetish object. Her action sequence attire is but one facet of her wardrobe and her persona, since her research and investigative scenes display other, situation appropriate, outfits and skills. Even in the fights, she is a fetish object whom women could also get behind.

There is, however, a counter-argument as to the salutary nature of the Emma-effect, that when women are the protagonists of action-based films (and, by extension, TV series), they continue to be presented through the lens of the male gaze. This is a character trope referred to as the ‘Fighting Fuck Toy’, a term coined by Caroline Heldman in her online article ‘The Hunger Games, Hollywood, and Fighting Fuck Toys’ (2012):

Fighting fuck toys are hyper-sexualized female protagonists who are able to ‘kick ass’ (and kill) with the best of them. The FFT appears empowered, but her very existence serves the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. In short, the FFT takes female agency, weds it to normalized male violence, and appropriates it for the male gaze.

This is impossible to argue against, not because it is inherently true, but because it is a self-fulfilling, circular argument. However, I beg to differ. Happily, Heldman extends her line of reasoning, to the point where our viewpoints are in accord:

The Hunger Games is Hollywood’s wake-up call that female action hero movies can be successful if the protagonist is portrayed as a complex subject instead of a hyper-sexualized fighting fuck toy.

Hollywood rolls out FFTs every few years that generally don’t perform well at the box office (think Lara Croft, Elektra, Cat Woman, Sucker Punch), leading executives to wrongly conclude that female action leads aren’t bankable. The problem isn’t their sex. The problem is their portrayal as sex objects, and objects aren’t convincing protagonists. Subjects ‘act’ while objects are ‘acted upon’, so reducing a female action hero to an object, even sporadically, diminishes her ability to believably carry a storyline. The FFT might have an enviable swagger and do cool stunts, but she’s ultimately a bit of a joke.

The answer, it seems, is to endow the female heroine with a multifaceted individual psychology. In addition to her formidable combat skills, according to Heldman, ‘Katniss is a believable, reluctant hero. She succeeds where other female heroes have failed because she isn’t a FFT.’ As well as Katniss Everdeen in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games books and Gary Ross’ and Francis Lawrence’s filmisations, the same phenomenon can be observed in the character of Lisbeth Salandar from Steig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy and Niels Arden Oplev’s and Daniel Alfredson’s film versions.

Yet, just as you cannot take the sexual allure out of the (relatively) psychologically complex Emma Peel, or remove her agency, I feel sure that there are many teenage boys who are sexually attracted to the characters portrayed by Jennifer Lawrence and Noomi Rapace. Emma Peel was as psychologically complex as Katniss Everdeen or Lisbeth Salandar, if not more so. She was also sexy. Indeed, her psychology was part of what made her so sexy.

Besides all of which, what exactly is the difference between gazing (male or female), and the ‘slow looking’ increasingly promoted by galleries and art critics? As Jeanette Winterson has written: ‘The only way to see something is to look more slowly.’ Such slow looking would be the diametrically opposite corrective to Jean-Luc Godard’s satirical critique of the reverence accorded to the traditional western canon of high art in Bande à Part (1964), where the three central characters run through the Louvre in nine minutes forty-three seconds, an iconic sequence referenced subsequently in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003), where the three central characters break that record, with a time of nine minutes twenty-eight seconds. (Occurring as they do in films, these are fictional records; the real life record belongs to Swiss artist Beat Lippert, who in 2010 recorded a time of nine minutes fourteen seconds, as part of his art piece titled La Sprezzatura.)

Furthermore, as a corollary, what else is the much-derided male gaze but an eye of admiration: in other words, attraction, which has been around since long before we were here, and will most likely still be here long after we are gone? Otherwise: no more humans – unless by artificial medical intervention (a.k.a. transhumanism). Men have always looked at and appraised women on their physical appearance, not only on the evolutionary pretext that they might make good mates and mothers of their children, but also on the admittedly idealistic premise that exterior attractiveness somehow bodies forth an inner beauty of the soul, even hinting at moral rectitude. It does not, of course – but it is a self-satisfying and enabling fiction to imagine that it does. What else is every love poem, from Solomon’s ‘Song of Songs’ to T. Rex’s ‘Jeepster’, but a celebration of the belovèd’s corporeal attributes – whether or not they function as a stand-in for something else? To change this would require a radical overhaul of human nature; or leastways, of masculine psychophysiology.

And also, perhaps, of feminine psychophysiology. For heterosexual women can and do employ ‘the gaze’ in their assessment of men, too (as can lesbians when checking out women) – and independent, self-supporting women are far more likely to do so than those looking only for a partner who is a traditional ‘good provider’, who brings financial security and stability in a partnership. While one is chary of aligning oneself too closely with Camille Paglia, that arch-provocateur and voluble traitor to the second wave sisterhood (and, serendipitously, a noted Diana Rigg fan), she expressed this viewpoint well in an interview entitled ‘The Savage Id’ (1999): ‘the Male Gaze was an a priori theory: First there was feminist ideology, asserting that history is nothing but male oppression and female victimization, and then came this theory – the ‘victim’ model of feminism applied wholesale to works of culture.’ My Emma (and I am not unaware of the pejorative implications of using that possessive pronoun) broke out of and went far beyond the frame in which she had originally been placed. She was, after all, by no means a mere passive object of desire, despite the origin story of her name: it derived from a comment by the writers, during development, that they wanted to create a character with ‘man appeal’. Endeavouring to incorporate this concept into the character’s nomenclature, she was originally called ‘Samantha Peel’, which was later abbreviated to the inelegant ‘’Mantha Peel’. Over time, the writers began referencing the idea using the verbal shorthand ‘M. Appeal’, and so she was inadvertently, homophonically christened. What’s in a name? But she went on to make male gaze theory highly questionable, if not anachronistically redundant, before it even became current.

Or am I being too generous to myself, and men in general? Was I already objectifying Diana Rigg as Emma Peel, at four-years-old? Maybe I was, but I did not know it back then. As a consequence, was such ostensibly ‘innocent’ objectification therefore not only tiresomely typical, but entirely object-ionable? Perhaps I am not best placed to adjudicate on the matter, lacking as I do ‘objectivity’. Or, to put it another way, my subjective opinion is not the only one to be taken into consideration. So I will leave the relative extent of my culpability in the patriarchal gaze for others to decide.

For, granted, perhaps the innocent neutrality of this male gaze is age-dependent, and becomes more questionable the older the gazer gets. Reference to French director Olivier Assayas’ recent television series Irma Vep, in which an Assayas stand-in, René Vidal, is filming a recreation of his own 1996 film of the same name (which was, in turn, a homage to Feuillade’s silent era series, Les Vampires), brings to mind a scene in Episode 2 where, during a session with his therapist, the highly neurotic René reveals one of his motivations in revisiting this project: his fixation with catsuits:

René: As a teenager, I was obsessed with Diana Rigg, the actress from The Avengers.

Therapist: Did you pleasure yourself thinking about her?

René: It wasn’t exactly Diana Rigg. Her character was called Emma Peel. And she did wear leather catsuits and boots.

Therapist: Did the catsuit and boots have an effect on you?

René: Yes! Yes, yes. There were scenes, when she was abducted and tied up…

Therapist: You had fantasies?

René: Yes.

Therapist: And you would masturbate?

René: Well…I have the greatest respect for Diana Rigg. She died recently. I thought she was an exceptional actress. It wasn’t so much Diana Rigg. The fantasy was more about her character.

Therapist: And those fantasies were the basis for your auto-erotic activities.

René: Yes, that’s exactly it.

Adolescents undoubtedly have the potential to be more sexually active, if not always more imaginative, than four-year-olds.

All I will plead in my defence is that my childish (and childlike) love for Emma was, finally, an aestheticisation. Is an aesthetic appreciation possible without objectification? ‘But people are not objects’, the humanist and/or feminist argument will run. But Emma was a character in a TV show, not a real person. As for Diana Rigg – the person, the actress – I have no experience of her in what is called ‘real’ life. And if I had had, it may well have been an utter disaster. She was paid to take on a role. She could hardly then have complained about being objectified in that role. Nor did she (although she did, rightly, make a fuss about how paltry was her remuneration for her services). It was her job, her profession, her career. And she did it oh-so-well. She could just as equally have been objectified in her portrayals of King Lear’s Goneril or A Doll’s House’s Nora. Maybe it is the fate of all high-profile mummers to be objectified, when acting in a professional capacity (and, in the age of celebrity-hunting paparazzi, during their downtime too). Whether regarded with idealisation or derision, or anything in between, they are objects of criticism – positive, negative or indifferent – as soon as they step on to a stage or a film or TV set. It goes with that benighted, glitzy territory.

In his Lacanian interpretation of religion, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, Slavoj Žižek writes: ‘This accounts for the status of the Lady in courtly love: Precisely because of its endless postponing of the consummation of the sexual act, courtly love remains on the level of sexual desire, not love – the proof of this is that the Lady is reduced to a pure symbolic entity, indistinguishable from all others, not touched in the Real of her singularity.’ But Emma was not like all the others. The ideal of courtly love depends, after all, on the prohibition on premarital sex (except with the now-quaintly termed ‘ladies of easy virtue’), and the concomitant insistence on pre-nuptial virginity. In addition to which, a traditional Christian apologist would argue that the love comes before the sex, not the other way around: you fall in love with a love object, then you get married and consummate that ideal love with a subject, in socially sanctioned and acceptable sex (usually with reproduction as its goal). Whatever about the ontological status of Emma Peel, Diana Rigg was demonstrably real, even if I never met her in person. If ‘This I is Another’, as Rimbaud had it, then this She was definitely The Other – but one I related to and identified with – which is the relationship any fan of anyone or anything has with the object of their fandom. A screen is something you project images on to; but it is also something which throws them right back at you. It also hides – or acts as a screen for – whatever is behind it.

 

When Dame Diana Rigg, an unrepentant, life-long twenty-a-day smoker, died of cancer on 10 September, 2020, at the age of eighty-two, I took it hard. The first and last vestige of my prelapsarian naivety and wonder was gone. I was now, irrefutably, the older generation, with all the forewarnings of encroaching decrepitude and eventual death which that entails. More so than any members of the 27 Club, whose early demises send shockwaves through us in our youth, but who are thus paradoxically pristinely preserved for all time in their prime and so in a sense remain ‘Forever Young’, it is ultimately the more to be expected (or at least not so ‘untimely’) departures of those long-lived survivors who have seemingly always been there, which provide the strongest intimations of our own mortality.

This feeling was later compounded by reading the account of Rigg’s final months written by her actor daughter Rachael Stirling, in which she references recordings Rigg made with the help of her son-in-law, Stirling’s husband Guy Garvey of the band Elbow. Rigg makes an impassioned case for the legalisation of assisted dying, speaking of her ‘truly awful’ and ‘dehumanising’ death throes. ‘Nobody speaks about this’, she says, ‘the lack of dignity and privacy that is part and parcel of severe illness.’ She continues:

They don’t talk about how awful, how truly awful the details of this condition are, and the ignominy that is attached to it. Well, it’s high time they did. And it is high time there was some movement in the law to give choice to people in my position. This means giving human beings true agency over their own bodies at the end of life. This means giving human beings political autonomy over their own death…. Any palliative nurse will tell you, in the end, patients often starve themselves as a means to an end. The body becomes weaker, the organs shut down. It’s not that they want to die that way. It’s how they take control. Nobody speaks about this. They talk about the pain and the dread, but not the awful details of the condition.

The justification which illustrates that she was always a trailblazing fighter, in person and in character, and not a mere gutless scaredy cat cosplaying in a catsuit, comes with the clincher:

I’ve always spoken out. I spoke out when I was very young, doing The Avengers, and learned I was earning less than the cameraman. I received universal opprobrium. I was called ‘money grabbing’. I spoke for peace in Vietnam, in Northern Ireland. I marched for peace in Iraq. I stood up for what is right. I speak my mind. I always have. If I see something is unfair, I’ll do my best to address it. I think this is unfair. I think it is unfair that I don’t have a choice. I think it is unfair that other people don’t have a choice.

Her daughter glosses this polemic with the intimate insight:

But the truth is, in the initial aftermath of her death, the press and the public wanted to remember Diana Rigg as she once was. It was too soon to associate Emma Peel with physical decline, or the only Mrs James Bond with incontinence. But it was the indignity of incontinence which made my mother want to end her life. For her, and I know this isn’t the same for everybody, the tipping point in her quality of life was the inability to control her bowels. It depressed her so completely that her dignity was, on a daily basis, stretched beyond breaking point. She simply didn’t want to be here any more.

I can but add that I fully concur here, yet another instance in which I find Ms. Rigg highly relatable. I wouldn’t want to be kept alive indefinitely, against my will, wallowing in someone else’s misery, or obliging them to wallow in mine.

It was only as I grew older that I realised that this earliest object of screen desire, my original fantasy fodder, was actually more than twenty years my senior. But she’s captured for ever as she was then, vivacious and timeless, in those at once innocent and knowing escapades with Macnee in The Avengers, the surreal psychedelia of which made it as much a symbol of Swinging ’60s London as the Mini (skirt and car – although Emma would never have been so slavishly in thrall to fashion, and instead was turned out in elegantly designed haute couture costumes and zipped around in a rather more individualistic powder blue Lotus Elan); or the music, image and cheekily irreverent attitudes of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who or The Kinks, even as the decade reached the more lysergic heights scaled by Hendrix, Cream and Syd Barrett-era early Pink Floyd. My Emma embodied that moment when post-war life changed seemingly overnight from dull, grey black and white into glorious, trippy Technicolor, as the series itself did between Seasons 4 and 5 in 1966.

Now, where did I put that photograph she sent me?