Rachael Stirling said she ate Diana Rigg’s ashes before going on stage, a detail that lands with more force because she was speaking about her mother’s death, her grief and the book she has written about them. Stirling said the loss was shaped by pandemic restrictions, which kept her from giving Rigg a big funeral after the actress died of lung cancer in 2020 at 82.
All About My Mother
49 is the age at which Stirling is now using All About My Mother to turn private loss into a public account. She called the book “a belated eulogy”, and that framing matters: it is not a formal biography of Diana Rigg, but a daughter’s account of a relationship that still has unfinished edges.
Helen Brown, the writer and broadcaster who interviewed Stirling, got the sharpest version of that edge in a line that only a family member could deliver. Stirling said Rigg texted her to say that it was appalling when she used too many swear words, adding: “Darling, when you talk like that you lose all sweetness and light.”
At times co-dependent
Stirling described her bond with Diana Rigg as “at times co-dependent”, and she also said being her mother’s playmate was her whole raison d’être. That combination of closeness and strain is the story’s real texture; it explains why the book reads less like tribute and more like a reckoning with a relationship that was loving, difficult and impossible to tidy up after death.
“Don’t apologise – these are good tears!” Stirling said during the interview, calling Rigg “heavenly”, “frightening”, “eye-bleedingly honest” and “a stoic… a survivor”. She also described her own grief as “an animal grief”, which is the most exact phrase in the exchange for what followed after 2020: no public ritual big enough, and no easy way to file the loss away.
Rigg in 1969
Diana Rigg’s career gave the book its public weight long before the ashes anecdote. In 1969 she became the only woman to wed James Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, appeared in Medea in 1992, was made a dame in 1994 and portrayed Lady Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones from 2013 to 2017. Those credits explain why Stirling’s book is not only personal, but also a daughter’s correction of the public image around one of the funniest and most formidable actresses of her generation.
What Stirling leaves readers with is not a neat memorial but a usable truth: grief can be intimate, absurd and unsentimental all at once. All About My Mother is the next place to look if you want the full account, because the ashes story is not a stunt so much as a symptom of how she is still trying to talk to Diana Rigg after 2020.
