No one ever did call us Greg's Dykes
A starring role in the lesbian drama Tipping the Velvet brought Rachael Stirling to the attention of Hollywood. She talks to Maureen Paton about love, ambition and her mother, Diana Rigg.
Rachael Stirling apologises for turning up with a David Brent look. This is absurd because she is not a fat and bearded comedian, although the distinctive, creamy drawl inherited from her mother, Dame Diana Rigg, can be very funny when the actress, who was educated at Wycombe Abbey, lapses into trendy ghetto-fabulous lingo. But Stirling is a trouper who likes to send herself up in order to guard against swollen-head syndrome — and it's true that her black shirt, snazzy tie and Spanish waiter's trousers could have come straight out of the wardrobe of Ricky Gervais's alter ego in the television series The Office.
"I just think that mannish look is so-oo-o stylish. It's not because I've turned into a raving lesbian," she explains.
Perhaps it's just as well to set the record straight, since the actress's first starring role — the lead in last year's taboo-busting BBC2 Sapphic costume romp Tipping The Velvet — turned her overnight into every gay girl's favourite actress.
"I even got sent out to open the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in Miami, which was an eye-opener," she says, rolling her big brown eyes, which — together with the wide cheekbones and slender, 5ft 9in frame — are the most obvious physical legacies from Rigg. Andrew Davies's racy dramatisation did huge business in America, opening so many doors for Stirling that Hollywood agents will shortly be flying over to inspect her imminent West End debut. As for Britain, the media coverage ranged from the merely salacious to the clinically hysterical, although at least her fears of getting caught up in a puritanical backlash against the BBC went unrealised.
"No one ever did call us Greg's Dykes; I was most disappointed," she confides.
Nevertheless, it was all so overwhelming for a young actress with just a handful of small film roles to her name and no training, apart from the National Youth Theatre in the school holidays, that Stirling admits she dropped out of the business for several months.
"The aftermath of Tipping was that I got sent an extraordinary array of scripts, largely involving nudity and with storylines that made the mind boggle. And I thought: 'F—, I need to take time out. Just sit back and get your feet back on the floor, girlfriend, and reassess.' And I reacted rather violently against this sudden plethora of invitations for all these random parties.
"I did borrow a dress to go to the Lord of the Rings premiere, but it's all a bit peculiar and utterly transient. Suddenly, you're in demand but you know for a fact that will not last. I want to be around when I'm 60; I don't want to be some flash in the pan. So I made a decision not to accept anything that was below par. And I just preoccupied myself with other things for a while, because," she explains, earnestly, "life outside work is just as important."
In Stirling's case, this meant putting down a deposit on her first property — a Victorian cottage in west London — and decorating the place, before deciding to take a leap of faith with another sexually controversial shocker, shot in Belfast earlier this year. In the yet-to-be-released Framed, a "low-budget, no-budget" film about paranoia by a first-time writer-director called John Simpson, she plays a femme fatale who ties up the comedian Lee Evans and rapes him.
She followed that with a forthcoming Hercule Poirot television drama and is currently cycling to rehearsals for her first West End outing. She has accepted a role in Wilde's A Woman Of No Importance with no star billing, in order to learn more from such seasoned theatre pros as Prunella Scales, Rupert Graves and Samantha Bond.
Until recently, she shared her newly acquired two-up-two-down with her boyfriend of two years, the hip-hop, rock 'n' roll and reggae DJ John Lycett Green. Alas, they broke up the day before I meet Stirling, which is why the brown eyes look even more soulful than usual.
"I live on my own, because the boyfriend is no more. It happened yesterday," she admits, "so it's a bit raw. My eyes are so-oo-o puffy."
No wonder, for she had described Lycett Green, whom she has known all her life through family friends, as her "soulmate". Their romance looked set to be a merger made in heaven between two famous dynasties: she the daughter of Rigg and the Scottish landowner Archie Stirling, and he the son of writer Candida Lycett Green and the grandson of John Betjeman.
"I thought so, too, but it's not to be," she says, gruffly, staring into her latte and puffing valiantly on a Silk Cut. "Sad, really. Nightmare, nightmare. I'll be all right. I'll survive."
So, Stirling is concentrating on her craft (she won't call it art) and hoping that the risk she has taken with Framed will pay off. "The script was really dark and wonderfully written. There was no time for any of that faffing about, no time for prima donnas, you just fucking got on with it. We filmed in February and March in an old Crumlin Road prison. Oh my God: I got into a state of pretty serious depression — and the heating hadn't been working for some time. It was a fairly dour place to work, but I've seen the final cut and it was extraordinary. I believe my instincts were right."
After taking a second breather of several months, she donned the hairshirt again to play another harrowing role in Poirot before auditioning for the Wilde play. "The Poirot script is so brilliant; I get hung," she enthuses.
"Aimee Mullins and Julie Cox and I were the Frascati sisters at the Best Western Hotel in Stevenage. I had been holed up in Belfast for two months, not many playmates to my name, and then we were having a ball in Stevenage; you can be so lucky like that. I got hung on Sunday and was rehearsing on Monday for A Woman Of No Importance; very odd. But I had forgotten the absolute stimulation of doing a stage play."
Yet the main reason she did the Wilde, she reveals, was because of an impassioned speech that her character, American heiress Hester Worsley, makes about the aristocracy being " 'a dead thing smeared with gold'. So beautiful and strong — and kind of dangerous," she adds, fervently.
Even for one who seems to have inherited the maternal iconoclasm that found perfect expression in The Avengers' Emma Peel and such great classical roles as Medea, these are surprisingly subversive sentiments. Stirling's father, Archie, comes from the cadet branch of the StirlingMaxwells, an old Scottish baronetcy dormant since 1956, and can claim a grandmother who was a Fraser of Lovat.
"I probably am a bit rebellious," she concedes. "I do have strong feelings about the aristocracy: they serve a purpose, but it's a sort of insular strand of society. The reason Hester rails against it is because it was a million times worse 120 years ago. Her point is that for all their pomp and wealth and art, they don't know how to live; they've lost life's secret. It can be applied to certain members of the aristocracy nowadays.
"She's a life-force, Hester, a very independent 18-year-old. So was I at her age," adds Stirling, who is all of 26. "She has taken herself on this journey to Europe; I must have been 19 when I took myself off to the Himalayas on my own. I was there for about a month; I had no problems. My parents were very worried, but my elder brothers, Willy and Ludo, were like, 'Naah, she'll be fine'.
"They're the best friends in the world. Having brothers — I love that. They don't take any rubbish and they beat you up if you've been misbehaving. They take the piss ruthlessly, but it's all good, character-building stuff."
Stirling has character in bucketfuls. After our meeting, she's going with her mother to a performance of Kes by the National Youth Theatre, to remind herself whence she came.
Mother and daughter continue to be very close companions, even though Rigg is selling the family home and moving — not to France, as was wrongly reported by one tabloid that is now, according to the trade paper UK Press Gazette, being sued by Rigg.
"She'll be the same distance from me. Whoever wrote about her relocating to France was full of shit," says Stirling, indignantly. "They see Mother with a baguette and say: 'Oh, she's moving to France'."
It was also reported recently that Rigg had been generous enough to buy a property for the Portuguese couple who had kept house for her.
"Well, Lucinda and Kosta have lived with us for years; Lucinda has been like my nanny since I was four," she explains. "They've always been a part of our family."
Now, having moved on herself, she must wrestle with Wilde's belief in love at first sight, while stoically dealing with her own heartache; but, then, she's good at that. When we first met, three-and-a-half years ago, she described how she had chosen to go to boarding-school, "because I needed to go away to grow up", after her parents broke up over her father's fling with Joely Richardson.
"Do I believe in love at first sight? Maybe falling in love at first sight," she says, cautiously. "Just laughing a lot would be the most important thing in a relationship to me. And a smattering of trust. A dollop of laughter — and an icing of trust."
She retains a healthy scepticism, airily saying that she has no idea what the Hollywood agents will make of her in the play. "I'm supposed to be going to LA after the run ends in January. The more I do, the more I realise the value of a good script, and the majority of good scripts are over there. The whole industry is so much bigger — and I would always follow a good script. But I do love it in London.
"I've always known," she adds sagely, "that I'm not going to come into my own until a bit later on in life; I just have this feeling. So I'm getting my head down, starting at the bottom and watching and learning."
