This website is dedicated to the talented and beautiful British actress Rachael Stirling, star of film, TV, stage and radio.
Rachael appeared on BBC Radio 4's section Women's Hour. She was interviewed by Jenni Murray and main points of discussion were her new play A Woman of No Importance, the consequences of her role in Tipping the Velvet, her mother, education, and internet polls. The interview is available here as a compressed MP3 file. Alternatively, you may read the transcript in the Press section.
Now Rachael Stirling became an overnight sensation when she starred as the young lesbian Nan finding her way in Victorian London, in BBC2's adaptation of Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet. Well she's back in Victorian times in her latest project, this time in a play which uncovers the hypocrisy of a society which turns a blind eye to men's immorality, but shuns any woman who steps out of line. In Oscar Wilde's A Woman of No Importance, she plays the young American Hester, who deplores such double standards.
[A sound clip of a scene from the play is now played, featuring Rachael as Hester.]
"I don't complain of their punishment. Let all women who have sinned be punished. It is right that they should be punished, but don't let them be the only ones to suffer. If a man and a woman have sinned, let them both go forth into the desert to love or loathe each other there. Let them both be branded. Set a mark, if you wish, on each, but don't punish the one and let the other go free. Don't have one law for men and another for women. You are unjust to women in England. And till you count what is a shame in a woman to be an infamy in a man, you will always be unjust, and Right, that pillar of fire, and Wrong, that pillar of cloud, will be made dim to your eyes, or be not seen at all, or if seen, not regarded."
Rachael, the play never fails to delight and surprise me. It was written in 1893 and still just sounds so modern. What appealed to you about it?
Well, first of all, the humour of it, because it is extraordinarily funny, but it has, at the same time, a very serious message about the inequality of man and woman, and also comments, acutely, upon hypocrisy in Victorian society. And it talks about sin as well, and how Mrs A, Mrs Arbuthnot, the woman with the past, has been made to suffer for twenty years, due to having had an illegitimate child. And she's cast out of Victorian society as a result. There are all these themes that are both relevant today and also hugely relevant to Wilde's own life.
It's interesting that he uses an American to make the commentary on his own society. Your character…
Yes.
Why do you suppose he did that?
He'd been to America on a lecture tour, and I think he'd experienced a much freer society, a less restrictive one. And my character gives this speech about how we are trying to build up a better, truer, purer society than life rests on in England. I think America represented freedom and Hester embodies that freedom. She speaks freely amongst these people. I mean, basically, she is the subject of ridicule for a large portion of it, and I have the mickey taken out of me, mercilessly. And that's by virtue solely of her nationality. But at the same time, she has a very serious and heroic point to make, and in fact she ends up saving the day with Mrs Arbuthnot.
Now, you're working with Samantha Bond, Prunella Scales, Rupert Graves… what does a relative newcomer learn from a cast like that?
Oh, it's fascinating. It's just about… oh, also, because it's so different to telly, which has been my previous experience, where you do all your homework on your own, basically. Thanks to the budgets these days, you have approximately two minutes to rehearse before a scene. And we have four weeks, which in fact wasn't as long as we would've liked to rehearse this. And it's about slowly but deeply delving into the psychology of the character, and about discussion, and about… you know, there are fifteen of us in this cast, of all experiences and all ages, and it's just a wonderful community into which one goes to sit and watch and learn. I watch Sam moving around the stage in a way that I want to learn to do, you know, that kind of freedom. And Rupert, who's wonderful and naughty and flies by the seat of his pants every once in a while when he can't remember a line. He's just genius, you know. And Pru… it's just a wonderful learning zone. And also because you're allowed to take time to really work out the point of that character and where you want her to go.
Now it was Tipping the Velvet, as I said, that shot you to stardom. Why did you take that job?
I took it because of this young girl, because of the character of this young girl, who was so… oh, partly because, I mean, a part like that was not going to come along again in a hurry. And this story! She goes from being an oyster girl, to being a dresser in the theatre, to being… [long pause] a star, to being a prostitute, and then to being a star. It's just, it was the most wonderful story, and it was so funny, and this girl was all about optimism and throwing herself in at the deep end and dealing with these peculiar experiences she found herself going through. It was funny and witty and original.
The tabloids, unsurprisingly, went crazy…
Beserk, yeah.
… absolutely crazy. How much of that had you anticipated?
I anticipated a certain amount. I knew that the dildo was gonna cause a stir. [giggling] That was… I knew that when I was standing there, painted gold, stark naked. I knew that it was not going to go without comment, but I didn't expect The Star to do Page 3 versions of me for a week, or for it to intrude upon something so sacred as the football pages at the back of the tabloids. That was unexpected.
How did your parents react? Mum is Diana Rigg…
Yeah. Ma cried with pride, because she was thrilled by my perf on the telly. I mean, I'd spent a long time taking small parts, watching and learning, and I felt ready by the time Tipping the Velvet came along, to take a big part like that. Technically, because I was at a stage where the technicality of filming wasn't going to get in the way of my performance, which I think you have to get to before you take a big part like that. And Papa was adorable, vaguely shocked, held a magazine up in front of the telly whenever I was naked, which was fairly often… and was more than anything proud. I mean, I just think as a piece of telly, independent as to whether I was in it or not, it was fun to watch for both of them.
Now, as I said, your mum is Diana Rigg, and I know you've tried very hard not to make headway because of that. You don't use her name, for instance. You use your father's name.
No, yeah, well because that's my name. I mean Ma's is her… Rigg is Mama's maiden name, and Stirling's mine. But I, I mean, I'm so proud of Ma, but for years I was very wary of being accused of nepotism or of getting a job not off my own back, and I'm a stubborn little madam, and I just wanted to kind of forge my own way. But now, I feel free enough to spread my arms wide and say "God, we're lucky, and we're in the same profession, and we have this wonderful thing in common!" I now see it as an entirely bonus, rather than a…
But there are mothers and daughters who work in this business, who… you get the sense that the daughters are not terribly happy at comparisons that are made. Do you ever worry that you will be compared with your mum?
Well I think it's hugely unoriginal to compare us, and I don't have the wisdom nor the experience that she has, but I'm thrilled to be talked of in the same sentence, to be honest. Mama is an extraordinary actress from which I can learn an enormous amount. I'm still stubborn, I still go off and do it on my own, and then wait for her to come and see it and give notes, you know. But I think we're so, so lucky. There's nothing to fight, really. It's just an entirely pleasurable situation.
Now, I know you took part in a couple of films whilst you were at university. You could've carried on…
Yeah.
… and given up the degree. But you didn't. Why did you stay on to finish the degree?
I stayed on to finish the degree because I just think it's so important to throw the net a bit wider. To continue to learn, to research, to be curious, to allow yourself to be curious about subjects, about politics, about literature, about history. And I looked at it all through… History of Art was my degree course, and I just wanted… I was hungry to learn as much as I could before I ended up sitting in a caravan reading scripts 24 hours a day.
Your mother never said to you, "Make sure, darling, you have something to fall back on, just in case"?
Of course. Everybody says, "You've got, you know, make sure that you have that", and at the time you think "Uhhhh", but I was having such a good time at university anyway. It wasn't a hard decision to make. And now, of course, I wear it like a banner. I'm so proud that I got myself a degree and that I can prove that I'm not a thick actress.
You were voted the most fanciable actress of the year, apparently, in a BBC internet poll. How did you react to that?
I didn't know until now. How cool! [laughs] I don't know, the most fanciable actress. You just have to get your tits out, basically, and you become the most fanciable actress, as far as I can work out. [laughing]
Rachael Stirling, thank you very much indeed.
Thank you.
I knew that Tipping The Velvet (BBC 1) was camp, but just how camp it is I didn't realise till I looked the word up in Collins dictionary. 'Effeminate, affected, consciously artificial, exaggerated, vulgar or mannered, self-parodying, especially when in dubious taste'. Well, that's my review written for me. Even the title is slang for cunnilingus, and we reach a sort of camp nirvana when we learn at the end of each episode that the executive producer is called Sally Head.
That isn't to say I didn't enjoy it. We can all relish the pleasures of being hosed down with molten nougat. Nan, the heroine, is an oyster girl. 'Open the oyster and it's like a secret world in there, and that's how it was with me,' she says in one of her first voiceovers. Just in case we'd missed that message, she says later about her favourite comestible, 'You mustn't lose any of the liquor, that's the best bit, some say,' and for those of us who are really, seriously obtuse there's a shot of waves lapping over empty oyster shells, lapping, lapping — oh, for heavens sake, you want to shout, enough already!
But Andrew Davies has never been afraid to parody himself. Take his trademark anachronisms: 'You don't want to know that,' someone says. 'Promise to be happy for me' and 'that's just my style — I don't think!' But this doesn't matter; it's just camp, like Colin Firth's wet cambric shirt in Davies's adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and the way that the streets of London in Velvet are so clean you could eat your oysters off them, instead of being filled with mud and stinking horse manure as they actually were. Oh, and the heroine, even when pretending to be a rent boy, has a skin like a freshly plucked apricot and bright-red lipstick. I'm sure lots of people will accuse the BBC of broadcasting filth; my objection is that the whole thing is impeccably clean. Even the sex, even the hand stealing south under the blankets, even the dildo peeking shyly behind the door, even the shot of pubic hair, I think a first for television drama, which clearly is meant to be pubic hair, and equally clearly isn't.
It's full of camp jokes. "Enry Irving 'isself once fell down these stairs!' says a landlady. Nan says 'oh, yes!' so often I was reminded of John Major's first prime minister's question time, when he used the phrase repeatedly, or possibly one of his more private sessions with Edwina. And is the music hall act in the first episode meant to be as tedious as it seems? Nan and her lover captivate London with a cross-dressing act which, with its air of noisy desperation, would have been perfect on The Fast Show. At first the audiences jeer and boo, quite rightly, for as music-hall performers Nan and Kitty, performing over and over a dreary song called 'Following In Father's Footsteps' have as much pizzazz and vavoom as a pair of stuffed owls in bell-jars. The point about the old music hall is that standards were very high indeed. Suggesting it was as bad as this is patronising to the Victorians. Later the customers applaud wildly, yet nothing at all has changed. I suppose it is the producer's little joke.
Oh, and Nan is so dull, so buttock-clenchingly boring, so vacuous, so utterly passive. Rachael Stirling does her best to play a character who lacks any character, and she's very pretty, so we can understand why a woman-eater like Kitty would want to have sex with her, but we cannot begin to comprehend the grand passion. It would be like falling in love with a doormat. And yet, and yet, it is captivating. Like the Funny Girls transvestite nightclub in Blackpool, where middle-aged northern trippers mutter to each other, 'I can't work out where they put their bits', you watch half-amused, half-aghast, marvelling at the artifice, wondering why anyone bothered, grateful that they did, puzzled even when you can see perfectly well where they put their bits.
Rachael Stirling, a tall, svelte figure in a mustard-coloured coat, catches sight of me and breaks into a run, waving frantically. 'Darling!' she cries, in her deep, rather actressy voice, kissing me enthusiastically.
'The last time we met, I was vile, wasn't I? I didn't say anything! I promise you I'm a motormouth now.' That last time, I left her company practically in tears of frustration. She was meant to be publicising her first film, Still Crazy, but it was her first interview and she was clearly terrified. The topic that was really off-limits was her relationship with her mother, Dame Diana Rigg, embodiment of the karate-kicking Emma Peel and one of the greatest actresses of her generation.
'Oh, I was deeply defensive,' Rachael, now 26, agrees. 'It was difficult because everyone was always comparing us. How do you compare a green 18-year-old with her hugely experienced, very wise, fiercely intelligent mother? I got defensive because I knew I couldn't stand up to that comparison.
'Now I've done enough, and I'm old enough and wise enough to shout it from the rooftops.
I'm absolutely thrilled about where I come from and who my ma is and what she's achieved. I feel naught but pride about it.' Rachael is sitting in the bar of the Berkeley Hotel, cigarette in one slim hand, spritzer in the other she can't overindulge because, in half an hour, she's due on stage at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, where she's appearing in Oscar Wilde's A Woman of No Importance. 'When I finish the run in January, I'm going to let rip!' she says naughtily.
Physically, she looks completely different from the girl of six years ago.
Then, she was somewhat podgy and clad entirely in black; today, she's svelte and glowing, in a silver jumper and skintight jeans. She has her mother's coathanger cheekbones and retrouss nose, but with her strong colouring and deep-set eyes looks more like Martine McCutcheon; passers-by used to shout 'Tiff!' at her all the time.
Despite her glamour, she's suddenly single after a two-year relationship with the tousled John Lycett Green, a reggae DJ, came to an end.
The son of the writer Candida Lycett Green, and grandson of the late Sir John Betjeman, he was a family friend, and there was talk of two great dynasties uniting. 'I thought so, too, but it's not to be,' she said recently.
The relationship appears to have run into trouble after John, who famously mooned at the press after Laura Parker Bowles's 21st birthday party, found it hard to cope with her explicit role as lesbian showgirl Nan Astley in the BBC's Sapphic drama, Tipping the Velvet. 'Boys other than actors just can't cope,' she declares. 'It doesn't matter if you're snogging a girl or a donkey or a man, they just can't cope.' Now it's been suggested that she is being romanced by her Woman of No Importance co-star Julian Ovenden, 27, exboyfriend of Cutting It star Sarah Parish and another tousled Old Etonian who, as the son of the Queen's Chaplain at Windsor, the Rev John Ovenden, is just as well connected as Lycett Green. Alas for the peddlers of such juicy speculation, Rachael denies this fiercely.
'I'm not going to have another boyfriend for a very, very long time,' she says. 'The next few years are about getting as much experience as I can and working as hard as I can. I like being on my own; I think it's the best way to be when you're curious and young. Anyway, there's no room in my schedule.'
That is certainly true. She's a month into the gruelling run, giving eight performances a week during which she's on stage from beginning to end.
Afterwards, she says, she's completely exhausted. 'I'm rarely in bed before 2am, and I'm a ten-hours-a-night kind of girl, so I don't get up until lunchtime, which sounds so lazy.' At 6.30pm, she is back in the theatre for her warm-up.
Naturally, her mother has been to see her perform. 'Mama usually gives me notes on my performance and those that I agree with I take, and those that I don't, I don't,' says Rachael. 'But she said she had no notes for me this time, she said I was perfect. It threw me into a state of complete confusion.' Indeed, despite appearing with such seasoned performers as Prunella Scales and Samantha Bond, Rachael has garnered much critical praise for her performance as American heiress Hester Worsley, earning herself the accolade 'delightful'.
On top of that, this summer she's made Freeze Frame, a low- budget, sexually controversial film about paranoia with comedian Lee Evans, and Five Little Pigs, a Hercule Poirot mystery for television. 'I haven't stopped since the middle of June,' she says. 'But I had a slow eight months until then. After Tipping the Velvet, I got sent loads of scripts that necessitated flashing my bosoms everywhere. I just couldn't understand why this extraordinary character and this extraordinary story had led to nothing but prurient scripts.' In fact, all of the controversy surrounding Tipping The Velvet seems to have taken her a little by surprise.
'I knew there was going to be a fuss, of course I did. I wasn't thick I mean, I was covered in gold paint, naked and wearing a dildo. But I didn't expect quite so much press coverage,' she says wryly. 'The outrage overshadowed something that was completely original, brave and witty. I was really proud of it. In America, they saw it as an arthouse piece, and that's what it should have been seen as, not Page 3 of the Sunday Sport.
'Do you know,' she goes on, 'for an entire week, I think it was The Sun, or was it The Star, dressed up all their Page 3 girls to look like me and Keeley [Hawes, her co-star] and recreated poses from Tipping the Velvet. It was vile. But we got amazing viewing figures.' She's been receiving strange fan-mail from both men and women ever since. 'One man traced his penis on the back of a letter with an arrow and the words "actual life size". Another wrote me an adorable letter saying, "I'm only five foot two, I only work in Tesco, I only live in Wolverhampton, but I do have very firm buttocks," ' she says, breaking into peals of helpless giggles. She was asked to open the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival last year. 'That was an eye- opener. I had to make a speech in front of 500 fairly frightening- looking lesbians.' What sounds more daunting still was having to watch the series with her parents.
'My father's nanny had a phrase that she used to use when there was something inappropriate on telly "eyes on sandals" and that's what I kept saying to Papa whenever I got my whops out or started kissing Keeley's nipples.' Her relationship with her family seems enviably warm and close, despite the trauma of her parents' divorce. She was brought up in the family home in Earls Court 'a really safe, quiet, wonderful joyous place'. Her father is the dashing Scottish landowner and former Scots Guard officer Archie Stirling, 61, whose uncle, Sir David Stirling, founded the SAS. His previous marriage to Princess Alice, the Duchess of Gloucester's niece Charmian Scott produced two sons, Willie, now 38, a writer, and Ludovic, 36, a designer, but ended in divorce in 1977, the year that Rachael was born.
Stirling and Rigg married five years later.
As a child, Rachael distracted herself by writing and casting herself in her own plays, in which she often enlisted her entire class at Thomas's, the London prep school. 'A clich, I know,' she says. 'But my parents were tough; they'd ask for their money back if they didn't find it funny.' Two months of every year were spent on her father's estate, where she ran wild.
'I used to spend days clamped to my horse, galloping around the country like a mad thing.' But the idyll came to an end in the late Eighties when her father embarked on a yearlong and much-publicised affair with the actress Joely Richardson. Her parents attempted a reconciliation but finally divorced in 1993. In 2000, Stirling married Sharon Silver, James Gilbey's ex and a Nigella Lawson- lookalike much younger than him, who, says Rachael, 'is heaven'; Sharon and Rachael have been spotted hanging out together in Woodys.
Diana Rigg, who has never remarried, has just sold the family home and moved house (though not to France, as erroneously reported).
The situation seems very civilised; there are no Stella McCartneyish mutterings from Rachael, though she is not comfortable discussing her parents' divorce, nor how she felt working with Joely Richardson on the film Maybe Baby. 'It was fine. You just get on with it,' she says briskly, her expression nevertheless forbidding.
At the time of her parents' split, Rachael was sent to board at Wycombe Abbey in Buckinghamshire. The first two years were 'mucky', she says. 'I was very spoilt. I wasn't used to people borrowing things or invading my space. I just wasn't prepared, mostly because my home life was falling apart a bit and my parents were getting divorced, and I was desperately homesick.
But I would rather have been there than at home while all that was going on.' Instead, she threw herself into drama. 'There was a wonderful theatre on a lake, set back from the rest of the school. It felt like you were going to a separate safe haven of a place, so I spent as much time there as I possibly could.' Halfway through a degree in history of art at Edinburgh University, she won herself a role in Still Crazy, a comedy film about middle-aged rockers, and has never looked back.
It was, ironically, a future her mother had hoped she would avoid, says Rachael. ' Whenever she was asked if I'd go into acting, she'd say, very firmly, "No! No!" But she came back from a trip to Delhi, and there I was in London, loads of slap on my face, having just come back from Pinewood. I'd done it on my own and she was absolutely resigned,' says Rachael gleefully.
'It was inevitable, really.'
This website is dedicated to the talented and beautiful British actress Rachael Stirling, star of film, TV, stage and radio.
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When you’re on set and you’re naked and there’s a man lighting your chin, and a woman combing your hair, it’s just not sexy at all.
Look forward to the US release of both films. …
