Posted by Bonnie on 11 December 2003 at
12:00
Once Rachel Stirling was frustrated and aggressive about references to her looking like her famous mother Diana Rigg.
Now Steve Pratt finds the Tipping The Velvet actress very proud of following in dame fortune's footsteps.
Even if journalists didn't keep reminding people, Rachael Stirling would never escape her famous mother. She looks and sounds too much like Diana Rigg, the woman she calls "ma", to ever disguise her family background.
The actress, who starred in BBC2's controversial lesbian romp Tipping The Velvet, has learnt to live with the mother-and-daughter references.
"The first film I did, when I was 19, was Still Crazy and I didn't know my arse from my elbow about cameras. So, to invite comparison then was unfair because you're very green and uneducated," she says.
"Now, technically I know my way around film, and Tipping The Velvet helped. When someone says, 'you look like your ma', I'm proud instead of frustrated as I was an aggressive teenager."
She's followed her mother's example when it comes to her private life, shunning showbiz glitz for something more ordinary. "My life is normal and always will be," she says. "My ma has a very clear division between work and play — and I do too. The red carpet and fancy dresses are not my bag."
Tipping The Velvet brought her much attention, not least because of its saucy sex scenes. She wasn't surprised by the uproar. "I had a vague inkling that where there was a dildo involved there would be a bit of a hou-ha," she says.
Her latest TV role will not cause offence. As socialite Caroline, she goes to the gallows for poisoning her artist husband. Fourteen years later, Hercule Poirot is asked by her grown-up daughter to investigate and find out if her mother really was guilty.
David Suchet's Belgian detective is joined by Stirling as well as Queer As Folk's Aidan Gillen, Toby Stephens, Marc Warren, Gemma Jones and Patrick Malahide.
Filming the Agatha Christie mystery gave Stirling, whose character is only seen in flashback scenes, a difficult moment shooting Caroline's execution scene. "We did it as accurately as it's possible to do," she says, recalling the "complete horror" of being led towards the noose.
"In those days it took a woman about 45 seconds to walk from the cell, in which she was imprisoned on her last night, to the gallows. No matter how much you say to yourself that you're doing a film, when you have someone reading, 'you will walk through the valley of death', it's hard not to believe it's real.
"The execution scene lingered with me. We'd been working for five weeks and that was the last day of filming. Everyone else had gone, and I was on my own.
"The next day I started rehearsing for A Woman Of No Importance on stage in London. I was hung one night and then doing Oscar Wilde the next."
The execution scene is part of an attempt to make the TV Poirot stories a little more realistic than in the past. "This is not a plot about whether he was killed with a spanner in the drawing room, but about human frailty," she points out.
"You see these people young and then, 14 years later, crippled by things that have taken place in their lives. It shows Agatha Christie to be a quite good psychologist as well as an inventor of plots."
Stirling admits to reading Christie's books when she was younger. She found them such page-turners that it was impossible not to get hooked on the novels.
She read most of them, but not Five Little Pigs. "It's one of her most formulaic books unless you are doing it as we have filmed it and make the basis of it real. I think this is one of the most successful transformations in a sense because she was writing about human beings," says the actress.
"You can't play Caroline as innocent or guilty. I took the book and the script and others' remembrances of her, five different opinions of her character by five other people."
The Oscar Wilde play represented a big change of pace, but one she enjoyed because it was different to the Christie role. "It's about stretching your other arm," she says. "With Five Little Pigs it's about what isn't seen. It's interesting to play a character who's elusive against one who's bright-eyed and bushy-tailed."
Stirling recently completed a low budget movie, Freeze Frame, with comedian Lee Evans. In the New Year, she's heading for Hollywood — not permanently, but to check out work.
"Much to my disdain, most of the best scripts are in Los Angeles. Over here, they're formulaic, either Richard Curtis or The Full Monty. In America, there's so much money pumped into writing," she says.
Stirling also reveals how she relaxes away from the cameras — playing football with all-girl team Frisky Town. "I play defence, but I'm a good striker," she says. "I've been with the team two years, just hanging out with the girls. We're a group of friends from all walks of life who got together to play."
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Posted by Bonnie on 7 December 2003 at
12:00
Rachael Stirling is making a dramatic impression, but as Diana Rigg's daughter, headlines are her natural inheritance, writes Anna Burnside.
When she was a girl, Rachael Stirling's dressing-up box was filled with her mother's cast-offs. All the usual things: past-it party dresses, outrageous accessories, miscellaneous outre and unfashionable garments deemed suitable only for Hallowe'en and games of charades.
When her mother, the actress Diana Rigg, moved house recently, Stirling revisited the dressing-up box. She nearly wept. It turns out that she and her friends' princess dresses were Ossie Clark originals. When they trailed through the muddy garden, it was in Courrages couture. "Everybody used to say, you must get the most amazing clothes from your mumma" (Stirling's name for Rigg is a curious hybrid of mama and mummy). "Well, I didn't, until now. We did have an amazing dressing-up box, but I plundered it when I was eight." Stirling's extraordinarily expressive face — her mother's cheekbones between chocolate button eyes and a rosebud pout — contorts with fashion pain.
"There were gowns from the Bond film [On Her Majesty's Secret Service] and of course I'd cut them with my play scissors. These things had been designed for her by incredible fashion houses." She lets out a kind of anguished miaow. "I pulled all these things out and said, look at this, look at this. And of course they all came down to my butt cheek." She makes another agonised face. "I was gutted."
There have been consolations. Rigg recently left the family home in Kensington. "With the move came the downsizing of the wardrobe," says her daughter, just a little smugly. "It was the first time there was a mass of deliciousness for me to wade through." Rigg's clear out left Stirling with a lifetime's designer finery. Today's enviable jacket — black crepe fastened with a large bow — she refers to as "an old hand-me-down".
It would be trite to draw too many analogies from the dressing-up box. But Stirling who, at the age of 26 has already played one iconic role as Nan in Tipping the Velvet, had to get her theatrical presence, chutzpah and wonderfully grease-painty manners from somewhere or someone. She is a little reticent when discussing Rigg, but it's hard to imagine the daughter of an accountant and a primary schoolteacher landing her first film role while still a student and later agreeing to appear on television painted gold and wearing a dildo.
Her father, the landowner Archie Stirling, may have given her an unshakable love of Scotland, but the draw of the stage is as genetic as the bone structure. "I feel really lucky and privileged to be working and to be doing the thing I love most in the world," she says, using her inherited ability to make luvvie-gush sound deep and convincing. "It's one of the few jobs in the world where you can engage your head and your heart."
Stirling did not always feel so blessed. Her father divorced his first wife, Alice, the year Stirling was born. He married Rigg five years later. The family split their time between his Scottish pile and Kensington. She went to prep school in London and spent the holidays galloping around the family estate. This childhood idyll ended abruptly at the end of the 1980s when her father had a year-long, extensively-documented affair with Joely Richardson, the actress. It spelled the end for her parents' marriage: an attempted reconciliation failed and they divorced in 1993.
While her family dissolved in an acrimonious puddle of tabloid headlines, Stirling was dispatched to Wycombe Abbey in Buckinghamshire, a boarding school. It was every bit as horrid as it sounds: she was unused to communal life, anxious about her parents and painfully homesick. The school's theatre became her sanctuary and she spent as much time there as she could.
Summers were taken up with the National Youth Theatre, which Stirling describes as "my drama school". "You just get up and do it and if they don't laugh you go home and work out why." When an agent saw her perform and asked to represent her, however, she was at a loss as to what to say. "I was asked to go to the William Morris Agency," she recalls. "I didn't have a f****** clue who they were. I knew this woman phoned mumma from time to time but I didn't know what she did.
"Eventually I worked it out and she sent me out for the occasional job. My first audition was for Birds of a Feather. Dreadful. Then I got this film, Still Crazy. I was so green that I didn't even know what they meant when they said 'you're wrapped'. I went back to my caravan. They found me when they were going round to lock up." There was a time last year, in the run-up to Tipping the Velvet, when Stirling was everywhere. Wearing a top hat. Dressed as a boy in tweeds and a flat cap. Most famously, laced into a corset, sitting on a box beside co-star Keeley Hawes. One of the most used pictures of 2002, it was a promotional shot set up by the BBC to give the impression that this was an envelope-pushing piece of raunch. Sure enough, it was used to illustrate a thousand shock-horror articles about lesbianism on the licence fee, although
Stirling is still disappointed that nobody referred to them as Greg's dykes.
"Keeley and I have huge arguments with that picture," she says. "There are bits of our bodies poking out where they shouldn't. I've got one tit that looks like it's vaguely falling out and Keeley's got a lump somewhere that she disagrees with." Nobody else seems to have noticed and the drama ensured Stirling was a star in her own right. "It did set everything on fire. I watched it again the other day and I still love it," she says. "Sarah [Waters] wrote the novel as a Victorian fantasy for her friends and we did the best job we could. Then it was boiled down to a dildo, which is depressing. But there was all the hoo-ha and I suppose that helped. I wish it wasn't that way but I suppose it is."
In the wake of the show she received some "strange" scripts. Stirling sensibly turned down everything that included corsets, sex toys and metallic body paint. However, she can't recommend being covered with gold highly enough. "It gives you the best shadows. You look as if you've got a yogic body from heaven. If ever you're feeling fat, cover yourself in gold paint."
Her appearance in Poirot: Five Little Pigs on ITV next Sunday will be her first television outing since Nan. It could not be more different. Stirling plays Caroline Crale, a demure mother in dropped-waist frocks and shady hats whose upper lip stays stiff even when she is hanged for murdering her husband. Five Little Pigs is a splendid piece of Sunday night drama. It is also the second time Stirling has been hanged in the line of duty and she reports that wearing an authentic prison dress and leather straps while walking towards a noose as someone reads the 23rd Psalm is more daunting than Sapphic writhing in a strap-on.
"Even if you can see the camera out of the corner of your eye, when you're standing on a trap door, a hood over your head and a rope round your neck," she says matter-of-factly, "you panic."
Instead of awarding herself a post-execution holiday, Stirling went straight into her next job, playing an earnest American puritan in A Woman of No Importance. "I was hanged on Sunday. On Monday I was yak yak yadda with Oscar Wilde." That will keep her busy until the end of January. Then Freeze Frame, a dark, psychological thriller in which she co-stars with Lee Evans, comes out in February.
This time Stirling is a crime reporter investigating Evans, a paranoid suspect who videos himself 24 hours a day. At one point she has to obtain a sample of Evans's DNA. "Semen, basically," she says. She arranges her lovely features into a moue of distaste. "He's not willing to hand it over. And I have to," she pauses, "get it off him and it involves a bit of rape. It was unbelievably hard to film. For both of us."
Stirling expected Freeze Frame, which is directed by first-timer John Simpson, to do a little arthouse business. Instead it has been bought by Universal, making it multiplex material. This despite the fact that its female star describes it as "some of the darkest emotional territory I've ever had to go to". There are several versions of what might happen after that. She is longing for a trip home, by which she means her father's estate near Stirling. "I haven't been back for about six months. I get proper," she starts doing comedy panic attack breathing, "pangs. It makes me feel like Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind, when she stands on the red, red earth of Tara. I go up home and it's like having a huge injection of life. Then I can come back to London and deal with all the dreary stuff."
Tipping the Velvet made enough of an impact in America to persuade casting agents to see her next month in Los Angeles. Backpacking in South America also appeals. But there is a streak of Protestant work ethic hiding behind her flamboyant exterior. Having chosen university (Edinburgh, to study fine art) over drama school, Stirling is now self-conscious about her classics gap and pines for a stint of "hard graft" with the RSC. "I would," she says, "make a funky Roslind."
Surely, I suggest, Edinburgh University's Bedlam theatre would have been delighted to have a NYT veteran with world-class cheekbones in its productions. Did she not exhaust The Caucasian Chalk Circle and The House of Bernarda Alba there? She snorts. "They wouldn't give me any work. I did one play at the Bedlam, an adaptation of Dubliners. After that I went to auditions and they never gave me a job." She laughs, rather humourlessly. "I am bitter. But I think they were bitter."
Does she think they didn't give her any parts because she is Rigg's daughter? She nods, then deploys a masterful comic pause. "Also, I wasn't very good. I'm getting better." Freeze Frame was filmed in a disused prison in Belfast, Three Little Pigs involved several weeks in rainy Stevenage in Hertfordshire and now Stirling wants to juggle As You Like It with worthy revivals and translations of Mexican classics. Does she never yearn to make How to Lose Another Guy in 10 Days?
Do her mother's hand-me-downs, lovely as they are, really supply all the glamour she needs? "I like popcorn movies as much as the next person, but it's not challenging to do or challenging to watch really, is it?" she says. "I want lots more low-budget, no-budget good scripts. "I do go to the occasional party but I always end up sitting on the loo locking myself in and saying I don't know anyone, I want to go home. I might be wearing a really swanky frock but I'd rather be watching telly."
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