Diana Rigg's little girl, Rachael Stirling, does her mum proud as the star of a risqué BBC American miniseries.
You wouldn't think that British soccer enthusiasts would tune in to a passionate Victorian-era love story filled with frilly costumes and music-hall numbers. But when Tipping the Velvet premiered in England last fall opposite a crucial soccer match, it proved to be a dilemma for sports fans. What to watch; the game or the miniseries' risqué lesbian sex scenes?
A resourceful newspaper write came up with a solution. "On the back of the sports page it said, 'This is what your schedule should look like this evening…'" recalls Tipping the Velvet star Rachael Stirling, 25. "Then they gave a minute-by-minute assessment of when to flick over to catch a flash of my left breast and when it was time to flick back to football."
Now viewers in the U.S. can see what all the fuss was about when the three-part drama airs on BBC American. Based on the acclaimed novel by Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet is the coming-out story of Stirling's Nan Astley, a naive oyster shucker in the seaside town of Whitstable, who discovers her attraction to women after catching the beguiling act of male impersonator Kitty Butler (Keeley Hawes). Soon, Nan is on stage in tailored men's suits belting songs along with her secret lover, Kitty, the first in a wild string of female mistresses.
If the Sapphic melodrama was an eye-opener to Britons, equally so was that it stars Stirling, daughter of Dama Diana Rigg, best known in America as Emma Peel of TV's The Avengers.
Stirling didn't ask her famous mum for advice. "I knew that Mama would never tell me to do anything but follow my instincts," says Stirling, who, by age 17, was spending summers acting with England's National Youth Theatre. Three years ago, when she made her professional London stage debut as a disillusioned health-food-store clerk in a play called Helpless, critics dutifully noted that she had inherited her mother's height, high forehead and rich speaking voice. Those comparisons were the reason Stirling didn't advertise her lineage.
"I hid my identity — but not in any evil way," Stirling says. It helped that her surname — her father is Scottish landowner Archie Stirling (he and Rigg divorced in 1990) — was different. "I got the feeling that if I failed [at acting] I was just going to be kicked by the press, so I just shut up and got on with it." A long pause. "I sound like a wise old bag, don't I?" Stirling says with a laugh. "Boring-ing!"
Stirling's habit of firing off wicked one-liners is another talent she learned from her mother, says John Bowe, who portrays Kitty's manager in Tipping the Velvet and has also worked with Rigg. "They both have a cutting wit," says Bowe, who reports that at a cast screening of Velvet, Rigg could be found in an uncharacteristic dither. "She was terribly anxious for Rachael to do well," Bowe says. "At the end, she was almost tearful she was so proud."
Stirling says her dad also "shed a tear or two," although in the midst of the second episode one bit of kinkiness prompted him to shield his eyes by holding up a magazine in front of his face. "Bear in mind, he hasn't seen me nude since I was 4," says Stirling, who lives in London with her nightclub-DJ boyfriend, John Lycett-Green. "I don't think he much liked the idea of seeing his daughter dressed as a naked gold statue. I mean, that's not a father's dream, is it?"
