Rachael Stirling is best known for two things — her mother, actress Dama Diana Rigg, and her starring role in the saucy lesbian drama Tipping the Velvet. She's back on our screens this week in Agatha Christie's Poirot: Five Little Pigs.
Rachael plays Caroline Crale, who is hanged in 1924 for the murder of her husband, the famous painter Amyas Crale. At the time, Amyas (Queer as Folk's Aidan Gillen) was having an affair with the beautiful and cruel Elsa.
Fourteen years later, Caroline's daugher Lucy returns from her new life in Canada. She approaches Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (David Suchet) with a letter that her mother wrote before she was hanged, claiming she was innocent.
Poirot agrees to reopen investigations into the strange case. He must pit his little grey cells against the five main suspects of the murder — the five little pigs of the story's title — who include Amyas's childhood friends Philip (Cambridge Spies' Toby Stephens) and Philip's brother Meredith (Reversals' Marc Warren).
During our interview, Rachael's feeling a little delicate. The night before she had been out with the cast of the West End production A Woman of No Importance, in which she appears with rumoured boyfriend Julian Ovenden (The Royal). But she is still enthusiastic about her part in the glossy murder-mystery.
"This adaptation is much darker and harder than most Poirot mysteries — and it had to be brilliant, otherwise the cast wouldn't have agreed to do it," says Rachael, 26.
"After Tipping the Velvet I was sent quite a lot of pervy scripts, which did put me off for a bit. It was depressing."
But in Five Little Pigs she gets to keep her clothes on. And it is clear that the talented actress has inherited far more from her famous mum than a pair of killer cheekbones. But even though she has worked hard to achieve recognition on her own terms, Rachael does accept that there has been a professional interest in the mother-daughter connection.
"Mum and I have discussed working together before. There has been a film script about a mother and daughter which we might do. It may be quite difficult, because we are so close, but it would really be an extraordinary journey for both of us to go on. And this particular script sounds as if only a real mother and daughter could do it — so it might as well be us!"
