Dame Diana Rigg has died.
She was 82.
The British actress shot to fame for her appearance in the original 1961 TV series The Avengers, and was also well-known for her appearance on All Creatures Great and Small.
More recently, she portrayed Olenna Tyrell on HBO’s hit fantasy drama, Game of Thrones.
Rigg also played a Bond girl in On Her Majesty’s Secrety Service in 1969, becoming the only Bond girl to get 007 to the altar.
She played the fan-favorite Emma Peel during her three-year turn on The Avengers, a role which won her much praise.
The actress opened up last year about being on the show, and how she found out she was being paid less than her male co-stars.
She said she threatened to quit unless she was given a hefty increase in salary, and the people behind the show obliged.
“I was a lone voice in the wilderness, nobody backed me up,” she said on the BBC’s Newsnight in 2019.
“Pat Macnee kept his head well below the parapet when I stepped forward and said, ‘I think it’s quite wrong that I’m being paid less than the cameraman.'”
“Of course then I was painted as this sort of mercenary woman, and hard headed and money grabbing and all the rest of it,” Rigg added in her interview.
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“But it struck me as being unfair so I spoke out. I’ve always thought that equal pay gets you a long way to being treated equally by a man.”
Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg was born near Doncaster on 20 July 1938. She travelled to India as a child, where her father worked as a railway engineer for the Maharaja of Bikaner.
Upon her return to England after the war, she spoke Hindi as a second language, and was sent to a Yorkshire boarding school.
She trained as an actress at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art after leaving the school, and made her professional acting debut in Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle as part of the 1957 York Festival.
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Rigg’s final movie, Last Night in Soho, will be released in 2021.
May she rest in peace.
Paul Dailly is the Associate Editor for TV Fanatic. Follow him on Twitter.