Diana Rigg Takes on a ‘Mystery’ of Her Own

Vincent Price, the master emeritus of stylish menace, is stepping down as host of the long-running PBS series “Mystery.” But the show is, in a manner of speaking, keeping things all in the family.

The new host, starting in October, will be the British actress Diana Rigg, who played Price’s loyal daughter in the ingenious 1973 comedy melodrama “Theatre of Blood.” Price played a flamboyant actor who, driven bonkers by bad reviews, sets about bumping off the critics with a fine Shakespearean flair, and with his daughter’s help.

Rigg is best known to American television audiences as Patrick Macnee’s saucy and agile partner, Mrs. Emma Peel, during two seasons of “The Avengers,” which is still in syndication.

Hard work it was, too, she remembered during a quick visit to Los Angeles last week. “Never a chance to study scripts ahead of time. Everything always running a bit late, so you were going from dawn until early evening. Fourteen-hour days regularly.” The show’s debonair charm was obviously achieved through triumphs of acting over reality.

Her duties on “Mystery” will commence Oct. 12 with “Look to the Lady,” the first of four Albert Campion novels by Margery Allingham to be presented under the umbrella title “Campion.”

Campion, who is played by Peter Davison, is a nobleman who conceals his title and his detecting skills beneath a mask of supreme vacuity. Allingham took him through 26 expert adventures between the ‘30s and the ‘60s.

Later on in the season, Leo McKern will return in a fifth series of “Rumpole of the Bailey” stories. Rigg herself will star in another project, “Mother Love,” in which she plays an obsessively and lethally maternal woman who stops at nothing to keep her son close.

Rigg admits that she has not been quite the mystery buff Price has been, but she watches them with delight. “They’re stylish, witty, literate. Not too much carnality. Well-produced. Pure entertainment.”

Her own credentials in the form are impressive. She was Mrs. James Bond in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” the only wife Bond has had (and the only time 007 was played by George Lazenby). She also appeared with Peter (Hercule Poirot) Ustinov in Agatha Christie’s “Evil Under the Sun.”

But her most conspicuous work has been on stage, and no one who saw her is likely to forget her entrance, flying in on a moon as a neurotic rock singer in Tom Stoppard’s bizarre philosophical comedy-drama “Jumpers.” She also starred in another Stoppard work, “Night and Day,” an interesting if not entirely successful play that had the characters speaking their true thoughts, as in O’Neill’s “Strange Interlude.”

Born in Yorkshire, Rigg says she decided at 7 that she would act (“without knowing anything of what was entailed”). She studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and, after working briefly in provincial repertory, joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, then performing exclusively at Stratford-on-Avon.

She made her debut as Hector’s wife in “Troilus and Cressida,” with Max Adrian, and Denholm Elliott as Troilus. (“Not his finest hour, as he would quickly agree,” she says.)

Repertory is exhilarating, Rigg says. “The difficulty is that you come in of an evening, absolutely up for Celimene in Moliere’s ‘The Misanthrope,’ and it’s not on. You’re meant to be Phaedra that night.

“The great value of rep is that it allows you to do every kind of thing and to exercise your flexibility.” She has just finished a year in Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies,” playing the part Alexis Smith did on Broadway. “We’re lucky,” Rigg says of British performers. “We can change our lives.

Tall and red-haired, Rigg is one of those British actresses who seem able to play beautifully in any mode and any century, in Rigg’s case as Phaedra, Lady Macbeth or Emma Peel. Early in her career she was an interviewer’s delight, often outrageously outspoken.

Years and matrimony appear to have mellowed her somewhat. Her husband is a Scot and they have a home in Scotland as well as London. Their daughter goes off to boarding school this fall and Rigg is planning her work “so I’ll always be at the end of a phone. She had aspirations to act but now she’s keeping her options open.”

The “Mystery” tapings, done in Boston, will not take a lot of time, and she is pleased to be following Price, who is in frail health. Rigg found him to be kind and intelligent when they worked together in “Theatre of Blood.”

“And he has a filthy sense of humor,” she told an interviewer at the time, approvingly.