Fiona Sturges at The Guardian:
On the stage and screen, Rigg specialised in fierce, complicated women: Medea, Phèdre, Mother Courage, the wimple-clad Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones. Yet in life she refused to take herself or her job seriously. Her fear of appearing earnest led her to decline offers of a biography. Now, six years after her death from cancer, her daughter, the actor Rachael Stirling, has taken on the task of documenting Rigg’s life. All About My Mother is a funny, intimate, often joyous and beautifully written eulogy to a woman who didn’t suffer fools yet remained blithely self-mocking and down to earth. Asked what it meant to be made a dame, she replied: “I think it means I’m not supposed to say ‘fuck’ anymore.”
Blending memoir and biography, Stirling builds a portrait based on her own recollections, plus research into Rigg’s performances, writings, recorded interviews and press cuttings collected and stashed in a trunk by her late grandmother Beryl. The book, Stirling says, “is not a detached narrative … This is what I know, what she said, what I’ve learned, what I want to write, what she wrote and what I think she wouldn’t mind my telling you.”
more here.
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