‘I never felt pressured by my mum, Diana Rigg’
Actress Rachael Stirling reveals to what it was like growing up as the daughter of a British icon
is Archie Stirling, the millionaire theatre producer and Laird of Keir; she was privately educated at the girls’ boarding school Wycombe Abbey, and began acting while studying art history in Edinburgh. Garvey grew up with six siblings in Bury, Greater Manchester, his father a chemist and his mother a police officer who later became a psychologist.
There was an immediate spark between them.
“I had only just started listening to his music, and I was a bit starstruck when he walked in the room and lost the power of speech slightly,” says Stirling, whose breakout role came in the 2002 lesbian drama series
“We were friends first, but there was something there. Most of my friends were married and had babies and I thought that might not happen for me, then I met Guy. There was an undeniable ease to it. It was just simple and made sense. We come from such totally different worlds, but our politics and our morals and our ethics meet in the middle.”
On their second date, she introduced him to her formidable mother, first making him wait on a tiny school chair at the back of a local literacy class that she and Rigg were teaching. “My mum’s first words to him were: ‘My, you’re brave’.” On their first visit to her father’s estate, Stirling persuaded him to drink from the river she used to slake her thirst from as a child, not realising it was now “half a mile downstream from Scotland’s only safari park. So he spent the first two nights at my dad’s house with his head down the lav, because I had poisoned him,” she recalls through gusts of laughter. The decision to have a baby came quickly. “When we met and fell in love, I just thought, he has to be a dad. It was so stonkingly obvious,” she says. Her father has three grandchildren, courtesy of his sons from his first marriage, but this is Rigg’s first grandchild – something that looked unlikely for a long time, given the end of her engagement to Oliver Chris (“two actors together is a nightmare”) after five years in 2012.
“Mum is pleased,” says Stirling. “Lots of mothers put pressure on their daughters [to have children] and she never did that. There is also something about it being a boy that she is thrilled about, as am I.” Much of Garvey’s recent solo album is about their relationship, she concedes.
The revolution in her private life comes at a time that is traditionally difficult for actresses. In her latest bigscreen offering, about a film crew making upbeat propaganda during the Second World War, she plays the supporting role of producer Phyl, while Gemma Arterton takes the romantic lead as screenwriter Catrin. “I like the nostalgia of it, but also the fact it’s not saccharine,” she says. “I love the sense of endeavour in film-making in those days.
“Mostly, I wanted to work with [director] Lone Scherfig, because she is magic, a proper team-spirit person. No thought, character, extra or aspect of costume goes in without being passed before those beady blue eyes. I love her, I love her brilliant brain. And she comes from the [Danish] Dogme school of film-making so you are never asked to do anything you don’t believe or have faith in.”
It’s not overtly stated, but Phyl is clearly a lesbian, “and of course has a crush on Catrin, in my opinion. I don’t mind,” she says. “It’s better than being the pretty affiliation of the lead fellow.”
As her 40th birthday approaches next month, Stirling says she is “not being precious” about the jobs, stage or screen, that come her way. After making her film debut at 21 in catapulted her into a sensational kind of fame at 25, with leading roles in the 2011 adaptation of
and following in recent years. She is still hugely proud of the one that made her famous and doesn’t mind the nude scenes – “though my son might when he grows up and sees his mum naked”.
In the early part of her career, however, she found herself hanging on to the advice of directors and agents – “part of my boarding school upbringing” – including an ill-advised attempt to break the US in 2006. “I’m really glad America didn’t work out,”