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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
As an icon of cool in "The Avengers," she was a good girl who hit back. Three decades later, one of the world's most elegant actresses is still knockin' em dead.
Sep 14, 1999 | In a scene from the 1960s TV series "The Avengers," film director Z.Z. von Schnerk describes protagonist Emma Peel in this way: "You are a woman of courage, beauty and of action. A woman who could become desperate yet remain strong, become confused yet remain intelligent, who could fight back yet remain feminine." What he left out is that she also possesses a disarming sexiness, the best leather wardrobe in the history of television and a mean karate chop.
Schnerk is a fiction, of course, as is Mrs. Peel, who was played by Diana Rigg. But his words do justice to the female half of the famed crime-fighting team and, to a large degree, to the actress who played her. With the suave John Steed (Patrick Macnee, impeccably tailored and outfitted with bowler and brolly) making up the other half of the duo, the Avengers sent cybernauts, flesh-eating monsters and professional assassins to their demise -- then toasted the day with a bottle of champagne.
When "The Avengers" was imported to the United States in 1966, Emma Peel and Diana Rigg became household names almost overnight. Britain's ITV had hired the 28-year-old actress, an inginue with the Royal Shakespeare Company, on the strength of her work on another TV project, an Armchair Theatre production of a play called "The Hothouse." Of her departure from the prestigious stage company, where she had turned heads with her portrayal of Cordelia in a celebrated Peter Brook production of "King Lear," Rigg told the Independent: "It was a perverse decision in a long line of perverse decisions." Nonetheless, with Emma Peel, Rigg walked into a role that uniquely captured the '60s Zeitgeist, and gave her a chance to reach past the neurotic Ophelias and loopy Helenas of "Hamlet" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Her Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts colleagues thought Rigg had gone slumming when she took on "The Avengers." In reality, she brought a sleek, hip professionalism to a medium Shakespeare would have loved.
Indeed, the creators of the show, which ran on British television from 1961 to 1969, had updated the William Powell-Myrna Loy formula -- itself a not-so-distant echo of Shakespeare's romantic comedies -- and, with a mod visual flair and '60s Euro-jazz theme music, retooled it for the small screen. Set in swinging London, "The Avengers" cashed in on the popularity of the undercover-agent Cold War drama epitomized by the James Bond movies. And the show's format anticipated latter-day TV detective teams that paired up a professional operator with a talented amateur ("Get Smart," "Scarecrow and Mrs. King," "Hart to Hart," "Moonlighting").
Rigg was a well-fitted foil for McNee's Steed, whose old-world charm (he was something of a Regency dandy) superbly complemented Emma's mod fashions and sporty '60s lifestyle. Their characters coasted on style as much as their crime-fighting finesse, and Rigg's Emma became an icon of cool. Unlike practically every other babe on big screens and little, Emma was her partner's professional equal and not a toy.
Rigg had come on board the show in 1966, replacing Honor Blackman, who played Steed's first female sidekick, Cathy Gale. Blackman left to take on the role of the quintessential Bond girl, Pussy Galore, in "Goldfinger." Like her predecessor, Rigg soon went off to play another Bond lady friend, in her case Teresa, the Contessa di Vicenzo, in "On Her Majesty's Secret Service." Despite her short stay on "The Avengers," Rigg's arrival had signaled a startling new kind of TV heroine. Her trademark karate poses, stylized as they seem now, made her the rare woman who approached the world with a physicality that wasn't entirely based on her sex appeal. She could fight back.
