When the actor confessed to ingesting a few flakes of her mother’s ashes on opening nights, reactions ranged from recognition to disgust. But, she says, grief makes animals of us all

There have been headlines of late that make me out to be an ash-guzzling savage nightly devouring her mother’s charred remains. “Rachael Stirling eats mother Diana Rigg’s ashes before going on stage” declared a dozen news outlets last month, while others referred to the “strange habit only she really understands” and “Dame Diana’s daughter admits eating her ashes in bizarre tribute”. I’ve written a book about our relationship, All About My Mother, in which I do confess to nibbling a grain or two, but I didn’t expect to be portrayed as a matricidal cannibal by the press.

My mother was Diana Rigg, an iconic actor with a 60-year career. Young ’uns will know her as the Queen of Thorns from Game of Thrones, be-wimpled spouter of the best verbal roasts on television: “I’ve known a great number of clever men. I’ve outlived them all. You know how? I ignored them.” Old ’uns, meanwhile, go dewy-eyed at the memory of her leather-catsuited telly triumph as Emma Peel in The Avengers from the 60s, the first woman to perform kung fu on western television. She was also the only woman ever to marry James Bond. She appeared in The Great Muppet Caper because I was profoundly in love with Miss Piggy, and her child-murdering Medea was the toast of Broadway. She won an Emmy and a Tony, and had countless honours bestowed upon her for her many stage performances. She was a complete original and very witty to boot.

Beautifully written by her daughter, this is a funny and intimate eulogy to the 60s star of The Avengers who went on to specialise in fierce, complicated women

The late actor Diana Rigg declined to call herself a feminist, noting: “Why would I burn my bra? I need my bra.” Nonetheless, her ideas on womanhood were ahead of their time. In an interview with Michael Parkinson, she observed how marriage was “all rather pagan, don’t you think? … A lot of women see it as security. Well, I’m not a woman who yearns for security.”

Taking over from Honor Blackman as the high-kicking Emma Peel in the 1960s spy series The Avengers, Rigg refused to play subordinate sidekick to Patrick Macnee’s Steed, turning her character into a beacon of female empowerment. When Rigg learned that not only was Macnee paid significantly more than she was, but the camera operator was too, she demanded a raise. She got it, but that didn’t stop the press from labelling her as a grasping diva. Fifty years later, she told Newsnight: “Equal pay. That’s what feminism means to me, only that.”