Diana Rigg was a 'lone voice in the wilderness' when she demanded equal pay back in the '60s as Emma Peel
Dame Diana Riggs, first became a household name when she took on the role of Emma Peel, the secret agent, who would karate chop you to oblivion if you crossed her. She was the first wildly successful prototype for female fighters on screen, and her costume choices like the leather and PVC catsuits have bled into how female superheroes are dressed now. For instance, Emma Peel's iconic violet suit would inspire David Aja, the comic book artist to design Marvel Comics' Hawkeye costume for Kate Bishop.
Later, the Black Widow's go-to outfit, the black catsuit, was modeled on the leather catsuits Emma Peel loved wearing while fighting crime. The character's influence on pop culture is immeasurable because, before her, this type of female character was unheard of. While Diana Rigg was the second actress to play the part, between 1965 to 1968, she made the character iconic enough to become a role model for a generation of young girls and inspired 'Mrs. Peel self-defense classes' in the UK and US.
But while she became a female role-model on screen, and earned two Emmy nominations for her performance, things weren't so great off-screen. She was shocked to learn that despite her growing fame, she was being paid less than even the cameraman on the show, let alone her male co-stars. This is when she held out for a pay hike from £150 ($192) a week to £450 ($576), threatening to quit were she not compensated fairly.
It was the first instance of a woman asking for equal pay and getting it but the backlash was severe. "I was a lone voice in the wilderness, nobody backed me up," she had said on the BBC's Newsnight in 2019. "Nobody backed me up. Pat Macnee (her co-star) kept his head well below the parapet when I stepped forward and said 'I think it's quite wrong that I'm being paid less than the cameraman'. Of course, then I was painted as this sort of mercenary woman, and hard-headed and money grabbing and all the rest of it," Rigg had said about the reactions to her revolutionary 'money moves'. However, she had stuck to her guns at the time. "It struck me as being unfair so I spoke out. I've always thought that equal pay gets you a long way to being treated equally by a man." Bosses on the show obliged her because of the show's incredible following in America.
More recently, Diana Riggs had stirred controversy by saying that she was not a feminist even though she was thought of as a feminist icon. In the ’70s, Rigg was approached by Second Wave feminists to be one of the faces of the movement, but she declined because she found them too "politicized". However, despite such comments and also saying things like women were "b****hier" than men, Riggs had always exercised her own brand of 'practical' feminism.
In another interview, she said: "Quite honestly, I’ve always thought it was a question of money, largely. You can’t actually legislate what goes on in people’s minds and their attitudes, but you certainly can legislate for parity where pay and salaries are concerned. In the tennis world, for example, Billie Jean King did the most wonderful battle against the inequalities that were happening there, and got a lot of respect for it. If you’re earning equal pay to a man you get respect. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. Everything else follows.” She added: “And if a woman has her own money and is in a relationship, she’s free to do exactly what she wants, and doesn’t have to answer to the man.”
She had also spoken positively about the #MeToo movement in the 2019 interview, recalling her own brush with the casting couch. "I had one experience, which I'm not about to talk about but when I was very young, with a director who was very powerful. I simply, hardly acknowledged it was happening. I think scorn is quite a powerful tool. I would urge women to use scorn whenever possible because it sort of scorches the gentleman. I'm all for the women who speak out, and I'm very glad that they now have a platform to speak out."