Rachael Stirling shares the intimate story behind her unusual habit of tasting her mother Diana Rigg’s ashes and why it matters to her performance.
When headlines proclaimed that actress Rachael Stirling had eaten the ashes of her mother, the legendary Diana Rigg many readers imagined a sensationalist tableau. In fact, the act stems from a private, almost ritualistic gesture that the daughter has cultivated over several years.
Stirling explains that the gesture is less a macabre stunt and more a heartfelt way of keeping her mother close during moments of artistic vulnerability.
Rigg, celebrated for roles ranging from the iconic Emma Peel in The Avengers to the icy queen in Game of Thrones left a cultural imprint that spanned six decades.
She earned an Emmy, a Tony, and a place in British pop culture as a quick-wit, unapologetically honest performer. Her daughter, the only child, followed the family trade into acting, though not without friction; Rigg’s skepticism about Stirling’s career choice sparked the occasional “rumpus” that later softened into mutual respect and affection.
The practicalities of cremation and scatter tubes
Both Groucho Marx and Diana Rigg requested cremation. Rigg’s instructions were starkly practical: no ceremony, ashes scattered at locations she loved, and the expenses prepaid by her own bank card. The family, however, overlooked the question of how the ashes would be returned. In the weeks after Rigg’s death, Stirling discovered a niche market of cardboard “scatter tubes“—small containers designed for multiple, discreet releases of cremains.
These tubes vary in size and decoration, often adorned with generic images of doves, suns, or floral motifs. Stirling opted for a set of plain, minimally embellished tubes to avoid overt sentimentality. She needed several because Rigg’s ashes would be dispersed from a vintage biplane over English fields, from a garden in France, from a plot in London, and finally at the Actors’ Church in Covent Garden. Each tube, roughly three inches tall, is compact enough to slip into a pocket, a feature that later became crucial for Stirling’s on-stage ritual.
From delivery to the dressing room: the first encounter with the ashes
On a bright September morning, a Yorkshire crematorium representative arrived with a modest wooden box wrapped in plain cloth. He placed the box gently on Stirling’s doorstep, his expression a mixture of solemnity and professional detachment. The weight of the box, unexpectedly heavy for a handful of ash, underscored the tangible reality of loss. Stirling likened the moment to receiving a newborn, a metaphor she later used to describe the delicate handling of the remains.
After a brief ceremony in her mother’s garden, the ashes were divided among the chosen tubes. One tube—the smallest—remained with Stirling as a personal talisman. She kept it in her dressing room, a space once used by Rigg herself in 1985 for the Ibsen drama Little Eyolf. The tube, however, had an awkward design flaw: it opened opposite the direction the label suggested, making accidental spillage a real risk.
The on-stage ritual: why a grain of ash matters
Stirling’s next major theatre engagement was Mike Bartlett’s Scandaltown at the Lyric Hammersmith, the very venue where she had performed with her mother just weeks before the funeral. On opening night, the tube slipped from her bag, opening the wrong way, and a few specks cascaded onto her dressing table. In a moment of panicked spontaneity, she lifted a grain to her fingertip, tasted it, and felt an immediate calm wash over her. “It felt completely right,” she recalled, noting that the sensation was grainy but oddly comforting.
The act, she explains, mirrors the ritual consumption of the Eucharist for many Christians: a symbolic ingestion that connects the believer to the departed. For Stirling, swallowing a minute fragment of her mother’s cremains became a personal anchor, a way to carry Rigg onto the stage when the spotlight hit. Since that night, she repeats the gesture before every press night, whether the play is a revival of Private Lives a modern drama at the Royal Court, or a Broadway transfer of Giant. The ritual has transformed from a one-off accident into a deliberate, calming pre-performance habit.
Public reaction and personal conviction
When the story broke, reactions ranged from bewildered curiosity to outright disgust. A fellow theatre widow whispered that she, too, partook of a loved one’s ashes, illustrating that the practice, while rarely spoken of, is not entirely unique. Stirling acknowledges that most people would find the habit “batshit,” yet she defends it as a natural extension of love and grief. “Ashes to ashes, funk to funky,” she quotes, invoking Bowie’s lyric to underline the cyclical nature of life, death, and artistic expression.
Despite the occasional raised eyebrows, Stirling remains steadfast. The act is not a publicity stunt; it is an intimate, private ceremony that allows her to feel her mother’s presence in the most literal sense while she delivers a performance. As she puts it, “I’m sure I’m not going mad. It’s what she would have wanted.”
