05/05/2008 Quoting from - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/05/05/btrigg105.xml Diana Rigg is quite a private figure, although she did talk about her past in a television series, Empire's Children, last year. She was born in Doncaster in 1938, but her parents were based in India. Her father, Louis Rigg, was a railway engineer who worked for the Maharaja of Bikaner, Ganga Singh. His wife Beryl returned to Britain for the birth of her daughter, then returned to India. Although Rigg felt a bit guilty about her Empire upbringing during the anti-Establishment 1960s, she is now fiercely proud of her father's contribution to the Raj. "The programme was celebrating the Empire, and about time too. My father owed a great deal to the Empire. And so did I. He actually served the Indians and worked for them. He was much liked by his workforce. So the programme was a lovely opportunity to pay homage to him and to the Empire." The programme also gave Rigg a chance to revisit India. "It was fine, lovely to go back to where we had once lived. Wasn't remotely spooky. The first place we lived in was completely tumbled down. Extraordinary how small it was. And then the second house was enormous. It was vast. And we had a lot of Indian servants looking after us. And then, of course, we came back to postwar England - miserable, not a banana in sight, let alone a Mars bar." Rigg was appointed a CBE in 1988 and a dame in 1994 for her many contributions to theatre and film. ============================= ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India