She earned her first Tony Award nomination for Best Actress for 1971’s Abelard and Heloise, and another for 1975’s The Misanthrope, but it wasn’t until 1994 that she took home the Best Actress Tony, this time for her work in Madea.
Born in Doncaster, England on July 20, 1938, Diana Rigg – whose full name was Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg – got into acting through stage work in the theatre.
She was also nominated for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her 2018 Broadway return in My Fair Lady.
She’d trained through the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and went on to perform in productions from the Royal Shakespeare Company in the late 1950s and 1960s, among several other works.