Actress says she eats a grain of her mother's ashes before going on stage
Actor Rachael Stirling admitted to swallowing a 'grain or two' of her mother's ashes on the first night of a new play.
Stirling, who is the daughter of Diana Rigg, shared the unusual revelation with The Telegraph ahead of the release of her memoir All About My Mother, which hits the shelves today (10 September).
Rigg, who is best known for playing a Bond girl in 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service, as well as starring in The Avengers and more recently as Lady Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones, passed away in 2020 at the age of 82, months after being diagnosed with lung cancer. Rigg's final film credit came in 2021's Last Night in Soho.
Sharing the anecdote, Stirling explained that the ritual feels 'absolutely natural' to her, despite shocking some people.
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"I eat her ashes before going on stage," she wrote in the memoir. "Although it shocks people when I tell them.
"It feels absolutely natural to me. I am cloaked in her, shielded and shrouded by her. My mother is my superpower."
While Stirling is not the first person to admit to eating the cremated remains of another human, it is not considered safe or healthy to do so.
Known as endocannibalism, cremated human remains contain heavy metals and chemical residues, such as carcinogenic formaldehyde, left over from the process of cremation.
There is also a high concentration of mineral salts and carbon, which can be dangerous to the body if consumed in high amounts.
Stirling also opened up about the final months of her mother's life, revealing that Rigg had been hospitalised during the pandemic. Recalling one frightening moment, the 49-year-old claimed that a mix-up at the hospital meant that she lost track of where her mother was, leaving Stirling panicking.
"They lost Mama's name on the system at one juncture during Covid. I was asking: 'Where the f*** is my mother?'," Stirling said.
"I found her eventually. I basically had to break into the hospital. She was in a room on her own. She couldn't get out of bed. The only thing she wanted to eat was this yoghurt, but she couldn't open it, and nobody had helped her, so she hadn't eaten anything.
"So that was that. I took her home with us."
Rigg would pass away in September of that year, just six months after being diagnosed with lung cancer.
In her final months, Rigg recorded a series of messages in support of assisted dying, which Stirling later shared in a piece for The Guardian. In one recording, Rigg said that she had always 'spoken out' throughout her career; she argued: "It’s high time there was some movement in the law to give choice to people in my position. This means giving human beings true agency over their own bodies at the end of life. This means giving human beings political autonomy over their own death."
Topics: Celebrity, Entertainment
Brenna Cooper