She was one of the women who defined the 1960s, so what has growing older taught her?

DIANA RIGG CAME ACROSS RUARAIDH MURRAY WHEN THEY WERE STAGING THEIR OWN FRINGE SHOWS, THE VETERAN OF STAGE AND SCREEN TAKING ON THE ROLE OF MENTOR TO HER YOUNGER COUNTERPART. HERE THEY TALK TOFFS, TECHNIQUE AND THE PASSAGE OF TIME

‘ WHEN I started at drama school there were nothing but working-class people. Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney. Tom Courtenay. There wasn’t a posh boy there.” Diana Rigg – Dame Diana Rigg if you want to stand on ceremony; she doesn’t insist on it – is sipping prosecco in the bar of the Groucho Club in Soho. We are discussing issues of contemporary class representation in her chosen profession.

“It’s swings and roundabouts,” she continues. “And we just happen to have a lot of very talented boys who have been to public school right now and it will even itself out next year, the year after. Why make a fuss about it? They are extremely good actors. If they weren’t there would be a point to the argument. But there is no point to it.”

Really? In this Cumberbatchian age we live in one wonders if the likes of Finney would get a foothold now. When grants are a distant memory would he even have got to drama school?

“I think if you want something you will chase it,” chips in Ruairaidh Murray, an actor himself, though not of the public school variety (Stockbridge Primary School and Broughton High School if you must know).

“They will get there,” continues Rigg. “They will get there. They’re not put off by seeing an Etonian there. Why would they be?”

It is an afternoon in early July. The Groucho Club is humming with life and conversation and alcohol (though in the interest of full disclosure, of the three of us only Rigg is partaking). We are gathered here today to talk acting and Edinburgh and love and growing old with two actors at very different stages of their careers, linked by a love of acting, by the Fringe and more tangentially by their Scottish histories.