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Diana Rigg is not likely to forget a certain critic's 1971 review of her nude scene in Abélard and Héloïse: "He said I was built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses." While not every actor has been brickbatted quite so brutally, all get swatted in the course of a career, says Rigg: "There is bound to be a bad choice of play or a misconceived performance." On the theory that "every time you quote your own bad notice you exorcise a little of the pain," Rigg has asked her fellow victims to send her their most painful and embarrassing reviews for an anthology. The book is to be titled No Turn Unstoned — after George Bernard Shaw's definition of what a critic leaves behind him. So far, Rigg has received 300 offerings, which she plans to supplement with the worst reviews of late great actors (those who, as she puts it, "have gone on eternal tour"). The book, she insists, "is not just an actor's way of getting back at a critic." In fact, Rigg sympathizes with the reviewer's plight. "After you've spent a night of bore dom," she allows, "the temptation to pan must be very great."
— By Claudia Wallis