Stirling's sapphic service

RORY FORD

SCOTS actress Rachael Stirling admits that she spent years "undercover" - shunning interviews and concealing her background from agents and other actors. Ironic then that she should now find herself definitely "uncovered" in the provocative new BBC lesbian period drama Tipping The Velvet.

Determined not to trade on her starry family connections - her mother is Diana Rigg and her father Scottish landowner Archie Stirling - the 25-year-old actress has spent the last four years carefully carving out a name for herself on her own merit

After graduating from Edinburgh University with a degree in art history, Stirling won a place at the National Youth Theatre and found an agent. By the time people realised who her mum was, she had established herself in her own right, with roles in movies such as Still Crazy, Maybe Baby and Iain Banks� Complicity already under her belt.

"Looking back, I probably dealt with it in the wrong way," she says now. "I thought that admitting that she was my ma would somehow take away from my own achievement, which is dumb, and I now celebrate it and am hugely proud of it. She reads the odd script but she doesn�t get involved with my work - the joy is that we have that in common. She�s my ma, not Diana Rigg."

Rigg, of course, will be forever ingrained on the male psyche for her role as the catsuit clad Emma Peel in The Avengers. Dame Diana was recently voted one of the sexiest women on TV for her role in the cult Sixties show and Stirling could be set to follow in those illustrious kinky booted footsteps.

Set in the 1890s, Tipping The Velvet is a sensuous lesbian love story that follows Nan Astley (Stirling) from her sexual awakening through a series of romantic adventures in the sexual underworld of Victorian London.

The story opens with Nan working in her parents� oyster parlour, but her life is changed by a visit to the local music hall to see male impersonator Kitty Butler (Keeley Hawes) perform.

The pair become friends and start a double act, with Nan leaving home to join her partner in the bright lights of London where they are overnight sensations - and begin a secret love affair. Unfortunately, things turn awry when Kitty can�t face up to her true feelings and opts for a respectable marriage to her business manager.

Lesbians? Sexual underworld? No wonder the red tops have been screaming: "IS THIS TALE OF LESBIAN LUST THE STEAMIEST SHOW EVER SEEN ON OUR TVS?" and other salacious Sapphic scribblings.

Scripted by master adapter Andrew Davies (Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch) from Sarah Waters� 1999 novel, Tipping the Velvet isn�t shy of portraying the whole of Nan�s rollicking story.

Although Stirling knew the book "back to front" and worked with Davies before - he penned ITV�s modern reworking of Othello in which she played the scandalous Lulu - when she received the scripts she admits that she was still taken aback at their candour.

"Andrew - naughty man - has got a lot to answer for!" she laughs. "There are ways and ways of writing stage directions" - even, she is convinced, when a, er, a dildo is involved.

Davies, who joked that this was the first time he had to tone sex down in one of his adaptations, admits that this is a lesbian period romp aimed squarely at men but isn�t out to provide instant gratification. "At the beginning of the first episode you are going to think: �What�s all the fuss about?�" he says. "But by the time you get to the second episode - which is absolutely filthy - you are so on her side that even the most conventional audiences will go with it."

Stirling concurs: "I first read the book last year and I felt passionately about it," she explains. "The one thing I minded more than anything was that the film should be funny to watch. I didn�t want it to be a breast-beatingly serious drama about lesbians - which it�s not. It�s a simple tale about this girl and the fixes she finds herself in. It has a vibrancy and an energy that just blows you away."

Stirling, who has inherited her mother�s striking good looks, says that the experience of making her own way in the world helped her relate to her character.

"I found it quite hard, during filming, to separate myself from Nan, simply because she�s like most other young women who are trying to find their own identities," she says.

"She�s got a wonderful spirit of trial and error about her - she tries anything and goes anywhere and meets anyone, just to try to discover who she is. She throws herself into things 400 per cent. She�s strong, brave and funny, she�s modest and charming. More than anything, she�s determined to find someone to whom she belongs and somewhere to be at home, and the three episodes take the viewer on the journey of her life."

And it is, Stirling agrees, quite a journey. "It�s the 1890s and Nan doesn�t feel she fits in particularly in Whitstable with her family. She doesn�t belong in the oyster parlour, she�s tempted by the theatre and finds herself drawn to Kitty.

"She goes from innocent girl to music hall star to rent boy to live-in lover with a manipulative, rich lesbian! Every single day of filming was a complete joy because I discovered something different about her."

As research, Stirling drew on her Edinburgh art history degree and immersed herself in the era.

Through paintings, I�d gathered a certain amount of information about that period and I knew that the pornography that came out of Victorian England was shocking at that time.

"I also did a fair amount of research into male impersonators like Vesta Tilley. Kitty�s the first one Nan�s seen, but it was a pretty common act."

Stirling also couldn�t wait to hit the stage for the drama�s rollicking music hall scenes. "I�d done a certain amount of singing and I knew I had a voice in me," she laughs, "and it turned out to be a belting voice rather than starling-like. But I loved the singing and it�s not like becoming a great opera singer - it�s rather more nudge, nudge, wink, wink!

"Performing in front of the audience was great fun, but there was something slightly different about when they were doing close-ups of us and there were only six people in the audience. You take a great big bow and there are six people going: �Yeah, it was all right. Cut�!"

The actress says that she�s thrilled to be part of a drama that was dubbed controversial months before the first scene was even filmed.

"Apart from Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and the odd snog on Brookside, there�s very little else that�s ever delved into lesbian relationships. Tipping The Velvet is about love, and it shouldn�t matter whether it�s two women or a man and a woman. Nan�s so funny that you shouldn�t mind whether she falls in love with a man or a woman, you want her to be happy at the end of it.

"If the lesbian theme makes people tune in, then all the better. I hope by the end of it, they�re carried away by Nan and her story, so it overrides any titillation that they first expected. But there�s definitely titillation there - they won�t be disappointed on that one!" she grins.

"I�m thrilled because it�s challenging. In terms of the sensational aspect and how it reflects on me, I reckon people might go: �Ooh, she�s a raving lesbian� for a month and then forget about it. I don�t care! But it�s a really good piece and I hope that, in the long term, once the controversy dies down, it should be really fun to watch."

For the record, Stirling "practically" lives with her boyfriend, John Lycett-Green, a DJ, in North London. The pair recently spent months apart while Stirling was filming The Triumph Of Love - in which, incidentally, she plays "a cross-dressing comedy maid opposite Mira Sorvino" - with Clare Peploe and director Bernardo Bertolucci in Tuscany. But now they�re making up for lost time.

"On my down time, I�m a DJ bitch," she laughs. "I sit behind the decks and I thwhack any girl over the head who comes up slobbering over my boyfriend - and anybody who comes up and asks for S Club 7!"