Once Rachel Stirling was frustrated and aggressive about references to her looking like her famous mother Diana Rigg.

Now Steve Pratt finds the Tipping The Velvet actress very proud of following in dame fortune's footsteps.

EVEN if journalists didn't keep reminding people, Rachael Stirling would never escape her famous mother. She looks and sounds too much like Diana Rigg, the woman she calls "ma", to ever disguise her family background.

The actress, who starred in BBC2's controversial lesbian romp Tipping The Velvet, has learnt to live with the mother-and-daughter references.

"The first film I did, when I was 19, was Still Crazy and I didn't know my arse from my elbow about cameras. So, to invite comparison then was unfair because you're very green and uneducated," she says.

"Now, technically I know my way around film, and Tipping The Velvet helped. When someone says, 'you look like your ma', I'm proud instead of frustrated as I was an aggressive teenager."

She's followed her mother's example when it comes to her private life, shunning showbiz glitz for something more ordinary. "My life is normal and always will be," she says. "My ma has a very clear division between work and play - and I do too. The red carpet and fancy dresses are not my bag."

Tipping The Velvet brought her much attention, not least because of its saucy sex scenes. She wasn't surprised by the uproar. "I had a vague inkling that where there was a dildo involved there would be a bit of a hou-ha," she says.

Her latest TV role will not cause offence. As socialite Caroline, she goes to the gallows for poisoning her artist husband. Fourteen years later, Hercule Poirot is asked by her grown-up daughter to investigate and find out if her mother really was guilty.

David Suchet's Belgian detective is joined by Stirling as well as Queer As Folk's Aidan Gillen, Toby Stephens, Marc Warren, Gemma Jones and Patrick Malahide.

Filming the Agatha Christie mystery gave Stirling, whose character is only seen in flashback scenes, a difficult moment shooting Caroline's execution scene. "We did it as accurately as it's possible to do," she says, recalling the "complete horror" of being led towards the noose.

"In those days it took a woman about 45 seconds to walk from the cell, in which she was imprisoned on her last night, to the gallows. No matter how much you say to yourself that you're doing a film, when you have someone reading, 'you will walk through the valley of death', it's hard not to believe it's real.

"The execution scene lingered with me. We'd been working for five weeks and that was the last day of filming. Everyone else had gone, and I was on my own.

"The next day I started rehearsing for A Woman Of No Importance on stage in London. I was hung one night and then doing Oscar Wilde the next."

The execution scene is part of an attempt to make the TV Poirot stories a little more realistic than in the past. "This is not a plot about whether he was killed with a spanner in the drawing room, but about human frailty," she points out.

"You see these people young and then, 14 years later, crippled by things that have taken place in their lives. It shows Agatha Christie to be a quite good psychologist as well as an inventor of plots."

Stirling admits to reading Christie's books when she was younger. She found them such page-turners that it was impossible not to get hooked on the novels.

She read most of them, but not Five Little Pigs. "It's one of her most formulaic books unless you are doing it as we have filmed it and make the basis of it real. I think this is one of the most successful transformations in a sense because she was writing about human beings," says the actress.

"You can't play Caroline as innocent or guilty. I took the book and the script and others' remembrances of her, five different opinions of her character by five other people."

The Oscar Wilde play represented a big change of pace, but one she enjoyed because it was different to the Christie role. "It's about stretching your other arm," she says. "With Five Little Pigs it's about what isn't seen. It's interesting to play a character who's elusive against one who's bright-eyed and bushy-tailed."

Stirling recently completed a low budget movie, Freeze Frame, with comedian Lee Evans. In the New Year, she's heading for Hollywood - not permanently, but to check out work.

"Much to my disdain, most of the best scripts are in Los Angeles. Over here, they're formulaic, either Richard Curtis or The Full Monty. In America, there's so much money pumped into writing," she says.

Stirling also reveals how she relaxes away from the cameras - playing football with all-girl team Frisky Town. "I play defence, but I'm a good striker," she says. "I've been with the team two years, just hanging out with the girls. We're a group of friends from all walks of life who got together to play."

* Poirot: Five Little Pigs: Sunday, ITV1, 9pm

Published: 11/12/2003