15 Doctor Who Actors Who Died In 2020

5. Diana Rigg

Doctor Who The Crimson Horror Diana Rigg as Winifred Gillyflower
BBC

An icon of film and television, Dame Diana Rigg's countless onscreen credits make for a truly impressive list.

While contemporary audiences will undoubtedly know her best for her work as Olenna Tyrell in Game Of Thrones, she also appeared in James Bond, the Avengers TV show from the 1960s, and won an Emmy in 1997 for her work on the miniseries Rebecca.

She also had a memorable role in Doctor Who, playing the sinister Winifred Gillyflower in the 2013 episode The Crimson Horror. Rigg was the villain opposite Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor, with her character working to spread a dangerous poison across the Earth, all the while attempting to lure people to a model village called Sweetville.

Gillyflower's daughter in this episode - Ada - was played by Rigg's real-life daughter, Rachael Stirling, making Doctor Who quite a special project for the both of them.

Rigg passed away on 10 September, aged 82.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!