Rachael Stirling interview: The Tipping the Velvet star is returning to our screens in the BBC's Capital

She had acting in the blood and an early life of privilege. So, after a critically lauded start to her career, why did Rachael Stirling end up hiding behind the bar of a London pub?

Stirling says that, after Tipping The Velvet, she was 'offered every lesbian under the sun and every opportunity to take my clothes off' (Kalpesh Lathigra)

Fifteen minutes into my tête-à-tête with Rachael Stirling, I am suddenly struck by her physical likeness to a young Diana Rigg, at the height of her mid-1960s Emma Peel fame. Yes, I know, the fact that Rigg is Stirling's mother makes the resemblance unsurprising, but the facsimile remains disorientatingly flawless.

"It's those brown eyes, babe," says the actress when I mention it, but in fact it's the whole face; it would take only a bowler-hatted gent twirling an umbrella to complete the timewarp.

My apologies to Stirling, and to the publicist to whom I swore that this piece would not be all about her mother. But as someone practically weaned on old episodes of The Avengers, I couldn't let the moment pass unremarked.

Stirling with Toby Jones in ‘Capital’ (BBC/Kudos)

Enough of the miracle of genetics, though, for now we must discuss London property prices.

Capital is BBC1's new three-part adaptation of John Lanchester's 2012 state-of-the-nation novel set on a single gentrified street in south London, where the varied residents are being insidiously menaced by anonymous postcards declaring: "We Want What You Have".

Stirling plays Arabella Yount, the shopaholic wife of investment banker Roger (played by Toby Jones), whose pampered world starts unravelling when Roger doesn't receive the bumper annual bonus he had been expecting. Arabella has some of the best lines, but the character must have been hard for Stirling to like.

"It's interesting that people point the finger at her for being the materialistic one, not Roger," says Stirling. "It's interesting that it's the woman who's villainised, yet the reason she's transfixed on tarting up their house is a total lack of affection from Roger. Her redeeming feature is that she loves him. She also makes me laugh. I always like a character who makes me laugh.

Stirling with Keeley Hawes in ‘Tipping the Velvet’ (BBC)

"I'm perfectly capable of seeing things that I've done and going, 'That's a bit mediocre,' but I think this is important as a document of our times," adds Stirling, who herself lives in west London, in a former railway engineer's cottage. "The relentless drive of the property market makes us either victims of it or complicit in it, or both at the same time."

Stirling was born and raised in London, only vaguely aware of her mother's celebrity status – and of the way that fathers at her Earls Court primary school would look at "Ma", as she calls her. Holidays were spent in Scotland, at the family home of her father, millionaire businessman and theatrical producer Archie Stirling, an arrangement that continued after her parents divorced in 1990 following her dad's affair with Joely Richardson. Stirling was 12 at the time, and had just arrived at an all-girls boarding school in Buckinghamshire.

"I don't have any self-pity about it," she says. "It was only traumatic as it was in the papers and the housemistress insisted on buying the Daily Mail. So I'd come downstairs from the dormitory and all the letters were laid out, and next door to them was the Daily Mail and invariably there was a story in it about my parents separating."

Stirling with Mackenzie Crook in the comedy ‘Detectorists’ (BBC)

Her ma and pa remain friends, and Stirling will, as usual, be visiting her father's baronial pile in Ochtertyre for Christmas, along with her mother and stepmother, Sharon, who are apparently now great friends. In fact, Stirling comes close to recommending divorce as a form of personal development. "Some people ask, 'Would you like them to be together?' and I wouldn't because I now have two great relationships," she says. "When they've been together years and years, parents can sometimes be a kind of impenetrable entity, and that parent-child relationship has never evolved into anything else, whereas I had two fallible parents and I love to hang out with them one-on-one."

Stirling went on to Edinburgh University to study Russian ("So that I could read Chekhov in the original – which I did, with the help of a big dictionary, I might add") while simultaneously starting her acting career in 1996 with the National Youth Theatre, her first major role being Desdemona to Chiwetel Ejiofor's Othello. She had to miss her graduation ceremony because she was busy making her first film, 1998's Still Crazy, a comedy about a reformed 1970s rock band starring Bill Nighy and Billy Connolly.

Family resemblance: Stirling with her mother, Diana Rigg (Getty) (Getty Images)

The fact that she was Diana Rigg's daughter brought with it certain assumptions, such as that she knew what she was doing in front of camera. "They told me to hit my mark and I hadn't a clue what they were talking about," she says. "It took me 12 takes to walk through a door and by the time they finally got it, Billy Connolly was clapping very sarcastically. No, I didn't know my arse from my elbow."

The viewing public were soon to know Stirling's arse from her elbow, however, when she played Nan Astley in the BBC's explicit 2002 adaptation of Sarah Waters' historical lesbian novel Tipping the Velvet, described by Andrew Davies, who wrote the adaptation, as "Pride and Prejudice with the dirty bits". The drama, which she now dubs "Dip My Velvet", made Stirling's name, but also, she says, made it hard for casting directors to take her seriously.

"It was quite a frivolous take on the book," she says. "Interestingly, they've just done a play of it at the Lyric [Hammersmith], and I think they tried to turn it into Mike Leigh, which is also wrong. Anyway, afterwards I was offered every lesbian under the sun and every opportunity to take my clothes off. I was quite naive; I know my mum is an actress and I should've known better, but I didn't comprehend where I was at."

The intervening years have seen Stirling steadily develop as an actor, with TV roles including Ursula Brangwen in a 2011 adaptation of Women in Love, as Millie in ITV's wartime costume drama The Bletchley Circle, and some particularly fine stage performances ("I love the danger of live theatre"), including two Laurence Olivier Award nominations in consecutive years (for The Priory at the Royal Court and An Ideal Husband at the Vaudeville).

The nominations coincided with the end of a five-year engagement to fellow actor Oliver Chris, prompting a decision to go and work k in a pub on Edgware Road in central London. "I'd done a runner from a boy I was supposed to get married to, and he was an actor, and I was being offered really mediocre scripts and I was a bit of a mess," she says. "People would come in to the pub and say, 'Have I seen you on the telly?' and I would say, 'No you're probably thinking of Martine McCutcheon.'"

Stirling as Ursula Brangwen in 2011’s ‘Women in Love’ (BBC/Company Pictures)

Stirling's five-month career break appears to have worked. Not only has she had one of her most rewarding years to date, playing Mackenzie Crook's girlfriend in the BBC4 comedy Detectorists ("a glorious love letter to the countryside… of course, my bits with Mackenzie are shot in Romford"); the aforementioned Capital; and an upcoming ITV drama, Churchill's Secret, in which she plays the daughter of Winston Churchill (portrayed by Michael Gambon). She's also just completed filming opposite Gemma Arterton and Sam Claflin in an adaptation of Lissa Evans' novel Their Finest Hour and a Half, about a wartime British propaganda film crew ("I play this acid-tongued script editor… lesbian, but no sex").

Stirling also has a new "boy" – Elbow's feted singer-songwriter Guy Garvey. "It's amazing," she says. "I come from huge privilege and he comes from seven kids in a small house in Manchester and a pretty tough upbringing, and somehow, politically, morally and humour-wise, we meet in the middle."

Stirling's 'poshness' has, she thinks, lost her as many parts as it has gained (Kalpesh Lathigra)

Stirling's "poshness", or what she describes as having "all punnets [of plums, presumably] in my mouth", has, she thinks, lost her as many parts as it has gained. "If I'd been an actor in the 1940s I would have been in fashion," she says. "I won't change the way I talk for anyone. I'll do it for work but not because I think someone will like me more if I take the edge off."

Stirling is taking the rest of the year off to recharge and support Garvey's debut solo album, Courting the Squall, but she is now so confident in her own distinct place in the thespian universe that she is unafraid of sharing screen time with her mother – first on an episode of Doctor Who and now in Detectorists (in which Rigg plays her mother). "In Game of Thrones and such she plays bombastic characters; [in Detectorists], she underplays it so beautifully and I think she enjoyed flexing that muscle as well," says Stirling. "Now she needs to get me a part in Game of Thrones and we'll be quits."

'Capital' begins on BBC1 later this month

Make-up: Jo Hamilton using Nars Cosmetics and Liz Earle/ skincare Gigi Hammond at untitledartistsldn using Bumble and Bumble