Dame Diana Rigg, who last week won £38,000 from the Daily Mail over two articles that portrayed her in an inaccurate light, has said she "despairs" of the government's decision not to introduce a privacy law.
The existing system of press self-regulation was not sufficient to provide a swift remedy in the form of a prominent apology to those injured by newspaper reports, Dame Diana said.
"I have followed the recent deliberations of the Press Complaints Commission and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and despaired at their conclusion that existing press regulation is sufficient," she wrote in the Daily Telegraph.
"Tabloid newspapers are very rich and hold huge funds to fight claims. They will go to any lengths to avoid printing an apology for this makes them look foolish and lose credibility.
"For justified claims such as mine there should be a fast-track, independent process without recourse to the law, which has the power to grant an immediate and prominent apology in the offending paper. Only then will the press begin to clean up its act."
Associated Newspapers was last week forced to pay Dame Diana £30,000 in libel damages plus an extra £8,000 for invasion of privacy at her home in France as well as her £80,000 legal costs, over articles that appeared in the Daily Mail and London Evening Standard in September 2002.
Dame Diana explained that she "naively" agreed to give an interview to the Mail's Jane Kelly to promote the Children with Aids charity, of which she is patron, not realising that Kelly was more interested in talking about her private life.
She was accompanied to the interview by the fund director of the charity, Peter Brooke Turner, and said: "In retrospect we were both idiotically naive and quite unaware that the latest sting in journalism, to lure reluctant subjects to the interview table, is to invite them to talk on a favoured charity".
"In the end I gave in and responded in general terms to questions on childhood, early theatre, the new house in France, etc. Nothing I hadn't spoken about before, and we seemed to part on cordial terms.
"Two days later the article appeared and I went into shock. I had been given a persona I didn't recognise, attitudes I don't possess, opinions I don't hold and words I had not spoken.
"To cap it all Miss Kelly had decided to retire me," said Dame Diana, who is about to start rehearsals for the Tennessee Williams play Suddenly Last Summer, which opens in January.
Friends advised the actress against taking legal action, but she pressed ahead knowing "that once in the public domain and unchallenged, the article would be up for grabs for any journalist to recycle and perpetuate at will".
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport last week rejected the call by a committee of MPs for a privacy law, branding it "unnecessary and undesirable", and made clear it considered the current system of self-regulation sufficient to protect against intrusion into private life.
In a report in June the Commons select committee on culture, media and sport, led by Gerald Kaufman MP, "firmly" recommended that the government should introduce new legislation to clarify the protection that individuals can expect from invasion of their privacy.
· To contact the MediaGuardian newsdesk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 7239 9857
