Daughter of Pamela Cooper, one of the much-admired Windmill Girls.Raised and educated in Bristol.Her father died when she was only two years old.

Her first stage appearance came in 1962, as a dancing girl in a pantomime staged in Bath. The following year she became a Butlin's Redcoat, and then she joined a London ballet troupe. This took her out of the country, first to Sweden, then to Spain.

Darvey parlayed her popularity from The Benny Hill Show to appearances on the game show Quick on the Draw and the sitcom ...And Mother Makes Five, and a role in the 1975 movie Carry On Behind. In the immediate years after her last Hill show appearance, Darvey travelled around the world with her cabaret act, in tandem with her then-husband, Terry Gittings (who had been a drummer in Georgie Fame's backing band). For a time in the early 1980s she was based in Miami Beach, Florida, where by then The Benny Hill Show had become famous in the United States through syndication. Their marriage ended in divorce a few years later, and Diana later ended up back in England where, at one point, she ran a pub in Bodicote, Oxfordshire.

In 1995 Darvey married for a second time, to Ralph Barker. She died five years later after a fall at her home, aged 54.