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In Conversation With… Dame Emma Thompson

By Simon Button. Images by Charlotte Hadden.

1 Year Ago

    “Whatever I do now, it has to serve the happiness of people. I think that’s my job… I love my job. I love all the forms it takes. I don’t take myself so seriously anymore and I don’t care how I’m judged. I’m past all that.”

Most actors are wary of critics. Dame Emma Thompson is an exception. Honoured by the Critics’ Circle at a lunch at London’s National Liberal Club (a fitting venue for a woman whose views skew towards the left of the political spectrum), the actress and screenwriter takes to the podium and says: “Criticism has shaped, to a great degree, the choices I have made in my working life.”

The Circle, of which I’m a member, was bestowing its highest honour — the Rosebowl Award for Services to the Arts — on Dame Emma for a 40-year career in which she has also been garlanded with two Academy Awards, two BAFTAs, two Golden Globes and a Primetime Emmy among numerous other accolades.

Bumping into her on the stairs before the presentation, she’s the friendliest of awards-laden performers. We chat about Saving Mr. Banks recently being on television (“Such a lovely film and it was such a wonderful experience making it,” Emma beams), as well as her popping up in a Channel 4 rerun of Cheers.

In the tenth season of the US sitcom, she played Dr. Frasier Crane’s first wife, but when I mention it, Thompson only has the vaguest recollection of doing so. That’s understandable when you consider just how much the Cambridge graduate has done since she became the first female invited to join the university’s feted Footlights comedy troupe alongside Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie back in the late 70s.

It would take a whole magazine to detail everything she’s been in since. By way of a précis, she’s done Shakespeare and Sense and Sensibility (which garnered her an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay), was in the Love Actually ensemble and headlined two Nanny McPhee films (which she also wrote), hosted Saturday Night Live and flexed her musical theatre chops again in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and was most recently seen on the big screen in the Matilda musical and the romcom What’s Love Got to Do with It?

The last time I interviewed her was for the 2013 comedy The Love Punch (admittedly not the most memorable entry on her considerable CV), when she insisted she was nothing like the grudge- earing ex-wife of Pierce Brosnan she played in the film.

“I don’t hold grudges at all and it’s one of my better qualities,” twice-married Emma smiled. “I really ought to hold them slightly more but I’m absolute rubbish at it because I fear conflict of that kind. I don’t hold on to things because I haven’t got the energy, actually.”

At that stage in her life she’d had a high-profile marriage to, and divorce from, Kenneth Branagh (“Like two mating lobsters, we clashed claws,” is how she’s since described their relationship), the split being brought on by his affair with Helena Bonham Carter.

It’s no surprise that the London-born daughter of actress Phyllida Law and writer and narrator of The Magic Roundabout Eric Thompson aspired to be a comedian while studying English at Cambridge. Stand-up terrified her. “But I did scary things like that when I was a young woman,” the 64-year old remembers. “I had all of my 20s to fail. I wanted to be a stand-up and then I wanted to be Lily Tomlin. I had a chance to experiment and that’s riches beyond compare. Young people who are successful now can’t do that because the spotlight is there all the time.”

Her first film appearance was in the 1989 comedy The Tall Guy opposite Jeff Goldblum but movies weren’t part of any masterplan. “I never expected to be a film actress and I wasn’t terribly ambitious about it,” says the woman whose previous acting gig had been on stage in Look Back in Anger with Branagh, whom she’d been in a relationship with since they worked together on Fortunes of War for the BBC. “Film acting and stage acting are not the same thing. In the theatre, you have to wear all your energy on the outside in order to project the character to the guy in the back row, but if you do that for film it’s too much. You have to internalise, because a thought can be translated by a muscle in your face and a film audience will be able to read that.”

Thompson has subsequently navigated stage and screen to great acclaim, as well as writing screenplays and three books about Peter Rabbit as a continuation of the Beatrix Potter series. When it comes to awards, she is one of Britain’s most honoured thespians and has been making shortlists again for her performance in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.

Katy Brand wrote the script this time round for a very funny and deeply touching comedy-drama in which Emma plays a sixty-something widower who hires a much younger sex worker (Daryl McCormack) so she can explore some unfulfilled fantasies.

The actress describes it as “a coming of old age movie” in which she appears emotionally and physically naked. “I have never conformed to the shape or look of someone they might want to see naked,” she says of her decision to go full frontal this late in her career. “And by ‘they,’ I mean male executives.”