Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
If I was given a script and it described my character as ‘beautiful’ I would just go: ‘That is not for me’
Thompson slams ‘sexist’ film biz
SHE is one of Britain’s greatest film stars… but Emma Thompson has never hankered for a glam Hollywood role, saying her looks have always ruled her out of contention.
The 60-year-old double Oscar-winner, insists the “prescriptive and sexist” film industry steered her towards more character-led parts instead.
She said: “I’ve never been a Gwyneth Paltrow type. I didn’t ever fit the norms that are generally required to be a sexually castable person, if we are talking Hollywood, or even here.
“The profoundly prescriptive and sexist responses to people’s shape and who they were… in a sense, I was out of that a bit because I have always been a character actor.
“It felt like a relief – but if I was handed a script where it described the character
I was going up for as ‘beautiful’, I wouldn’t go up for the role.
“I would just go ‘that is not for me’. “So I was relieved by it but I was oppressed by it. Of course.
“As you get older, you are relieved of all of that but I haven’t had the same trajectory as someone like, say, Michelle Pfeiffer, which must be very hard when you are considered a great screen beauty and then to see that drifting away.
“I don’t notice it really because I have done other things. And because I have a political response to it –which is a kind of energy in itself.”
Emma said she had learned to create a public persona for herself and, away from promoting movies, she was a private person who stayed away from emails and even Wifi as much as possible. But she worries about young people now, adding: “It seems to me that privacy has gone.
“Young people don’t have it any more because everything is documented. “One must be self-censoring.” Speaking on The Pleasure Podcast, Emma also said that she wanted to make a sitcom based on the menopause, although she didn’t notice the changes much herself.
She joked: “I had the occasional hot flush at night which I just thought ‘that is a tremendous amount of energy, it is extraordinary, we should harness that, I feel like I could power the Chrysler Building right now’.”
She also described how she managed to stop an unnamed man taking advantage of her in her twenties by shaming him
– but noted that stopping a sexual attack was not always that easy.
She said: “When I was about to be taken advantage of at the age of 20 or something by a much older man.
“He reached towards me to put his hand down my shirt.”
She went on: “I grabbed his wrist and said ‘I think you are taking advantage’ and immediately he kind of took his hand away and stopped.
“He knew he was taking advantage as soon as I described it and used the words ‘taking advantage’.
“His shame instinct kicked in and stopped him from doing it and protected me from my own feeling of shame.
“It is a hugely powerful thing, to be able to say no in the right way.
“I knew he was someone just trying it on. But if you have had an experience where you say no and no one listens as a child, you are in deep s*** later on.”