Emma: I’m backing fantastic Mail Force
Her backing for the PPE crusade... why she IS staying in Britain... and her mother Phyllida Law’s Parkinson’s diagnosis – a rare and deeply personal interview with Emma Thompson, our latest Mail Force donor
EVEN Dame Emma Thompson, ferocious campaigner, saver-of-the-planet, the ultimate ‘doer’, felt rattled and overwhelmed by the sense of powerlessness the Covid-19 pandemic has brought.
Like so many in the UK, she talks of being unable to focus, read, help. Do something.
‘I’ve spent a lot of time staring into space, which is unusual for me,’ she says.
She has found a way to help, though. Emma has become the latest high-profile donor to the Mail Force charity, which was set up by the Daily Mail and our partners to procure vital PPE equipment for the medical frontline. The charity, which has raised close to £8 million, has bought and flown muchneeded supplies to the UK, and is now funding manufacture in this country, too.
Nearly 50,000 of our readers and some of Britain’s leading philanthropists have donated money. Now, Emma has joined us, making a sizeable personal donation, and encouraging others to do the same.
When she read about what the Mail was doing, she was galvanised into action.
Her fears, and desire to help, were prompted not least by the past few weeks she has spent looking after her own mother, the much-loved Glasgow-born actress Phyllida Law, who is 87 and who has Parkinson’s Disease.
‘I’ve never been as moved by a newspaper campaign. It’s a brilliant initiative which I’m happy to support,’ Emma says, explaining that the Mail Force campaign is desperately needed — not just in terms of delivery of the vital PPE, but in terms of empowering others into helping, too.
‘There has been so much to worry about, so much doom and gloom. Genuinely, and rightly, there is a lot of fear and I know from my own experience that if you are fearful or anxious, the best way is to do something about it.’
SHE adds: ‘For a national newspaper to give people the opportunity to do something they are hearing about on the news every day, this whole question of PPE, was brilliant. You just want to be able to be useful in some way, and the paper gave them the opportunity to do something.’
Of course, like most high-profile celebs, she has been approached by all manner of charities and organisations, but was struggling to see how any of them could make a difference.
‘It’s difficult with PPE. You can’t just make it and send it to hospitals. It has to go through all these tests. I was asked by some people: “Can you support us, we are making PPE?” But that was not going to be acceptable to hospitals.
‘I thought for a newspaper to take it on, and give their readership a really active positive role, was fantastic.’ She concedes that she’s not always a supporter of the media, but reiterates that we are not in normal times.
‘We are stuck in our houses. No one is earning so they can’t give to charity. Charities are being decimated by this. Everyone is struggling to just get through. But this campaign allows people to give a small amount and really feel part of an initiative that makes a difference. And I know a lot of doctors and healthcare professionals who appreciate it. They are doing the most amazing jobs and it’s a privilege to do whatever we can to help them.’
In very Emma Thompson fashion, she has been ringing around friends and contacts in hospitals close to the Scottish family home where she spent much of her childhood, and to which her family has returned in lockdown, and asking what is needed. The answer? PPE equipment.
‘They are the most extraordinary people. I mean, we all know what an amazing job the NHS does, and what’s happening now just brings it into focus, doesn’t it?’ she says.
‘The people I’ve been speaking to here have been talking about how we are a “yes population here”.
‘We’ve just got to do this thing, so let’s get on with it. To me, that is very Scottish, but I know it’s being replicated all over the country.
‘What really strikes me about all
To give your readers a positive role is fantastic ... to feel part of an initiative that makes a difference
It was here we first noticed my mother’s symptoms ... we didn’t know it was Parkinson’s at first An Italian citizen? No, I adore Venice but I love Britain. I’ll never live anywhere else
of it is how the momentum has to be continued. There can be no going back to the normal underfunding and lack of resources. Everyone here is so resilient and adaptable, but underresourced. We have to prepare them for the next spike which could so easily come in the autumn.’ I catch up with Emma, via Zoom, at the family cottage in Argyll, where she is holed up with her husband Greg Wise, their daughter Gaia and her mother Phyllida Law. All are, of course, actors. Their current situation — three generations of women (and one unfeasibly handsome man) hunkering down as a global pandemic rages outside — does rather read like a film script. ‘There probably should be a short film made about me giving my mum a shower, which I do with me in the shower too,’ she (half) jokes, over a cup of tea (this would be a very British film; there is always tea). She explains that her mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s five years ago and now needs a wheelchair and assistance even to wash. Emma had been planning to spend a good swathe of this year anyway with her mum at Phyllida’s cottage in Argyll, where the family have always decamped. Lockdown turned it into a very different sort of sojourn, and Gaia (‘who was supposed to be off doing her own thing’) joined them. Greg celebrated his 54th birthday in lockdown, and she scrambled up to retrieve a Happy Birthday sign from a high shelf, then reminded herself that this was not a time to end up in A&E. While they are a close family, like so many, they are suddenly closer, in every sense. And a houseful of actors is throwing up some interesting observations from Emma. Particularly when she’s in the shower with her mother, grappling with their new reality, never mind the soap. ‘Oh dear, oh dear. It’s very funny, you know, living in between a 20year-old, the fruit of my loins, and my mother. Looking at the 20year-old body, and thinking “gosh!” then looking at the 87-year-old body, and inhabiting the body that is in between. That’s amazing, to be connected in that way, generationally.’
Their new ‘normal’ is a bit surreal, frankly. Emma, 61, has assumed the duties of carer; Gaia, chef.
‘It’s a bit like living in a cross between a care home and a gastropub,’ she admits. ‘Mum is quite lame so it’s a case of taking her out in a wheelchair, and making sure she takes her medication. The meds are amazing.
‘We can shield her here quite easily, and she moves more here, too, because she is interested in looking at the trees and the birds. In London, it’s more difficult.
‘But it’s working quite well, actually. Gaia has taken it on herself to cook, which helps a lot. I used to love cooking but — I don’t know why — I don’t want to now. I’m quite happy with a can of beans, but it’s nice that she wants to do it.
‘Whatever the day’s been like, someone who isn’t you is going to make dinner.’
THE star may be at home in front of a camera but today we are talking via Zoom, which is known mostly for giving unflattering views up people’s noses, even if they are A-listers. She is make-up free, obviously. And her hair is . . . well, very lockdown.
‘On a personal level, I’ve discovered what colour my hair actually is,’ she admits, giving it a theatrical shake into the screen. ‘It’s white.’ It is. When she fluffs it up with her hands, she looks like a sheep. ‘It’s mad, but I quite like it. I may hold onto it, after.’
Of course, there will be eyebrows raised at the idea that Emma Thompson and her clan decamping to Argyll. But first a correction about her relationship with Italy.
‘I have not got citizenship of any kind in Italy. What I have is a residency permit in Venice, a city I totally adore and have been visiting since I was 16,’ she says.
‘It is useful to correct a few inaccuracies about this. My relationship with Venice is nothing to do with Brexit or even with my love of Venetian pasta! The residency permit is a bit like a key to the city.
‘I want to be able to spend some time there in the holidays and wanted to show my love for a city which is so often underwater and, as a result, under siege.
‘But my heart is in Scotland and I will always love Britain above all else, and I will never live anywhere else.’
Emma flew back to the UK at the start of March, and did indeed head straight to Scotland, a few weeks before the ban on people travelling to second homes.
Not that she’s ever called the cottage on the shores of Loch Eck a second home.
Back in 2003, she admitted in an interview that the place had a very special place in her heart.
‘My mum’s from Glasgow, so I’ve been brought up half in Scotland and half in London, so it’s not really a holiday, it’s like the other bit of life, the real life so to speak,’ she says.
The place is certainly ‘real’. Hollywood sleek it isn’t. The shelves in the kitchen groan with books and spices and there is a ramshackle feel to the place.
Today, she talks about how it was always a place of comfort. ‘My uncle ran a tearoom in Ardentinny for 16 years, so for me it’s home. I’ve been coming back since I was wee.
‘The plan was that I was going to have a sabbatical this year — some much-needed time off — and the plan was always that I’d spend quite a bit of time here, with Mum.
‘Obviously, I didn’t know that the rest of the world would be having a sabbatical, too.’
NOr did she know that her knowledge of the local hospital would suddenly take on such significance. That hospital is a small one — Dunoon General.
Staff there first treated Emma when she was around ten, she reckons: ‘When I climbed over a rusty bit of barbed wire and got it in my ankle. Then, when my daughter was little I had to take her because she fell off a wall and we thought she’d broken her arm.
‘And then, of course, both my grandparents died in the geriatric unit there.’
The grateful family made a donation back then. ‘We built a conservatory on the back so they could sit and watch the birds. The care there was absolutely incredible, remarkable.’
Obviously, the past two months have brought that sort of care into sharp focus. As has her personal lockdown reality. While Emma and her sister, Sophie, have always been very hands-on with their mother’s daily needs, and particularly so over the past four or five years, she says she takes her hat off to people who care professionally.
‘I think these people who do it for a living — like the people who looked after my grandparents — are extraordinary.’
Of course, they are the lucky ones. At home (or rather at their London home), there is a close network, too.
Phyllida has a garden flat (eccentrically decorated; there is a sign on the front door warning visitors that a witch lives within), while Emma and Greg live in a house just opposite. They joke about the entire street being a care home for retired actors.
‘I’ve lived there since I was seven, but over the years a lot of actors have moved in.
Up the road is Derek Jacobi and his husband. Above them is Jim Broadbent and his wife. Down the road is Imelda
Staunton and husband Jim Carter, and further on Edward Fox and Joanna David. Everyone is friends. We now refer to the street as a care home.’
Here, though, there is the feel of a proper care home. And is she a good carer? She throws her arms up. She’s trying to be.
‘It’s the repetition of the same things happening all the time that is difficult,’ she says. ‘But also the way we’ve adapted here is to stick to quite a rigid routine.
‘Also, if it is your parent you are dealing with, the fact they can no longer look after themselves in the same way — that is a very interesting and very important transition and one a lot of people don’t get the opportunity to make because they are not local to their families.’
She means it is a privilege to be in a position where you can care for your mother when she needs you. ‘The whole care home thing — well, we stopped looking after our folk, not necessarily because everybody doesn’t want to, but just because it is so
hard,’ she says. Phyllida did the same for both her mother and mother-in-law, of course. She wrote a remarkable book about the years spent with Granny Annie, the mother of her late husband, Eric Thompson, creator of The Magic Roundabout.
Annie suffered from dementia and Phyllida wrote an account that was at once affecting and yet hilarious.
Emma says the family started noticing problems with Phyllida herself quite a few years ago. ‘It started here actually, or it was here that we started to notice the symptoms,’ she says.
‘We didn’t know it was Parkinson’s, at first, because there is no test for it. But we took her to see a gerontologist and got the diagnosis.
‘It was the same year we lost my sister-inlaw (Greg’s sister Clare died of cancer in 2018) , so obviously that wasn’t a fun year. It was the sort of year you think: “Let’s not go through that again.” ’
None of this is told in woe-is-me matter.
She is acutely aware that it’s a privilege to still have your mother at all when you are 61. ‘And she’s doing very well. She can’t do the walks she used to be able to (one walk was so well-trodden that the family gave it its own name: the P. Law) but she’s great.
And they are together, which is everything. She talks about the joy of that intergenerational contact.
‘My mum is talking about things like rationing during the war and all those things that her generation went through,’ she says. ‘And that generation is so stoic. I mean, my grandfather fought in both wars. That stoicism is helpful actually.’
And her mother’s take on this pandemic? ‘It’s interesting. She listens to the news a lot. When Donald Trump got in, she listened to the news with great gusto because she just couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
‘I’d come into her sitting room and she’d say: “Ooh, you’ll never guess what Trumpy has done.” She got very interested in the news because it was off-the-scale and not believable.
‘This is unbelievable in a different way. When I take her coffee in the morning, she says: “It’s awful. It’s just awful.”
‘She engaged with it but she’s very worried about everyone. She worried about people in tower blocks, about domestic violence. It’s triggered something deep.’
Ultimately, though, they are together as a family, which is the height of privilege these days.
‘We are so lucky,’ says Emma. ‘My heart just goes out to people who are losing a parent and not being able to go and see them, and for those who can’t see their grandchildren. Especially when you feel that time is running out.’