Emma Thompson: ‘My family would never let me be a diva!’
She may be now a Dame and have two Oscars under her belt, but Emma Thompson couldn’t be more down to earth if she tried
She’s an Oscar winner twice over, with a Best Actress award for Howards End in 1992 and a Best Adapted Screenplay award for Sense and Sensibility in 1995; a newly announced Dame in the Queen’s birthday honours list this year; and, off screen, a committed social campaigner with a special interest in feminist and environmental causes. So it would be all too easy for Dame Emma Thompson to slide into the category of those who take themselves too seriously. But, as we sit down for a chat with her in London – she’s looking relaxed in a casual white shirt, her thick hair cut into a no-fuss bob – it becomes apparent, just a few minutes in, that the reverse is the case.
‘If ever I have acted like that, it’s been beaten out of me by my family!’ says Emma. ‘They are very good at pointing things like that out, believe me!
‘But it is true that, if you work in an environment like I do, where you get looked after a lot, then you have to be very careful to remember that while that’s happening, you are in a very peculiar and not normal position. Look, I arrive on a film set and immediately someone is going to get me a cup of tea, and everyone is nice to me, and so it goes on. And, yes, I could get very spoiled, because if you’re surrounded by people who are constantly saying “Yes, you must have this or that,” and, “Yes, you’re right,” and never questioning you, it’s not very good for you. And I think we all know quite a lot of people like that, don’t we?’
Emma, 59, stays down to earth by keeping her day-today life as normal as she can. She lives in an unfashionable area of North London with her actor husband Greg Wise and their 18-year-old daughter Gaia.
Emma’s mother, the actress Phyllida Law, lives on the same street, and they receive frequent visits from Emma’s actress sister Sophie and her brood, and from ‘Tindy’ – Tindyebwa Agaba, the 30-yearold Rwandan refugee whom Emma and Greg adopted when he was still in his teens.
‘I do a lot for my family,’ says Emma, frankly. ‘I do most of the cooking and I do most of the shopping, I know the price of milk, and it’s not like I don’t clean my own toilets from time to time. I try to keep life real!’
She and Greg, 52, who met on the set of Sense and Sensibility in which he played seductive love rat Willoughby, have been married for 15 years and together for 22, which is a rare achievement in notoriously flighty showbusiness circles. Ask her their secret and she says a lot of it comes down to honesty.
‘My daughter remembers one time when she was little when
I came down from being upstairs and was furious with my husband because he hadn’t made the tea. And she asked me about it later and I said, “OK, it probably wasn’t about the tea, it was about something else.” But I did notice that she’d noticed, and what I took from it was to make sure that if
I am going to have an argument with someone, especially in front of my children, then I should let it be about the thing that it’s really about and don’t disguise it as something else. But that’s just about
‘I clean my own toilets from time to time. I try to keep life real’
emotional intelligence, isn’t it?’
After most efficiently putting herself (not to mention the rest of us) through the emotional wringer not once but twice this year – first as the ice-cold Goneril in the BBC adaptation of King Lear, and then as Fiona Maye, the tortured family court judge in the recent film The Children Act – Emma is putting her comedienne hat back on at last to do a short turn as the Prime Minister in Johnny English Strikes Again, the third in the series of the beloved spy spoof films featuring the inept international agent Johnny English. And as Emma herself tells us, she had a wonderful time doing it.
‘I had a ball,’ she laughs of the film, which stars her old comedy buddy and former Love Actually co-star Rowan Atkinson. ‘I play an idiot politician, a really quite viciously self-interested Prime Minister.’ She stops and assumes the expression of one in whose mouth butter would not melt. ‘Who on earth could I have possibly based that on? Anyway, it was great fun, I was only on it for a short while, but I wore a really nice suit and shot in some beautiful places in England, and it’s always a laugh working with Rowan so I had a very good time.’
Emma says that when she’s not working or looking after the family, she likes to read
(‘I love historical novels, I just finished another Philippa Gregory’) or watch television
(‘I tend not to get into the very long series because I get too restless, although I did watch the entire series of The Crown’) or go to the movies. ‘Although they’ve got so long these days! Even the Marvel movies are about three and a half hours long – I went to one recently and it felt like I was there for days watching these people save the planet again!’
A trouper to the bone, she catches herself in danger of poking fun at other people’s work, which she would be horrified to do. ‘Actually,’ she adds hastily, ‘I really love Marvel movies.’
Could a superhero role be coming up next?