THE END OF THE AFFAIR
Emma Thompson has given celebs — and the rest of us — a lesson in break-up dignity, writes Glenda Cooper
‘THERE are some friends,” intones Stephen Fry at the beginning of the semiautographical 1992 film
Peter’s Friends, starring, among others, Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh, “you know you will have for the rest of your life. You’re welded together by love, trust, respect, loss or — in our case — embarrassment.”
Oh dear. Two decades on, Fry still commands awe as a polymath and actor, but clearly his fortune-telling skills weren’t up to much. Within three years, Thompson and Branagh announced that they were separating. And until now, no one really said why.
In a world of reality TV, celebrity magazines, Twitter break-ups and makeups, it’s hard to think back 18 years to the relative silence that accompanied the Branagh-Thompson split.
At the time, they were Britain’s golden acting couple. Known simply as “Ken and Em”, their relationship invited comparisons with the glamour of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh or even Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Yet despite whispers of Branagh’s “private and complicated” relationship with fellow Brit actor Helena Bonham Carter, and Thompson’s subsequent relationship with Greg Wise, no one was any the wiser.
But last week Thompson finally lifted the lid on what happened at the end of that union — with charm and self-deprecation — and how she used the pain and depression she suffered to carve out an even more successful career for herself.
If revenge, as the late fashion designer Gianni Versace believed, is best served after seven years, then other alpha couples in the throes of painful break-ups could learn a lot from the Thompson example.
“[It] is — as Mike Nichols [the director] once said . . . all blood under the bridge. You can’t hold on to anything like that,” Thompson said as she finally commented on the Branagh/Bonham Carter affair in an interview. “She’s a wonderful woman, Helena.”
Thompson and Branagh met in 1987 when they appeared in the miniseries
Fortunes of War. They married two years later and carried their union on to their professional life, working together on projects such as Dead Again and Peter’s
Friends.
Even after Thompson was described by the New York Times as an “international success almost overnight” for her role in
Howard’s End (for which she won an Oscar for Best Actress in 1993, and in which
Bonham Carter also starred — as Thompson’s sister), she returned to acting with Branagh in Much Ado About Nothing.
But cracks were forming. At the same time as his wife’s star was rising in
Hollywood with Remains of the Day and In the Name of the Father, Branagh was struggling to make a success of his first bigbudget film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which he played Frankenstein and Bonham Carter his fiancée and adoptive sister.
It seems that the Ken and Em show was already in trouble — competing schedules, too much time away from each other — even before the affair with Bonham Carter, which is believed to have started on the Frankenstein set in 1994.
And yet the split would prove a miracle for Thompson’s professional and private life, transforming her from north London luvvie to national treasure. Miserable, depressed, she would crawl to the computer in — it’s said — the same dirty dressing gown every day to complete the screenplay for Ang Lee’s film Sense and Sensibility. She went on to win a second Oscar in 1995 for it, making her the only person to have won Academy Awards for both acting and writing.
On set, she found a new husband in Greg Wise. Nearly 20 years later they are still going strong. Today, Bonham Carter is in a long-term relationship with filmmaker Tim Burton, while Branagh married Lindsay Brunnock, an art director, in 2003.
Thompson managed to utilise the pain at the death of her marriage in one of her most acclaimed performances — that of Karen in Richard Curtis’s Love Actually, who suspects her husband of infidelity. “I’ve had so much bloody practice at crying in a bedroom, then having to go out and be cheerful, gathering up the pieces of my heart and putting them in a drawer,” she once said.
Now, when questioned about Bonham Carter, she can even joke about it. Asked whether the situation had not been tricky because the two actresses seem quite similar, she replied: “Oh we are. Being slightly mad and a bit fashion-challenged. Perhaps that’s why Ken loved us both . . . Helena and I made our peace years and years ago.”
For most mortals, waiting 18 years to say anything about the break-up of a marriage — and then being generous about it — seems an impossible challenge. Who can blame Jennifer Aniston for taking to the pages of Vanity Fair and US Vogue to make clear her hurt and betrayal after Brad Pitt left her for Angelina Jolie? Aniston lambasted her former husband as lacking a “sensitivity chip” and said the fact that the affair appeared to have happened on set before her marriage broke down was deeply distressing. “That stuff about how [Angelina] couldn’t wait to get to work every day? That was really uncool.”
Jo Wood was humiliated by her Rolling Stone husband Ronnie — keeping him sober only to see him start a relationship with a 19-year-old when he was in his 60s— and promptly sold her story about him spending the kids’ school fees on a Rolex.
But however delicious revenge might seem at the time, who suffers in the end?
The problem is that you end up being
But however delicious revenge might seem at the time, who suffers
in the end?
forever linked to the ex you grew to loathe. It can even damage your professional life — French President François Hollande’s credibility has not fully recovered since late last year, when he found himself in the middle of a furious row on Twitter (where else?) between his current partner Valérie Trierweiler and his ex, Ségolène Royal. Monsieur Normale became an object of derision.
For most it would be unthinkable to utter the words “wonderful woman” for the Other Woman — or indeed channel heartbreak into acclaimed rom-com performances — but Thompson’s example might be a lesson. Or perhaps the beginning of an Oscar-winning screenplay.