Emma: I almost lost my husband to Kate Winslet
...after we all met on Jane Austen set – and he dated her before me
THEY met on the set of Sense and Sensibility amid romantic entanglements as complicated as any of those in the Jane Austen classic they were filming.
Now Dame Emma Thompson, 60, has revealed how she ended up with her husband Greg Wise, 53, after he first dated their co- star Kate Winslet.
In the 1995 adaptation, Wise played the caddish John Willoughby, who has a doomed relationship with Marianne Dashwood, played by Miss Winslet, now 44.
Dame Emma told last night’s Graham Norton Show Wise had been advised by a ‘witchy’ friend he would meet his next partner on the set. He didn’t consider the then Miss Thompson, playing Marianne’s sister Elinor, as she was nearing the end of her marriage to Kenneth Branagh at the time.
Instead he took Miss Winslet on a date to the Glastonbury Festival but, like their characters in Sense and Sensibility, their relationship was destined not to be.
Wise eventually ended up dating Dame Emma after she divorced Branagh in 1995. They have been together for 25 years and married for 16, with two children.
She told the BBC1 show last night that before beginning work on Sense and Sensibility Wise ‘went to see a friend of his who was a bit witchy and she said he would meet his future partner on the film’.
She added: ‘He assumed it wasn’t me because I was married and quite a lot older than him so he thought it might be Kate.
‘He took her to Glastonbury and she was so bored, he thought, “This isn’t going to work, who can it be?”
‘ Then things happened that probably shouldn’t have happened and it’s been 25 years in May.’
She was on last night’s show to promote her new film Dolittle – in which she voices a parrot – with Robert Downey Jr.