Emma Thompson was born on April 15, 1959 in Paddington, London, into a family of actors – father Eric Thompson and mother Phyllida Law, who has co-starred with Thompson in several films. Her sister, Sophie Thompson, is an actor as well. Her father was English-born and her mother is Scottish-born. Thompson’s wit was cultivated by a cheerful, clever, creative family atmosphere, and she was a popular and successful student. She attended Cambridge University, studying English Literature, and was part of the university’s Footlights Group, the famous group where, previously, many of the Monty Python members had first met.Thompson graduated in 1980 and embarked on her career in entertainment, beginning with stints on BBC radio and touring with comedy shows. She soon got her first major break in television, on the comedy skit program Alfresco (1983), writing and performing along with her fellow Footlights Group alums Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. She also worked on other TV comedy review programs in the mid-1980s, occasionally with some of her fellow Footlights alums, and often with actor Robbie Coltrane.Thompson found herself collaborating again with Fry in 1985, this time in his stage adaptation of the play “Me and My Girl”” in London’s West End, in which she had a leading role, playing Sally Smith. The show was a success and she received favorable reviews, and the strength of her performance led to her casting as the lead in the BBC television miniseries Fortunes of War (1987), in which Thompson and her co-star, Kenneth Branagh, play an English ex-patriate couple living in Eastern Europe as the Second World War erupts. Thompson won a BAFTA Award for her work on the program. She married Branagh in 1989, continued to work with him professionally, and formed a production company with him. In the late 80s and early 90s, she starred in a string of well-received and successful television and film productions, most notably her lead role in the Merchant-Ivory production of Howards End (1992), which confirmed her ability to carry a movie on both sides of the Atlantic and appropriately showered her with trans-Atlantic honors – both an Oscar and a BAFTA award.Since then, Thompson has continued to move effortlessly between the art film world and mainstream Hollywood, though even her Hollywood roles tend to be in more up-market productions. She continues to work on television as well, but is generally very selective about which roles she takes. She writes for the screen as well, such as the screenplay for Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995), in which she also starred as Elinor Dashwood, and the teleplay adaptation of Margaret Edson’s acclaimed play Wit (2001), in which she also starred.Thompson is known for her sophisticated, skillful, though her critics say somewhat mannered, performances, and of course for her arch wit, which she is unafraid to point at herself – she is a fearless self-satirist. Thompson and Branagh divorced in 1994, and Thompson is now married to fellow actor Greg Wise, who had played Willoughby in Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995). Thompson and Wise have one child, Gaia, born in 1999. She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire at the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours for her services to drama.”
Emma Thompson
Movies
Daddy Cool
Andre (Gérard Depardieu), a Frenchman divorced from his American wife takes his teenage daughter, Nicole (Katherine Heigl), on vacation with him. She’s desperate to appear as a woman and not a girl, so in order to impress a local boy, she makes up more and more ridiculous stories, starting with…
Fun Facts
I sometimes think that the young must get very bored with the parts that they are required to play. It's not as though there are that many very complex
Quotes
[on her role in the Harry Potter film] I have a nervous breakdown in the film and in one scene I get to stand at the top of the stairs waving an empty sherry bottle which is, of course, a typical scene from my daily life, so isn't much of a stretch.
I can't stand this new culture of the instant disposable celebrity. It's all so vulgar.
I am who I am and there is nothing I can do about that.
I have periods of intense activity, then stop. My ideal is to work hard in the morning until I pick Gaia up from school. Just putting an empty square in my diary seems to make a space in my head, too. You have to be very good at saying no.
My appearance has changed a lot over the years, but it has far more to do with how I feel about being a woman. I've never thought of myself as vain. When I was at Cambridge, I shaved my head and wore baggy clothes. What I did was to desexualise myself. It was partly to do with the feminism of that time: militant and grungy. That's all changed now, though I don't think it is liberating to get your tits out. I don't hold with that. But I am much more comfortable with being a woman now than I was in my twenties.
But when I lose my temper, I find it difficult to forgive myself. I feel I've failed. I can be calm in a crisis, in the face of death or things that hurt badly. I don't get hysterical, which may be masochistic of me. But in small matters, I am not calm at all. My worst quality is impatience.
I mind having to look pretty, that's what I mind, because it is so much more of an effort.
Liam Neeson, quite frankly, is sex on legs. Always has been.
Children are much more understanding of the suddenness and arbitrariness of death than we are. The old fairy tales contain a lot of that, and we've stolen from them, just as they stole from Greek myth, which has that same mixture of pre-Christian chaos.
I've realized that in all the great stories, even if there's a happily-ever-after ending, there's something sad.
Acting simply cannot be about how you look. It would be very difficult to make a film where you have to be beautiful in every shot. You have to put so much effort into it; you have to hold your head at particular angles, put the light in a certain way and I don't like acting like that. I like to act unconscious of how I look.
The first time I was nominated, I didn't know anything about the Oscars. That was almost 15 years ago. I just did Oscar week and enjoyed it very much because I was with my mum. Even so, each time it's happened I've come down with some ghastly infection. It is overwhelming for people. It has nothing to do really at all with your performance. It comes down to if you get an Oscar for your film, then the revenue for your film goes up. They mean a great deal. I can't deny it.
I'm very lucky I write as well. I don't see how I could be as effective a mother as I'd like to be if I had to go away and act all the time. So I've sort of pulled back from acting, which is fine, because I've found over the years - and this was a surprise to me - that I can get the same kind of creative satisfaction from writing as I have heretofore gotten out of acting. It's very encouraging, really.
[1992] We just did Hamlet with Sir John Gielgud and it was so luvvy it wasn't true.
[on the personality of P.L. Travers and Saving Mr. Banks (2013)] She is a rather extraordinary combination of things. I suppose that was the scary thing about playing her. In film, we often get to play someone who is emotionally or morally consistent in some way, and she was not consistent in any way.
My godfather said that 'story' was about taking the chaotic jigsaw of life, making it into a picture and putting a frame around it so that we could look at it, have control over it. Story and art are the humanizing elements in us.
[on being reminded she once claimed that picturing the men she had slept with helped her drift off] I haven't done that in a long time. I'm more likely to rehearse casserole recipes, which perhaps is a sad indictment of my state of mind.
Once you're a mom, you've been split into two people. Like Peter Pan and his shadow.
Th nanny story is essentially the western. It's the stranger from out of town who comes into the situation of conflict, solves the issues using unorthodox methods and then must depart. Shane and Buffalo Bill turn up as Nanny McPhee and Mary Poppins in the female world.
[Walt] Disney had a very Dickensian childhood. Disneyland was a way of rendering the world a safe place for himself and other children.
Why insist on building a new border between human beings in an ever-shrinking world where we are still struggling to live alongside each other?
[on her appearance on 'the red carpet', clad in a hot pink number] It's Stella McCartney. It was actually much shorter on the runway, but when I tried it on it was a bit mutton-dressed-as-a-lamb, so I had it lengthened. I like my legs but not the top bits very much.
I would rather have a root canal treatment for a year than go on Twitter or Facebook. The irony of Facebook is [that you speak out but] don't say it to anybody's face. It revolts me, repels me.
I have the same career trajectory as Maggie Smith. I was passionate about comedy. I wanted to be Lily Tomlin. I wanted that career. Write my own stuff and play it. And I did it for a while. I had my own series which was so badly reviewed by the critics I thought I can't do this anymore.
[on working with Tom Hanks in Saving Mr. Banks (2013)] It was such fun. You can imagine. He's a darling and such a good actor. We've known each other on a social level for some time and we always said "What can we do? What can we do?"". And this turned up and it was sort of perfect.
To be perfectly frank