Emma Thompson (born 15 April 1959) is a two time
Academy Award-winning British actress,
comedian, and screenwriter. She is also a patron of the
Refugee Council.
Early life
Thompson
was born in Paddington
, London, England. Her father was the actor
Eric Thompson, best known for having
written and narrated
The Magic
Roundabout, shown on BBC children's television in the
1960s and 1970s.
Her mother is the Scottish
actress
Phyllida Law. Thompson's younger
sister is actress
Sophie Thompson.
Thompson has spent part of her life in Scotland and has stated that
she "feel[s] Scottish".
Thompson
went to Camden School
for Girls
and then studied English at Newnham
College
at the University of Cambridge
where she was a member (along with fellow actors
Stephen Fry, Hugh
Laurie and Tony Slattery) and
vice-president of the university's theatrical club, the Footlights. Her acting talent was so
impressive that agent Richard Armitage signed her to a contract
while she was still two years away from graduation. Thompson
graduated from Cambridge in 1980.
Soon after she came to fame with a leading
role in the West
End
revival of the musical Me and My Girl, opposite Robert Lindsay, followed by the
BBC serial drama, Fortunes of
War.
Career
Thompson's earliest television appearances included the comedy
sketch show
Alfresco,
broadcast in 1983 and 1984 (as well as its three-part pilot
There's Nothing to Worry About, shown in 1982), which also
featured
Ben Elton,
Stephen Fry and
Hugh
Laurie. Also in 1984 she guested alongside Fry and Laurie in
the episode "Bambi" of the sitcom
The Young Ones, playing Miss
Money-Sterling. Her breakthrough began in 1987 with her role as
red-haired rock guitarist Suzi Kettles in the cult TV series
Tutti Frutti
for which she won a
BAFTA for Best Actress. In
1988, she starred in and wrote the eponymous
Thompson
comedy sketch series for BBC1; the series was not successful with
audiences or critics. Described in
Time
Out magazine as "very clever-little-me-ish", it has never
been repeated in Britain despite her Oscar successes, and Thompson
has not returned to the sketch comedy field.
Thompson's first major film role was in
Richard Curtis's 1989 romantic comedy,
The Tall Guy, co-starring
Jeff Goldblum. Her career took a more
serious turn with a series of critically acclaimed performances and
films, beginning with
1992's
Howards End (for which
she received an
Oscar for
best actress); the part of
Gareth Peirce, the lawyer for the
Guildford Four, in
In the Name of the
Father;
The
Remains of the Day opposite
Anthony Hopkins; and as the British painter
Dora Carrington in the film
Carrington.
Thompson won her next
Oscar in 1996,
for
best
adapted screenplay for
her adaptation of
Jane Austen's
Sense and Sensibility, a film
directed by
Ang Lee, in which she also
played the Oscar-nominated lead role opposite
Hugh Grant. She has said that she keeps both of
her award statues in her downstairs bathroom, citing embarrassment
at placing them in a more prominent place.
Thompson's recent
television work has
included a starring role in the 2001
HBO drama
Wit, in which she played a dying
cancer patient, and 2003's
Angels in America,
playing multiple roles, including one of the titular
angels. Her
Emmy Award was
as a guest star in a 1997 episode of the show
Ellen; in this episode she played a
fictionalised parody of herself: a closeted lesbian more concerned
with the media finding out she is actually American. She also
appeared in an episode of
Cheers in
1992 titled "One Hugs, the Other Doesn't".
Most recently, Thompson appeared in supporting roles such as
Sybill Trelawney in
Harry Potter and
the Prisoner of Azkaban and
Harry Potter
and the Order of the Phoenix. She has also appeared in the
comedy
Love Actually. The
film
Nanny McPhee, adapted by
Emma Thompson from Christianna Brand's Nurse Matilda books, was
first released in October 2005. Thompson worked on the project for
nine years, having written the screenplay and starred alongside her
mother (who has a cameo appearance). In the film
Stranger than Fiction she
plays an author planning on killing her main character, Harold
Crick, who turns out to be a real person. Most recently, Thompson
made a short uncredited cameo as a doctor introducing the cure for
cancer in the form of measles in the latest film adaptation of
I Am Legend, and starred
in
Last Chance Harvey
opposite
Dustin Hoffman,
Eileen Atkins and
Kathy
Baker. In 2009, she appeared in
An
Education and
The Boat
That Rocked, the new
Richard
Curtis film, which also starred
Gemma
Arterton,
Philip Seymour
Hoffman,
January Jones,
Kenneth Branagh,
Bill
Nighy,
Nick Frost,
Jack Davenport and
Rhys
Ifans.
Due to scheduling conflicts, Thompson will not reprise her role as
Sybill Trelawney in
Harry Potter and
the Deathly Hallows. In 2009, she appeared on the panel of
QI in the Film episode, which aired on
March 6th.
Environmental work
.jpg/300px-Emma_Thompson_(2008).jpg)
Thompson in 2008
Thompson
is a Greenpeace activist, and, on 13
January 2009, after flying in from attending the Golden Globe ceremony in the US, it was
announced that Thompson, in partnership with three other Greenpeace
activists, had bought land near the village of Sipson
, a village
whose homes are under threat from the proposed third runway for
Heathrow
Airport
. It is hoped that the area of ground, half
the size of a football pitch, will prevent the government from
carrying through its plan to expand Heathrow. The field, bought for
an undisclosed sum from a local land owner, will be split into
small squares and sold across the globe. When interviewed, Thompson
said: "I don't understand how any government remotely serious about
committing to reversing climate change can even consider these
ridiculous plans. It's laughably hypocritical. That's why we've
bought a plot on the runway. We'll stop this from happening even if
we have to move in and plant vegetables."
Personal life
While she
was at Cambridge University, Thompson had a romantic relationship
with fellow student and actor Hugh
Laurie, who was also a member of the Cambridge Footlights, and
was conveniently attending Selwyn College
right across the street from Newnham.
Thompson married
Kenneth Branagh,
with whom she appeared in
Fortunes of War, on 20
August 1989. They appeared together several times, in hit films
such as
Dead Again,
Henry V and
Much Ado About Nothing,
but divorced in October 1995.
In 2003,
Thompson married actor Greg Wise in
Dunoon
, Scotland (where she has a second home). The
couple have a daughter, Gaia Romilly, born in 1999. In 2003,
Thompson and Wise informally adopted a 16-year-old Rwandan refugee
named Tindyebwa Agaba.
They are currently fighting his deportation
back to Rwanda
where it is
thought all his family were killed in the genocide.
Thompson is an outspoken anti-religious atheist: "I'm an atheist; I
suppose you can call me a sort of
libertarian anarchist. I regard
religion with fear and suspicion. It's not enough to say that I
don't believe in God. I actually regard the system as distressing:
I am offended by some of the things said in the Bible and the
Qur'an, and I refute them."
Filmography
Film
Television
The following is a partial list of Thompson's theatre
credits:
Further reading
References
- http://www.cam.ac.uk/map/v4/img/main-06-07.png
-
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=16236943&method=full&siteid=66633&headline=it-s-nanny-mcme-name_page.html
- Acting on outspoken beliefs, October 15, 2008, The Australian.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,24497883-15803,00.html
External links
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