"Children are the most wonderful audiences. What's struck me most is that that they watch it so silently, until the end when they shriek and shout and clap."
Dame Emma Thompson, DBE (born April 15, 1959 in Paddington, London), is a distinguished British actor and screenwriter best known for a lot of Merchant Ivory
movies, as well as Sense and Sensibility, Dead Again, Stranger Than Fiction, Nanny McPhee, and Saving Mr. Banks.
She introduced Fry to Laurie, thus making her responsible for a veritable English institution, and has a very vitriolic friendship with Fry, who has seen her naked more than once.note She also almost played God (it was decided that Alanis Morissette would be funnier), and was, before his death, a very good friend of Alan Rickman.note
Thompson is also the only person who's won Academy Awards in both screenwriting (Sense and Sensibility) and acting (Howards End).
Compare with Barbra Streisand, Laurence Olivier, George Clooney, and Michael Douglas, who also have unusual Oscar combinations.
Selected Filmography:
- The Young Ones (s2e1 Bambi, cameo)
- Henry V (Kenneth Branagh version) as Princess Catherine of Valois
- Peter's Friends
- Impromptu
- Howards End
- Cheers (one memorable episode in which she plays Frasier Crane's first wife)
- Much Ado About Nothing (Kenneth Branagh version) as Beatrice
- The Remains of the Day as Miss Kenton
- In the Name of the Father
- Junior
- Sense and Sensibility as Elinor Dashwood
- Primary Colors
- Judas Kiss as FBI Agent Sadie Hawkins
- Wit (TV movie based upon the play)
- Treasure Planet as Captain Amelia (voice only).
- Angels in America
- Love Actually as Karen
- Harry Potter as Sybill Trelawney
- Nanny McPhee as Nanny McPhee.
- Stranger Than Fiction
- I Am Legend
- Brideshead Revisited
- Last Chance Harvey as Kate
- An Education
- The Boat That Rocked
- Men in Black (2012 — present) as Agent O:
- Men in Black 3 (2012)
- Men in Black: International (2019)
- Brave as Queen Elinor (voice only).
- Beautiful Creatures
- Saving Mr. Banks as P.L. Travers.
- Beauty and the Beast (2017) as Mrs. Potts
- Years and Years as Viv Rook
- Late Night (2019)
- Last Christmas
- Dolittle
- Cruella as Baroness von Hellman
- Good Luck To You, Leo Grande as Nancy Stokes
- Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical as Ms. Trunchbull
- What's Love Got to Do with It? (2022) as Cath
Tropes:
- Ability over Appearance:
- Treasure Island has the captain as a male. Treasure Planet changes it to a woman to accommodate Thompson.
- She was, at 36, by all rights far too old to play 19-year-old Elinor Dashwood (aged to 25) in Sense and Sensibility — something about which nobody cared one jot after seeing even a fraction of her excellent performance in the film.
- Acting for Two: For the TV adaptation of Angels in America she plays an angel, a homeless woman and Nurse Emily.
- Adam Westing: In Ellen she's caught making out with a woman, and encouraged to come out to the public...then gets cold feet about whether it could lead to the discovery of her even greater shame of being American. She won an Emmy for the performance, which included a perfect Midwestern accent.
- Beauty Inversion: In Nanny McPhee where she appears under old age prosthetics - and Nanny becomes more beautiful as the story goes on. Thompson joked it took more make-up to have her appear beautiful.
- The Cameo: As the Headmistress in An Education.
- Cast the Expert: Very appropriate that she be chosen to play a writer in Stranger Than Fiction.
- Casting Gag:
- She plays Hugh Grant's sister in Love Actually, when they had played lovers in Sense and Sensibility.
- She also plays the author of Mary Poppins in Saving Mr. Banks, having played a Mary Poppins Captain Ersatz in Nanny McPhee.
- Dawson Casting: At 36 she played Elinor Dashwood who is around 19.
- The 1995 film version of Elinor Dashwood was aged up from 19 to 27, to partly alleviate this.
- Deadpan Snarker: It's rare to find a role where she isn't playing one. She's also very much one in real life.
- Dyeing for Your Art: She gained thirty pounds for Love Actually.
- Enforced Method Acting:
- For Stranger Than Fiction she fed lines to Will Ferrell through an earpiece, so that his reaction to words other people can't hear would be more natural.
- She and Kate Winslet lived together while filming Sense and Sensibility in order to develop a natural sisterly chemistry.
- Fake Nationality: Sort of. She plays the Australian PL Travers in Saving Mr. Banks, but Travers had lost her accent and spoke with an English one at the time Thompson played her.
- Fake Scot: Voiced Scottish Queen Elinor in Brave. Thompson's Scottish accent is quite accurate, helped no doubt by having Scottish family members.
- Real-Life Relative: Her sister Sophie Thompson stars in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, though she appears in Part 1 and Emma in Part 2.
- Romance on the Set: She met and fell in love with her current husband, Greg Wise, on the set of Sense and Sensibility. Somewhat ironically, he was playing notorious cad John Willoughby.
- Shameless Fanservice Girl: She has a bit of this. In her home in Scotland, there's a field which has a sauna and a pond which can be used by anyone using the sauna. She doesn't bother to wear clothes when travelling to and from the house to the sauna, and one night there was a knock on the door and a policeman informed her that an intruder had been seen on her property. She was alarmed, until the policeman told her that a woman walking her dog had seen a "naked 52-year-old man" walking through the field that afternoon.Emma Thompson: At which point I thought, Okay, something has happened, or, my boobs have dropped so low that, from a distance, they're really just testicles.
- So My Kids Can Watch: She took the role of Professor Trelawney to impress her daughter.
- Those Two Actors: With Kelly Macdonald in Nanny McPhee, Brave and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
- Throw It In: In Brave she ad-libbed Elinor's line "there'll be fire and sword if it's not set right."
- Vitriolic Best Buds: She and Stephen Fry are the best of friends. Neither is afraid to mock the other senseless if the situation calls for it. Such as this conversation, for example:Emma: You know the word "luvvie"?
Stephen: Yeah?
Emma: What do you all feel about it?
Stephen: [sigh] I mean, I'm not going to get as upset as some actors do - some actors say, "We do a bloody hard job of work, we're serious people, you know, it's a coal face, doing a play! How dare they call us luvvies!" I think that's a bit overdone. On the other hand, it's a bit tedious when the Daily Mail says "luvvie couple XYZ," or something -
Emma: Do you know what the first citation of it is in the OED?
Stephen: No.
Emma: It's you.
[cue My God, What Have I Done? reaction from Stephen; eventually the previously-retired Luvvie Alarm goes off in reaction to the discussion] - Wag the Director: On behalf of a fellow actor. For Brideshead Revisited, the studio wanted to force Hayley Atwell to
lose weight for the role of Lady Julia. Emma hit the roof and threatened to walk if they insisted. This being Emma Thompson, aka one of the most (if not the most) bankable English actresses of her generation, she won the argument. - What Could Have Been:
- She was nearly cast as Catherine Tromell in Basic Instinct but backed out of the deal.
- She also nearly played Emma Peel in The Avengers (1998). The role went to Uma Thurman.
- A kiss was filmed between her and Hugh Grant in Sense and Sensibility, but cut as it would have been inappropriate for the time the novel was written.
- Meryl Streep was interested in Miss Kenton in The Remains of the Day. As it was written with Emma in mind, it remains one of only three parts that Meryl has ever been turned down for.
- She quit the Skydance Animation film Luck in protest of the studio hiring the disgraced John Lasseter.
- Written by Cast Member: An Oscar-winning screenwriter herself, she has contributed to the scripts of many projects she's worked on.
