Emma Thompson, the actress who keeps writing herself new parts and new arguments

Emma Thompson

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	April 15, 1959 Hammersmith, London, England
Occupation	Actress and screenwriter
Known for	Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Awards	2 Academy Award · 2 BAFTA · 2 Golden Globe · Emmy · DBE (Dame Commander of the British Empire) · Locarno Pardo d'onore (Honorary Golden Leopard)

At the Locarno Film Festival, Emma Thompson accepted an honorary award for a film she had made because it seemed like a terrible idea. Dead of Winter asked her to play a widowed fisherwoman who runs through blizzards, drags a kidnapped teenager across Minnesotan ice, and fights through one of the genre’s most physically demanding survival narratives. Thompson, who had spent the better part of three decades playing women of almost architectural composure — the kind whose entire interior life shows through their most careful silences — was now falling through frozen ponds. Her assessment of the decision was immediate and characteristically direct: starting an action career at 66 had been a very bad idea.

She grew up inside the industry she would master, in a theatrical household in London. Her father, Eric Thompson, was an actor and the writer responsible for The Magic Roundabout; her mother, Phyllida Law, a working actress whose career spans decades still; her sister Sophie Thompson followed them both onto the stage and screen. The obvious next step was Cambridge, where she read English literature at Newnham College, became vice-president of the Footlights, and learned that comedy is a form with rules as severe as any other. She graduated around 1980 and moved almost immediately into television sketch work.

The shape of what she would become arrived in 1987, when the BBC broadcast Tutti Frutti and Fortunes of War simultaneously. She won the BAFTA Television Award for Best Actress for her work in both — two separate awards in one year, for two productions that were almost opposites: a Glasgow comedy about a fading rock band and a wartime drama set across collapsing Europe. The industry registered the fact but drew the wrong conclusion. It was the dramatic mode that opened the largest doors.

The early 1990s confirmed the arc. Working frequently with her then-husband Kenneth Branagh, she built her technique across a series of literary adaptations — Henry V (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Peter’s Friends (1992). Then James Ivory directed her as Margaret Schlegel in Howards End (1992), and she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. The following year, she received simultaneous Oscar nominations for Best Actress for The Remains of the Day and Best Supporting Actress for In the Name of the Father — two different films in one season, a feat accomplished by fewer than ten actors in the award’s history.

But the third thing she won was the one nobody expected. Thompson wrote the screenplay adaptation of Jane Austen‘s Sense and Sensibility (1995), starred in the film opposite Hugh Grant and Kate Winslet, and won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. This made her the only person in the Academy’s history to win Oscars for both acting and writing. She kept a detailed diary during production, later published. The actor she met on that set, Greg Wise, became her husband in 2003.

The writing Oscar sits in the public record and then quietly disappears from most accounts of what she is. Between Sense and Sensibility (1995) and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022), she wrote Nanny McPhee (2005) and its sequel — both commercially successful — but the dominant work of those two decades was acting in other people’s scripts: Love Actually (2003), the Harry Potter series, Men in Black 3, Saving Mr. Banks (2013). These were often brilliant performances. They also represented an actress being used in ways that kept the industry comfortable. Whether Thompson chose this pattern or accepted it is a question her public persona has always been too brisk to dwell on.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022) recalibrated the picture. Written by Katy Brand and directed by Sophie Hyde, the film cast her as Nancy Stokes, a recently widowed woman who books hotel meetings with a sex worker to discover what pleasure she had never allowed herself. Thompson appeared nude at 63 and submitted to the experience without sentimentality. She won the Best Female Orgasm award at the UK’s feminist film festival and publicly declined to call the choice brave. Bravery, she suggested, had very little to do with it.

The AI stance follows similar logic. When asked in 2025 about artificial intelligence replacing creative workers in Hollywood, she replied: « Just f*** off. I’m so annoyed. » She writes longhand on a legal pad. The connection between the hand and the brain, she has explained, is not decorative.

She and Wise, who also acts, have a daughter, Gaia, born in 1999. They also raised Tindyebwa Agaba Wise, a Rwandan survivor of the genocide who took the family name in 2003. Thompson has long been active with the Helen Bamber Foundation, which supports survivors of trafficking and torture, and has been publicly outspoken enough on Brexit that British newspapers have occasionally asked, with detectable unease, whether she has become comfortable in her own opinions.

The Sheep Detectives is among her 2026 projects. Emma Thompson continues to make decisions that leave interviewers scrambling for the correct adjective. The right one, so far, has always taken a little longer to find than the last one.

Featured Films

Étiquettes: actors, actresses, British cinema, Kenneth Branagh, Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson

Personnalités liées

Orson Welles

Luke Bracey

La transformation de Kelly Rowland de star de la pop en actrice

Carolina Miranda

Charlie Hunnam : du phénomène télévisuel à figure mondiale du grand écran et du streaming

Alicia Vikander