A very English Emma

10 April 2012

Sitting in Emma Thompson's cosy kitchen in north London drinking Earl Grey and eating fairy cakes - baked by her four-year-old daughter, Gaia, and her husband, a handsomely dishevelled Greg Wise, who are now tugging on wet-weather gear for a walk on Hampstead Heath - it's difficult to equate this perfectly ordinary domestic scene with a two-time Oscar winner who regularly does star turns on the red carpet. But Thompson has never been tempted into the Hollywood star firmament.

"I would never have survived living in LA," she says. "I would have dieted myself into an early grave or had plastic surgery or Botox to keep up with my peers. But it's great to visit. They adore success and treat you like a star, but then I come home to London and have all the wind taken out of my sails. It's the perfect combination, really."

Last night, though, she was honoured as Best Actress at the Evening Standard Film Awards for her role as the wronged wife in Love Actually. "It was totally unexpected," she said, "but I loved making the film. Richard Curtis is just brilliant at making you laugh; just at the moment when you think things might go a little mushy he throws in a fantastic joke."

The award is the beginning of a career renaissance that puts paid to the Hollywood adage that no actress can get a job after 40. Thompson, now 44, has been nominated for a Bafta for supporting actress for Love Actually, and by the Screen Actors' Guild for her performance starring alongside Al Pacino and Meryl Streep in Angels in America, a two-part television epic that cost $62 million to make and comes to our screens this weekend.

Meanwhile, she is writing a script about the murder of Chilean activist Victor Jara; in March her children's film, Nanny McPhee, for which she has spent six years raising the money, will go into production; and in the autumn we will see her as the eccentric Professor Trelawney in the next Harry Potter film. "I get to have a nervous breakdown and stand on the top of the stairs waving an empty bottle of sherry, which is, of course, a typical scene from my daily life, so it isn't much of a stretch," she quips. "My daughter is not quite into Harry Potter yet, but I am doing it so that she will be very impressed later on."

The only negative in recent months has been the critical mauling received at last year's Venice Film Festival for Imagining Argentina, in which she stars in Christopher Hampton's film about the disappearance of tens of thousands of people under the military dictatorship in the Seventies. The film, which opens here in March, was one of the worst-received movies in the event's history.

Thompson confesses that she was astonished by the bad reception. "The curious thing was that the rest of the audience loved it and gave it a standing ovation. But the press and the critics didn't. I still support the film. It was not an easy story to make and perhaps it is still raw."

Thompson was a late developer, already in her thirties when her Best Actress Oscar for Howards End shunted her on to the A-list in 1992. This was followed by two more nominations, for Remains of the Day and In the Name of the Father, and a second Oscar for her screenplay of Sense and Sensibility, a huge box- office smash where she first met Greg Wise, who played Willoughby, a dashing but ultimately weak suitor.

Born in Paddington to the late stage director Eric Thompson, who created the children's TV classic The Magic Roundabout, and the actress Phyllida Law, she always believed she would go into comedy, treading the boards with Hugh Laurie at Cambridge and spending her early years playing comedy clubs in London and New York. "I came from a family who laughed at funerals," she says. "And I still believe that laughter is an antidote to almost anything."

Her first dramatic role wasn't until she played Harriet Pringle in Fortunes of War in 1987, where she met and fell in love with her first husband, Kenneth Branagh, to whom she was married for several years.

Motherhood also came late. She was 40 when she gave birth to Gaia after IVF treatment and describes motherhood as "a thunderbolt". "For me," she says, "having a child meant that nothing was ever the same again." She and Wise have spoken publicly about their disappointment at failing to conceive a sibling for Gaia, but last July they put it behind them by getting married in a typically low-key ceremony in the Scottish Highlands.

It was motherhood that persuaded her to take a sabbatical in 2001 and it is in part the inspiration of her daughter, whose name means "spirit of the earth", that persuaded her to "come out" as a political activist by becoming an ambassador for ActionAid and use her voice to raise awareness about Aids in Africa. "She opened up my mind and my world suddenly seemed very circumscribed. I wanted her to see Africa, to grow up knowing that there are other ways of life and that they are equally important."

Since then she has travelled to Mozambique and Uganda, and is planning to visit 10 more countries to write a book about Aids and poverty. She is clearly deeply inspired: "The women are on the front line in their communities, fighting this battle with virtually no resources. I have witnessed tremendous heroism."

She admits it was ironic to be offered the role of an angel ministering to a young man dying of Aids by Mike Nichols for Angels in America just months after taking on her role at ActionAid. "I accepted immediately, sight unseen. Then I read the script. It was incendiary. The first page practically burst into flames in my hands," she says.

She plays three roles: a nurse, a homeless tramp and a beautiful, incandescent angel who has become the icon of the film, adorning billboards all over LA and New York when it was shown there last November.

The adaptation of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer prize-winning play is a breathtaking, reckless venture. Set in New York in the mid-Eighties, when Aids first began ravaging the gay community, the film, shown in two three-hour parts, follows eight principal characters as they wrestle with life and death, love and sex, political corruption and madness.

In America, it has became the most talked-about drama in television history (many critics have said it would have swept the Oscars if it had played on the big screen). When I suggest that she has upstaged a stellar cast, she demurs: "I'm not usually star-struck but I do get a thrill every time I see my name next to Al Pacino's. I actually get to snog Meryl Streep. These are the people I grew up with; I've admired them for years."

Thompson believes that Angels is more relevant now than it was back in the Eighties. "These are frightening times," she says, slamming the table and railing over the "criminal negligence" of Western governments in dealing with the Aids crisis in Africa. "We're treating African Aids victims in the same way we did when Aids was confined to the gay community. Only this time it's even more inexcusable. It is a criminal negligence that the governments of the First World aren't doing more. A continent is dying in front of our eyes and we are looking away."

Then, just as she catches herself sounding slightly sanctimonious, she suddenly roars with laughter as she describes making Wise wear a condom just before going to Africa because they should "practise what I was preaching". "We are asking people to change their whole sexual culture and I thought it was important to remember what it was like. And there's no doubt about it," she says, "it's just not as much fun."

Another one of her preoccupations is the damage done to young women by the diet industry. "While in Africa women don't necessarily have full jurisdiction over their bodies. I have noticed that teenage girls there have a total lack of self-consciousness about body image. This is because they are not subjected to a constant barrage of media about how they should look. They have, in a way, a lot more freedom."

She sees no difficulty in juggling all her different roles. "It all feels connected. I don't go to Africa to highlight Aids as some kind of antidote to the red carpet, and neither do I want to give up filmmaking, which some might consider a frivolous waste of time. They both inspire each other."

Growing older has, she says, brought balance and made it easier to equate her seemingly disparate sensibilities. "There was a time when my feminist rage interfered with my capacity even to dress up as a woman. I felt crushingly selfconscious in high heels. Now I think that it's great there are women out there like Joan Collins who really make an effort every time they leave the house."

I tell her I had noticed that she was looking more glamorous year by year. "Well," she says, dashing off for a fitting for the shocking-pink number she would wear to the awards last night. "I will be 45 years old this year and I don't have many more years left to be glamorous. It's my last-ditch effort. Shortly, you can expect to see me in sensible shoes, wearing sewn-together duvets for warmth and comfort."

Angels in America is on Channel 4 on 7 and 8 February at 9pm and repeated on FilmFour on Monday 9 February and Saturday 14 February at 8pm. Imagining Argentina goes on general release next month.

A very English Emma

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