As good as it gets

10 April 2012

A quarter of a century has passed since I first met Emma Thompson. She was in her last year at Cambridge University and I had just arrived as a student there, and she seemed impossibly sophisticated, roaring around on a motorbike and starring with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry in Footlights.

Since then, she has won two Oscars - for best actress in Howards End and for her screenplay of Sense and Sensibility, in which she starred with Kate Winslet.

But she has remained almost implausibly down-to-earth. Indeed, Emma is so grounded that she is more likely to tell you about her pesky varicose veins than her glittering successes - latterly in Stranger Than Fiction, in which she stars alongside Dustin Hoffman and Will Ferrell.

She is quirkier and more unpredictable than she has sometimes been portrayed - the cliched labels veer between English thespian and the cleverest girl in Hollywood. An active campaigner for several charities, including ActionAid, she is undoubtedly serious-minded at times, but she also has a wonderfully frivolous streak, and a passion for Alexander McQueen tailoring, Prada little black dresses and the absolute highest of heels, preferably with sequined trimmings.

In Stranger Than Fiction, she plays a writer who is literally close to the edge, which reminds people that she has gone through some bad depressions herself.

"Yes, playing the depressive writer is no stretch for me. And the scene when I'm standing on top of a tall building, contemplating suicide, we actually shot that on the edge of a building. They put me into a little harness, but it doesn't matter - you're standing on the edge of a building and you can't feel anything holding you. So you think you're going to fall. Except, in a way, the character I played was in a worse place - it's as if she's in a limbo, like purgatory. She's in between living and dying, in a Dante-esque circle of hell - just smoking and not eating.

"We've all done that - I've certainly been there, in various depressions, when you never wash, and wear the same things all the time. It's the sort of depression that doesn't necessarily make you want to kill yourself - you just don't want to be, you want to switch it all off and stop. That's not the same as saying, 'I'm going to kill myself.' But it's a feeling I know well."

Did she have trepidation about playing that part in the film?

"I did a bit. The work I've done since Gaia was born has been quite intense at times, and it fed into a sort of postnatal depression that sent me right off the edge. You've got to choose your parts carefully, which is why Nanny McPhee was such a joy to do, and why I want to do another one. It is about all the problems and all the difficulties of life, but finds a positive way of resolving them. What I love about the ending is that it's about her choosing to live. And choosing to live means that she has to compromise. What she has to do is let go of her almost sadistic perfectionism.

"I've been holding onto this completely masochistic need to be good, so that if I feel I've done something wrong, I have to expiate my sins and I have to be extra good. But that makes some part of my subconscious furious - which is when you have the row with someone you shouldn't have, or you get depressed. Because your mind just doesn't want to deal with that stuff, or can't contain it.

"To have motherhood happening on the cusp of 40 - that was a big deal," she says. "I was 39 when Gaia was conceived, and 40 when she was born. I didn't notice my fortieth birthday because a vast explosion had gone off in my body. It was a bit like my mum not noticing the menopause because she was widowed at 48. By the time she'd lifted her head up from the grief, she'd gone through it. And it was hellish after Gaia was born, trying to have another baby through IVF. That was terrible - I blamed myself, and no one could persuade me that it wasn't my fault - and that led to another depression. I went through four cycles of IVF, the first one with Gaia, and another three after that. It was bad. I counted other people's children for years. But I'm fine about it now."

She seems to have come to terms with being in her forties, and with the process of ageing. Mind you, she's very disciplined about staying in shape.

"It's a lot of work, but I try to do a bit of exercise every day, because I like wearing nice clothes, and I like to be a good hourglass shape. Not too thin, which doesn't look nice at all, and I don't approve of it. It's so unbelievably tedious that women still think they have to be thin, but I haven't got the energy to get as angry about it as I used to. I just think, this is stupid, and if you can't see that, well, what's to be done?

"When I was doing the photoshoot for this feature, I just wanted to make sure there were lots of proper curves! As for getting saggy ... I like my arms, and I wanted to carry on liking them, and being able to wear sleeveless tops, so I haven't got my bingo wings yet, and that's because I do strength work with my arms at least two or three times a week - 60 press-ups. The gym is really depressing, so I just trot in an elderly fashion around the cricket pitch. I go for a little jog, and 20 minutes later, I feel a lot better.

Apart from the jogging, her prescription for depression is to have two weeks when she just does nice things.

"It doesn't have to be a holiday. I really enjoyed going to get a draining board this morning! Or going out to the theatre, or letting my daughter stay with a friend on a sleep-over and not feeling guilty about it. What I've found is that whereas in the past I might disappear into a kind of fantasy world, in order to escape from myself, now I find that if I'm careful, and do enough enjoyable things, I can balance myself better."

Was it love at first sight for her when she met Greg Wise on the set of Sense and Sensibility in 1995?

"No, though I thought he was lovely. He turned up to the audition and was as beautiful as the day is long. He'd picked a little bouquet of wild flowers and hidden it, and when it came to the bit in the script when he says, 'This is my bunch of wild flowers, not hothouse flowers', he really had this little bunch. And I blushed, because it was such a lovely surprise.

"I don't know if I've ever told you this before, but just before we started filming, Greg had been to see a friend of his who was a bit of a witch, and she had said, 'You are going to meet your future wife on this film'. Of course, I was still married to Ken, so it didn't occur to Greg that it was me, he thought it was Kate [Winslet]. And he took Kate to Glastonbury - not the festival, the town, because we were filming nearby - and if I am a Victorian at heart, she's a Modern, and Greg is a hippie. So she was just so bored by Glastonbury! If he'd wanted to get into her knickers, he should have taken her to Barcelona. But Glastonbury just wasn't going to do it - all those crystal shops!"

So when did she actually get together with Greg?

"I had to go to Cannes to open Carrington and, because there was so little time during the shoot of Sense and Sensibility, they said they would send me on a private plane. So I said OK, then Greg came to me and said, 'I've got friends in Cannes, can I have a lift with you?' And I said yes, sure. And that's what did for us, really - a private plane to Cannes was very, very romantic.'

Does she ever see Ken now? "No, though not for any reason. It's just our paths never cross. It's very odd because we were married for seven years, and had met three years before that, so we were together for 10 years."

Her life seems pretty balanced now, between looking after Gaia and working. She seems to have sorted things out.

"There are no ideals, let's face it. Sometimes I think, I wish I could just stay at home. I had a wonderful summer - I'd get up in the morning, write for a couple of hours until about 10, then have the rest of the day with Gaia. It was heavenly, doing the simple things like cooking meals for my family and going for a walk. Though I do tend to muck up my life with do-gooding. What is it that forces us into so much activity? I'm sure it's all ego-related. Who was it that said the journey through life is just one blow to the ego after another?

"You can't go on hoping that you'll get to this point where everyone likes you, where everything is perfect, where everyone admires you. I was at the Oscars once, and the documentary that won was about this woman who had been in a Nazi concentration camp. She was a woman of absolute integrity and, at the end of her speech, she said: 'Whenever you're having a dull evening at home with your family, just remember, there is nothing more wonderful than that.'

"I always remember that, whenever I'm feeling a bit Sunday-ish - that nothing could be nicer, nothing more precious. That's the wonderful thing that John Diamond wrote before he died - look, this is it, this is the best bit right now. This is as good as it gets."

Interview extracted from the January issue of EASY LIVING, on sale Thursday. Stranger than Fiction is on release this week.

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