Emma Thompson: The Life Story Behind the British Legend

Emma Thompson is the only person in history to win Academy Awards for both acting and writing, and that single fact tells you everything about her talent. When she played Margaret Schlegel in “Howards End” in 1992, she won the Oscar for Best Actress, and when she wrote the screenplay for “Sense and Sensibility” in 1995, she won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, while also being nominated for her acting in the same film. She is a Cambridge graduate, a Footlights comedian, a Shakespearean, a children’s author, and an activist, and she has done it all with a wit, an intelligence, and a warmth that make her one of the most loved figures in British culture. She is the daughter of actors, the sister of an actress, and a performer who has played everything from a prim Edwardian heroine to a magical nanny to a professor in “Harry Potter”. Her story is about a woman who refused to choose between acting and writing, between comedy and drama, and who proved that you can do it all, brilliantly.

The earliest years unfolded in London, England, where Emma Thompson grew up inside a household that left its mark. Her father, Eric Thompson, was an actor and the creator of The Magic Roundabout, and her mother, Phyllida Law, was an actress, and she grew up in a theatrical household in London. Her younger sister, Sophie, also became an actress. She attended Camden School for Girls in London, and she later studied English literature at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she performed with the Footlights comedy group. The setting was ordinary in many ways, and that ordinariness is part of why the later rise still surprises people.

Below is the life story as it happened, not just the highlights, because the quiet years explain the loud ones, and the setbacks explain the comebacks.

A Theatrical Childhood and Cambridge Footlights

Emma Thompson was born in London in 1959, the daughter of two actors, Eric Thompson, who created the beloved children’s series “The Magic Roundabout”, and Phyllida Law, a respected actress. She grew up in a theatrical household, where performance was normal, and where wit and intelligence were valued. She attended Camden School for Girls, and she was a bright, funny girl, more interested in books and in performing than in anything else. She won a place at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied English literature, and she joined the Footlights, the university’s famous comedy group. She became the first woman to be elected to the Footlights, and she performed in revues that showed her gift for comedy. Cambridge gave her her education, her wit, and her love of language, and those qualities would define her career. She has spoken about how her parents encouraged her, while also warning her about the difficulties of acting, and how her sister Sophie, who also became an actress, was her closest friend and rival. Those early years were about learning, about performing, and about discovering that she could do more than one thing well.

Newnham College, Cambridge landed in 1977, and for Emma Thompson it was less a reward in London, England than a fresh responsibility for Emma Thompson. She studied English at Cambridge, joining the Footlights and becoming its first female member. It also proved how much Emma Thompson had grown in craft, confidence, and control of Newnham College, Cambridge since 1977. The steadiness behind Newnham College, Cambridge is the part of Emma Thompson that does not show up in headlines from 1977.

In 1979, Footlights comedy gave Emma Thompson a challenge that looked modest in London, England and proved demanding for Emma Thompson inside. Her work with the comedy group showed her gift for wit and for performance. For Emma Thompson, Footlights comedy was proof that the long hours and the early sacrifices in London, England had not been wasted. Footlights comedy shows how much of the success of Emma Thompson is preparation meeting a moment that finally arrives in London, England.

Theatrical family landed in 1965, and for Emma Thompson it was less a reward in London, England than a fresh responsibility for Emma Thompson. She grew up as the daughter of actors, in a household where performance was part of daily life. It also proved how much Emma Thompson had grown in craft, confidence, and control of Theatrical family since 1965. There is a reliability in how Emma Thompson handles such moments that directors in London, England learn to count on after Theatrical family.

The value of Newnham College, Cambridge for Emma Thompson shows up in what followed in London, England, in the confidence of the choices and the quality of the work after 1977.

Howards End and the First Oscar

In 1992, Emma Thompson starred in “Howards End”, Merchant Ivory’s adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel, playing Margaret Schlegel, a thoughtful, idealistic woman navigating Edwardian England. Her performance was luminous, intelligent, and deeply moving, and it won her the Academy Award for Best Actress, as well as a BAFTA. The film was a critical and commercial success, and it made Thompson a star. She has spoken about how much the role meant to her, because it was about a woman who thinks, who feels, and who tries to live honestly in a world that does not always reward honesty. She followed it with “In the Name of the Father” in 1993, in which she played a lawyer, earning another Oscar nomination, and with “Much Ado About Nothing” in 1993, in which she played Beatrice, opposite her then-husband Kenneth Branagh. The early 1990s were the peak of her first fame, and they established her as one of the finest actors in the world. “Howards End” remains one of her defining performances, and it is a film that is still loved today.

The story of Howards End in 1992 starts with Emma Thompson taking a gamble in London, England that many around Emma Thompson would have avoided. Her Margaret Schlegel won her the Academy Award for Best Actress. The job mattered because Howards End stretched what people in London, England believed Emma Thompson could take on next. That willingness of Emma Thompson to keep learning is visible in Howards End, and it is what keeps the work of Emma Thompson fresh.

In 1993, In the Name of the Father opened a new chapter for Emma Thompson, and Emma Thompson walked into it in London, England without looking back. Her lawyer earned her another Oscar nomination, showing her range in serious drama. The job mattered because In the Name of the Father stretched what people in London, England believed Emma Thompson could take on next. That willingness of Emma Thompson to keep learning is visible in In the Name of the Father, and it is what keeps the work of Emma Thompson fresh.

With Much Ado About Nothing in 1993, Emma Thompson stepped into new territory, and Emma Thompson felt the risk in London, England from the very first day. She played Beatrice, showing her gift for Shakespearean comedy. What people in London, England remembered afterwards was the feeling of Much Ado About Nothing, not the noise around Emma Thompson. It also explains why the phone kept ringing for Emma Thompson after Much Ado About Nothing, because dependable talent is genuinely rare in London, England.

Looking back, Howards End was one of the steps that made later triumphs possible for Emma Thompson, because it proved the base in London, England was strong.

Sense and Sensibility and the Double Oscar

In 1995, Emma Thompson achieved something no one else has ever done, she won an Academy Award for writing, while also being nominated for acting in the same film. She adapted Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” for the screen, writing a screenplay that was faithful, witty, and deeply moving, and she also starred as Elinor Dashwood, the sensible sister. The film was a critical and commercial success, and it won her the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, making her the only person to win Oscars for both acting and writing. She has spoken about how difficult the adaptation was, about the years it took, and about the joy of bringing Austen to life. The achievement is unique in Oscar history, and it is a testament to her extraordinary talent, as both a writer and an actor. “Sense and Sensibility” remains one of the most loved adaptations of Austen, and it is a film that shows Thompson at the height of her powers, as a storyteller, as a writer, and as a performer.

Sense and Sensibility in 1995 found Emma Thompson ready for a bigger stage, even if London, England was not sure yet about Emma Thompson. She wrote the screenplay and starred as Elinor, winning the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. What lasted from Sense and Sensibility was not the headline but the craft of Emma Thompson, and craft is what keeps a career alive in London, England. The quiet discipline of Emma Thompson behind Sense and Sensibility is easy to miss in London, England, and it is the most important part.

When Unique double Oscar arrived in 1996, Emma Thompson treated it as a door in London, England that might not open twice for Emma Thompson. She became the only person to win Academy Awards for both acting and writing. For Emma Thompson, Unique double Oscar was proof that the long hours and the early sacrifices in London, England had not been wasted. Not many manage that kind of shift and keep the audience with them, yet Emma Thompson did it in Unique double Oscar by staying truthful.

1995 paired Emma Thompson with Adapting Austen, a project in London, England that needed patience, nerve, and long hours from Emma Thompson. Her screenplay was praised for its fidelity, wit, and emotional depth. For audiences in London, England, Adapting Austen became the piece they mention first when they explain why they admire Emma Thompson. Not many manage that kind of shift and keep the audience with them, yet Emma Thompson did it in Adapting Austen by staying truthful.

Sense and Sensibility proved that the foundations of Emma Thompson were solid in London, England, and solid foundations are what let a career survive the hard years.

Love Actually, Nanny McPhee, and the Beloved Roles

Thompson’s later career includes some of the most loved roles in British cinema, most notably in “Love Actually” in 2003, in which she played Karen, a wife who discovers her husband’s infidelity, in a scene that has become one of the most heartbreaking in modern film. She also created and starred in “Nanny McPhee” in 2005, a children’s film based on the Nurse Matilda books, in which she played a magical nanny who transforms a family. The film was a hit, and it showed her gift for writing and performing for children. She played Professor Sybill Trelawney in the “Harry Potter” films, a dotty, funny diviner, and she voiced Queen Elinor in Pixar’s “Brave” in 2012. She also starred in “Saving Mr. Banks” in 2013, playing P.L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, opposite Tom Hanks. Each role is different, and each one shows a different side of her talent. Her work in these films made her a favourite with audiences of all ages, and it showed that she could move between drama, comedy, and children’s stories with ease.

In 2003, Emma Thompson said yes to Love Actually, and that yes in London, England carried more weight for Emma Thompson than anyone expected. Her Karen became one of the film’s most heartbreaking and loved performances. Audiences in London, England felt the honesty in Love Actually, and honesty is the hardest thing for Emma Thompson to fake in this business. Love Actually shows how much of the success of Emma Thompson is preparation meeting a moment that finally arrives in London, England.

The story of Nanny McPhee in 2005 starts with Emma Thompson taking a gamble in London, England that many around Emma Thompson would have avoided. She wrote and starred in the children’s hit, showing her gift for family storytelling. For Emma Thompson, Nanny McPhee was proof that the long hours and the early sacrifices in London, England had not been wasted. It also explains why the phone kept ringing for Emma Thompson after Nanny McPhee, because dependable talent is genuinely rare in London, England.

Around 2004, Harry Potter as Trelawney put Emma Thompson in front of a new audience in London, England, and the response mattered to Emma Thompson. She played the dotty Divination professor, delighting a new generation of fans. The project added a new colour to the career of Emma Thompson, and that colour from Harry Potter as Trelawney has never quite faded in London, England. It is a useful reminder that the career of Emma Thompson was built as much in the small jobs as in the famous ones like Harry Potter as Trelawney.

The value of Love Actually for Emma Thompson shows up in what followed in London, England, in the confidence of the choices and the quality of the work after 2003.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande and Fearless Later Work

In 2022, Thompson starred in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande”, a film about a retired teacher who hires a sex worker, and her performance was widely praised as brave, funny, and deeply human. She appeared nude in the film, at sixty-three, and she has spoken about how the role challenged her, and about the importance of showing older women’s bodies and desires on screen. The film was a critical success, and it showed that Thompson was still taking risks, still choosing bold roles, and still surprising audiences. She has also appeared in “Cruella” in 2021 as a fashion villain, and in “Matilda the Musical” in 2022, showing her range in different genres. She has spoken about the importance of ageing honestly, about refusing to hide, and about the need for better roles for older women. Her later work is a story of an actress who refuses to fade, who keeps choosing interesting parts, and who uses her platform to speak about issues she cares about. It is a career that is still growing, and still inspiring.

For Emma Thompson, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande in 2022 was the moment to show London, England that the earlier success of Emma Thompson was no accident. Her brave performance as a retired teacher was widely praised for its honesty. It also proved how much Emma Thompson had grown in craft, confidence, and control of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande since 2022. The lesson of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is simple for Emma Thompson: do the hard job well in London, England, and the next door opens by itself.

In 2021, Cruella became a test of whether Emma Thompson could grow in London, England without losing what made Emma Thompson interesting. She played a fashion villain, showing her gift for stylish, camp comedy. The work of Emma Thompson in Cruella landed because Emma Thompson treated it seriously in 2021, and seriousness is something audiences in London, England can feel. That willingness of Emma Thompson to keep learning is visible in Cruella, and it is what keeps the work of Emma Thompson fresh.

Matilda the Musical came in 2022, and it turned into a proving ground for Emma Thompson, a test Emma Thompson faced in London, England with everything to prove. Her role in the musical showed her continuing range across genres. The job mattered because Matilda the Musical stretched what people in London, England believed Emma Thompson could take on next. The lesson of Matilda the Musical is simple for Emma Thompson: do the hard job well in London, England, and the next door opens by itself.

The step of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande counts for Emma Thompson because it connected the early promise to the later success in London, England, and without it the story would have a gap.

Activism, Writing, and Life Beyond the Screen

Thompson has always been an activist, speaking out on issues including refugees, human trafficking, and the environment. She has worked with the Helen Bamber Foundation, supporting survivors of trafficking, and she has campaigned for refugee rights, using her fame to draw attention to causes she believes in. She has also written children’s books, including the “Peter Rabbit” stories, showing her gift for storytelling beyond the screen. She was made a Dame in 2018, in recognition of her services to drama, becoming Dame Emma Thompson. She is married to the actor Greg Wise, and she has a daughter, Gaia, and an adopted son, Tindy. She has spoken about the importance of family, about balancing work with home life, and about the need to protect the people you love. Her life beyond the screen is as rich as her work on it, and it shows a woman who thinks deeply about the world, and who is willing to stand up for what she believes. It is a life that reflects the values she learned as a girl in London, wit, intelligence, and compassion.

For Emma Thompson, Helen Bamber Foundation in 2005 was the moment to show London, England that the earlier success of Emma Thompson was no accident. She has worked to support survivors of human trafficking, using her platform for good. Audiences in London, England felt the honesty in Helen Bamber Foundation, and honesty is the hardest thing for Emma Thompson to fake in this business. It is a useful reminder that the career of Emma Thompson was built as much in the small jobs as in the famous ones like Helen Bamber Foundation.

With Children’s books in 2013, Emma Thompson stepped into new territory, and Emma Thompson felt the risk in London, England from the very first day. She has written Peter Rabbit stories, showing her gift for storytelling beyond film. Seen from today, Children’s books marks a point where the career of Emma Thompson quietly changed direction in 2013. Careers like that of Emma Thompson are built on steps like Children’s books, taken seriously in London, England and finished properly.

Damehood came in 2018, and it turned into a proving ground for Emma Thompson, a test Emma Thompson faced in London, England with everything to prove. She was made a Dame for her services to drama. The project added a new colour to the career of Emma Thompson, and that colour from Damehood has never quite faded in London, England. Careers like that of Emma Thompson are built on steps like Damehood, taken seriously in London, England and finished properly.

Helen Bamber Foundation proved that the foundations of Emma Thompson were solid in London, England, and solid foundations are what let a career survive the hard years.

What Emma Thompson Proves About Doing It All

Thompson’s legacy is the proof that you need not choose between talents, and that a great artist can be an actor, a writer, a comedian, and an activist, all at once. She began as a Cambridge Footlights comedian, became an Oscar-winning actress, then became an Oscar-winning writer, and she has never stopped. She showed that intelligence and wit are not a barrier to emotion, that comedy and drama can live in the same performance, and that a woman can be powerful, funny, and serious at the same time. Her influence can be seen in the many actors and writers who followed her path, and in the way the industry now values versatility. Young artists look at her career and see a lesson, do not limit yourself, learn to write as well as act, be brave, and use your voice. The girl from London who loved books became Dame Emma Thompson, the only double Oscar winner, and her story is a reminder that talent, honestly used, has no limits, and that the best careers are the ones that refuse to fit in a single box.

In 1996, Emma Thompson joined Double Oscar legacy, a project in London, England whose scale surprised even Emma Thompson and the people making it. Her unique achievement as actor and writer remains unmatched in Oscar history. The work of Emma Thompson in Double Oscar legacy landed because Emma Thompson treated it seriously in 1996, and seriousness is something audiences in London, England can feel. That mix of effort and calm from Emma Thompson is difficult to imitate, and it is why Double Oscar legacy still earns discussion in London, England.

In 2005, Emma Thompson joined Versatility as a model, a project in London, England whose scale surprised even Emma Thompson and the people making it. Her career across acting, writing, and comedy has become a model for multi-talented artists. Versatility as a model confirmed something the closest watchers in London, England already knew, that the talent of Emma Thompson had depth behind it. It is a useful reminder that the career of Emma Thompson was built as much in the small jobs as in the famous ones like Versatility as a model.

2015 gave Emma Thompson Activism legacy, and the part demanded a steadiness in London, England that only experience teaches Emma Thompson. Her work for refugees and trafficking survivors shows how fame can be used for good. Activism legacy showed a performer in London, England willing to be judged on the work itself, which is a brave choice for Emma Thompson. There is a reliability in how Emma Thompson handles such moments that directors in London, England learn to count on after Activism legacy.

Double Oscar legacy proved that the foundations of Emma Thompson were solid in London, England, and solid foundations are what let a career survive the hard years.

My Take:

The first thing that strikes me about Emma Thompson is that she has had two completely different careers, and either one alone would be enough.

She was born on 15 April 1959 in Paddington, London, into a household where performance was not a dream but the family trade. Her father, Eric Thompson, was the actor and writer who narrated The Magic Roundabout; her mother, Phyllida Law, is a Scottish actress who was still working into her eighties; her younger sister Sophie Thompson became an actress too. Growing up inside that world could easily have produced a cautious, well-connected career. Instead, Thompson went to Newnham College, Cambridge, read English, joined the Footlights, and became part of the generation that included Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry — clever, funny, and allergic to taking herself seriously. Her first real break in comedy came with the sketch show Alfresco in 1983, alongside Laurie, Fry, and Ben Elton, and I think that beginning matters more than people realise. She learned to write jokes before she learned to carry a period drama, and the writing never left her. It is the reason her best dramatic performances have a dry, watchful humour running underneath them, and it is the reason she could later sit down and adapt Jane Austen for the screen without a trace of reverence getting in the way.

The acting career that followed is the one most people know, and it is worth slowing down for, because the range is genuinely unusual. In 1989 she played Katharine of Valois opposite her then-husband Kenneth Branagh in Henry V, a film that announced both of them as serious classical actors, and over the next few years she worked with Branagh again on Dead Again in 1991, Peter’s Friends in 1992, and Much Ado About Nothing in 1993 — a run of films that made them the golden couple of British cinema until their marriage ended in 1995. But the performance that changed everything was Howards End in 1992, James Ivory’s adaptation of E. M. Forster, in which she played Margaret Schlegel, a woman of principle and feeling trying to hold a family and a house together against the cold certainties of the Wilcoxes. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for it, and watching the film now, what impresses me is how unshowy the performance is. Margaret is not a character who announces herself. Thompson plays her with a kind of moral attention, a listening quality, and the film trusts the audience to notice. A year later she was nominated again, twice in the same year — Best Actress for The Remains of the Day, playing the housekeeper Miss Kenton opposite Anthony Hopkins, and Best Supporting Actress for In the Name of the Father, playing the lawyer Gareth Peirce. Two Oscar nominations in one year, in two entirely different registers, and both deserved. Miss Kenton is the performance I return to most: a woman who loves a man who cannot say he loves her back, and who finally walks away from him in a scene on a wet road that breaks your heart without a single raised voice.

Then came the second career, the one that makes her unlike almost anyone else in film history. In 1995 she wrote the screenplay for Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen’s novel of two sisters and two kinds of sense, and she also starred in it as Elinor Dashwood, the older sister who keeps her feelings locked away. The film was directed by Ang Lee, and it won her the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay — and a nomination for Best Actress in the same film. She is one of the very few people in history to win Oscars for both acting and writing, and I think that fact is underrated as an achievement. Adapting Austen is a trap: too faithful and the film is stiff, too free and it stops being Austen. Thompson’s script is witty, brisk, and emotionally exact, and her own performance as Elinor is the quiet centre of it. Elinor is the hardest of Austen’s heroines to play, because her drama is interior — she loves Edward Ferrars and believes she has lost him, and she says almost nothing about it. Thompson plays the whole film with a held breath, and when Elinor finally breaks down at the end, the release is enormous. I have watched that scene more times than I can count, and it still works. That is not luck. That is a writer who understood her character from the inside, because she had written her.

What I find most admirable is that she never treated the writing as a side project. A decade later she wrote Nanny McPhee in 2005, a children’s film about a magical nanny who arrives to discipline seven unruly children, and she played the title role herself under heavy prosthetics, turning from a frightening figure into a beautiful one as the children learn their lessons. It was a box office success, and she wrote the sequel too. In 2019 she co-wrote Last Christmas, a romantic comedy inspired by the songs of George Michael, with the playwright Bryony Kimmings, and she played a supporting role in it as well. Writing a film and acting in it at the same time is a particular kind of discipline — you have to serve the story and your own performance, and the temptation to give yourself the best lines is real. Thompson’s scripts never feel like star vehicles. They feel like stories she wanted to exist, and her roles inside them are often the least showy ones. That generosity, that willingness to be the scaffolding rather than the statue, is something I think about a lot when I watch her work.

The popular career that came later is the part the whole world knows, and I do not want to be snobbish about it, because she is wonderful in it. She joined the Harry Potter films in 2004 as Professor Sybill Trelawney, the dreamy, shawl-wrapped Divination teacher, a comic performance played entirely straight, and she returned to the role twice more. She played Karen in Love Actually in 2003, and the scene where she discovers her husband’s infidelity — opening the Joni Mitchell CD, sitting alone in her bedroom, and then pulling herself together to go downstairs and carry on with Christmas — is one of the most honestly acted scenes in any romantic comedy ever made. She does it without a speech, without a confrontation, with a face that does the whole job. She voiced Queen Elinor in Pixar’s Brave in 2012, played P. L. Travers in Saving Mr. Banks in 2013, a prickly, funny, heartbreaking portrait of the woman who wrote Mary Poppins and hated what Disney did to it, and she played Mrs. Potts in the live-action Beauty and the Beast in 2017. In 2022 she did two things that could not be more different: she played the Baroness in Cruella, a fashion villain of pure ice, and she played Nancy Stokes in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, a retired teacher who hires a sex worker to finally experience pleasure, a role that required her to be nude on screen in her sixties and to talk about desire with a frankness that most actors half her age would not attempt. That range — from a children’s nanny to a woman discovering her own body at sixty — is not a career. It is a refusal to be put in a box.

Her personal life, as far as it is public, is steady in a way that interests me because it is so unlike the pattern of her profession. She met the actor Greg Wise on the set of Sense and Sensibility in 1995, and they married in 2003; they have a daughter, Gaia, and a son, Tindyebwa, adopted from Rwanda, and she has spoken about the adoption with a warmth that makes it clear how much it changed her. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2018, and she accepted the honour wearing trainers, which is exactly the kind of detail that tells you who she is. She is also one of the most politically outspoken actors of her generation — campaigning against human trafficking with the Helen Bamber Foundation, speaking about the climate crisis, about refugees, about Gaza — and she has paid for it with criticism and headlines. I do not agree with everything she says, and I do not need to. What I respect is that she says it in her own name, without hiding behind a publicist, and that she has done the work on the ground, not just on social media. She has travelled, she has met the people she campaigns for, and she has put her own money and time behind it.

If I had to name the quality that ties all of this together, I would call it seriousness without solemnity. Emma Thompson takes the work seriously — the acting, the writing, the politics — and she refuses to take herself seriously, which is a much rarer combination. She is funny in interviews in a way that feels unguarded rather than performed, she laughs at herself, she admits mistakes, and she has talked openly about depression and about the pressure of being a woman in an industry that discards actresses at forty. She has said that the secret of a long career is to keep learning and to keep saying yes to the frightening thing, and her own filmography is the evidence. Who else takes on Jane Austen and J. K. Rowling and a sex comedy at sixty-two and makes all three feel like the same person made them? The thread is intelligence, and a refusal to be embarrassed by feeling things deeply. Her best characters — Margaret Schlegel, Elinor Dashwood, Miss Kenton, P. L. Travers, Nancy Stokes — are all women who feel more than they say, and who pay a price for holding it in. Thompson plays that price with extraordinary precision, and I think it is because she understands it from the inside.

There is one more part of the story that deserves a place here, which is the friendships and collaborations that shaped her. Alan Rickman was one of her closest friends, and they worked together again and again — in Sense and Sensibility, where he played the quiet, honourable Colonel Brandon; in Love Actually, where he played her unfaithful husband; in the Harry Potter films, where they were colleagues for a decade. When Rickman died in 2016, Thompson wrote a tribute to him that was widely shared, and what stayed with me was the way she described him: not as a star, but as a person who remembered birthdays, who read scripts carefully, who showed up. He had directed her in The Winter Guest in 1997, a small, cold, beautiful film set in Scotland in which she played a mother grieving her husband, and it is one of her least-seen performances and one of her best. The film was a favour between friends, made on a tiny budget, and it shows what happens when two people who trust each other completely make something without an audience in mind. I think about that film when people talk about her as a Hollywood figure, because it is the opposite of Hollywood: two friends, a Scottish winter, a camera, and a story about grief that does not ask for pity.

Her stage work belongs in the picture too, because it is where the classical training shows. She played Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing on stage and on screen, she has done Shakespeare with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and she returned to the theatre in her fifties and sixties for plays that asked for stamina most film actors no longer have. The stage is where an actor cannot hide behind an edit, and Thompson has never hidden. She has also written for the stage, and she has talked about how the discipline of theatre — the rehearsal, the repetition, the live audience — keeps her honest as a film actor. It is easy to forget the theatre when the film career is this big, but I think it explains the precision. A stage actor learns to make a choice and commit to it, and that is exactly what you see in her film work: no hedging, no half-decisions, every scene played as if it were the only chance to get it right.

So my honest take is this: Emma Thompson is the most complete film artist of her generation in Britain, and possibly anywhere. She is a great actress and a great writer, and the two halves of her talent make each other better. The writing makes her acting smarter, because she understands structure and character from the author’s side. The acting makes her writing better, because she knows what an actor needs on the page — a playable moment, not a speech. Add to that a comic’s timing, a classical actor’s discipline, and a citizen’s willingness to speak up, and you have a career that has no real parallel. She has won two Academy Awards in two different categories, been nominated eight times, made films that children love and films that break adults’ hearts, and she is still, in her sixties, taking the roles other people would call too risky. That is not a career built on luck or looks or timing. It is a career built on being very, very good at two difficult jobs at once, and on never once deciding that one of them was enough.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did Emma Thompson become famous?

She first became known with the Footlights at Cambridge, then became a star with Howards End in 1992.

Did Emma Thompson win two Oscars?

Yes. She won Best Actress for Howards End and Best Adapted Screenplay for Sense and Sensibility, the only person to win for both.

Is Emma Thompson in Harry Potter?

Yes. She plays Professor Sybill Trelawney, the Divination teacher, in the Harry Potter films.

What is Emma Thompson’s most famous film?

Howards End and Sense and Sensibility are her most acclaimed, though Love Actually is also hugely loved.