Emma Thompson biography

Synopsis

Early Life

Actress, writer. Born on April 15, 1959, in London, England, into a theatrical family. Thompson is the daughter of director Eric Thompson and actress Phyllida Law, and her younger sister, Sophie, also became an actress.

At first, Thompson did not want to follow in her parents' footsteps. Instead, she went to Cambridge University to study English literature. But Thompson eventually caught the acting bug when she joined the university's famed Cambridge Footlights theatre club. Other members of the group included Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie (who Thompson briefly dated). After completing her degree, Thompson tried her hand at stand-up comedy. She later described her act to a Newsweek reporter as "all rude . . . basically, herpes and things like that, which doesn't necessarily go down well with everyone."

Early Film Career

While her career as a stand-up comic may have flopped, Thompson enjoyed some success on the stage and on British television. She appeared with Robbie Coltrane, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, and others on the sketch comedy show Alfresco in 1983. On the London stage, Thompson enjoyed a long run in a revival of the 1930s musical Me and My Girl.

In 1987, Thompson starred in two television productions. She worked with Coltrane again on Tutti Frutti, which followed the misadventures of a fictional rock group known as the Majestics. For the World War II drama Fortunes of War, Thompson starred opposite Kenneth Branagh. The two played a married British couple living in Bucharest, Romania, when war breaks out. Thompson and Branagh eventually developed a relationship off-screen, culminating in their 1989 wedding.

Thompson and Branagh worked together on several more projects. In 1989, she had a supporting role in Branagh's film adaptation of William Shakespeare's Henry V. Thompson played a woman who has lost her memory in the well-received mystery Dead Again (1991), with Branagh on board as the private eye trying to help her. In Peter's Friends, she and Branagh appeared as college friends in the ensemble comedy, which included Hugh Laurie and American comedienne Rita Rudner. Thompson's last film with Branagh had the pair taking on the famous Shakespearean roles of Beatrice and Benedick in the comedy Much Ado about Nothing (1993), which Branagh directed and adapted for the screen.

Serious Roles

In 1992, Thompson truly started to emerge from her husband's shadow with her powerful performance in Howards End. She starred opposite Anthony Hopkins in this turn-of-the-century drama produced by Ismail Merchant and directed by James Ivory. Based on the novel by E. M. Forster, the film followed the interrelationships between two families—the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes. Thompson played Margaret, the oldest of the philanthropic Schlegel siblings while Hopkins played Henry, the patriarch of the Wilcox family. Henry ignores his late wife's last request to give her estate, Howards End, to Margaret, but he eventually falls for Margaret. As a critic in the Washington Post wrote, "the film's driving force is Thompson, who balances delicately along its ironic edge like a tightrope walker with an umbrella." She won several honors for her work on this film, including an Academy Award for Best Actress.

The following year Thompson shone in a more contemporary drama, In the Name of the Father. She played a lawyer defending Gerry and Guiseppe Conlon (Daniel Day-Lewis and Pete Postlethwaite), a father and son wrongly convicted of an IRA bombing. Based on a true story, the film earned