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We’re well into December, so the time is right to revisit Love Actually, the 2003 Richard Curtis rom-com that’s become a festive-season favourite. It’s also a film that demonstrates Emma Thompson’s capacity to break your heart on screen.
In the beloved ensemble comedy she plays a wife and mother who discovers at Christmas that her husband (Alan Rickman) is having an affair. Her reaction in the scene that follows has become a touchstone for depicting the shattering pain of romantic betrayal and the struggle to put on a brave face. In his posthumously published diaries, Rickman describes her as a “Rolls-Royce”.
More than two decades on, that scene still holds its considerable power. Just like the powerhouse that is Dame Emma. In the years since, the constantly creative actress, writer and producer has been doing some of the most engaging and exciting work of her career.
Playing private eye Zoe Boehm in the recently concluded Down Cemetery Road (Apple TV), Thompson radiates sass and swagger. She has spiky silver-grey hair, strides around in a sleek leather coat and favours the kind of boots that would be useful in combat. She judges people quickly, if not always accurately, and has absolutely no time for fools. That sizeable group includes anyone she reckons is ducking her questions, behaving badly or simply annoying her.
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Zoe’s attitude and approach to the world will come as no surprise to anyone who’s read the Mick Herron books in which she features, a protagonist he created before Jackson Lamb and his band of MI5 outcasts in Slow Horses. It will also come as no surprise to anyone who’s watched Thompson’s career, heard her talk, or read anything she’s written. In the best possible way, Dame Emma is no shrinking violet and, at the age of 66, she’s busy making middle-age look marvellous.
Down Cemetery Road, produced by the team that successfully adapted Slow Horses, is a snappy, suspenseful thriller laced with humour. Thompson has said she’s long admired Herron’s capacity to craft novels that are “dark and realistically cynical about the world but also very funny”. And there’s a lot in Thompson’s history that suggests that a Herron heroine is an ideal fit for her at this stage of her life and career.
Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson in Down Cemetery Road.Credit: Apple TV
Like Slow Horses, Down Cemetery Road features unlikely alliances, shock revelations, scary assassins and unsavoury institutional conduct, though at its heart are two very different women. They meet when Zoe encounters the initially hesitant Sarah (Ruth Wilson), a potential client at the debt-ridden detective agency she runs with her husband, Joe (Adam Godley). She immediately and incorrectly dismisses Sarah as “doe-eyed and helpless”. In fact, among other things, Sarah is an art conservator with a keen eye for detail, and they end up uneasily joining forces to find a missing girl. This odd couple’s quest brings to light the resourcefulness and resilience of both women, Sarah’s often-impulsive initiative totally at odds with Zoe’s initial assessment of her deferential demeanour.
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Zoe marches around with confidence, capable and comfortable in her own skin until that assurance is shaken by the death of a loved one. Then she’s hell-bent on attaining justice and retribution. Those earlier qualities, at least, seem like qualities the character might share with the woman playing her.
The daughter of TV producer Eric Thompson and actress Phyllida Law, Thompson grew up with an insider’s understanding of showbusiness and has worn her fame with style. Over her four-decade career, there are too many milestones to list here. But it’s worth noting that she got her start with comedy, writing and performing at university in the 1980s with the Cambridge Footlights alongside Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry.
Since then, she’s built an acclaimed, award-winning and impressively varied career on screen and behind the scenes, becoming the only person in history to win Academy Awards for acting and writing. The former came with her performance in Howards End (1992) and the latter for her adaptation of Sense and Sensibility (1995), in which she also stars as Elinor Dashwood and has a crying scene that’s a joy to behold.
She’s done everything from Shakespeare (King Lear), to Schwarzenegger comedies (Junior), franchises (Harry Potter, Men in Black) to indies (Carrington), as well as a heap of impressive stuff in between (In the Name of the Father, Angels in America, Wit, Saving Mr Banks).
But it’s 2022’s Good Luck to You, Leo Grande that she describes as her personal favourite, and “one of the most seminal experiences of my professional life”. In it, she plays a middle-class, middle-aged widow who resolves to try to experience the sexual pleasure and variety that’s been missing from her life by hiring a male sex worker (Daryl McCormack). Directed with sensitivity and intelligence by Australian Sophie Hyde, it’s an emotionally and physically revealing film that manages to be both bold and tender. And Thompson’s performance is a stunning blend of audacity and discipline, exhibiting a total lack of vanity.
Emma Thompson plays Nancy, a recently widowed woman looking for the pleasure she has long craved, with sex worker Leo, played by Daryl McCormack.Credit: AP
Also of particular significance to her is Nanny McPhee, a film she co-wrote and stars in and that she’s been working for eight years to adapt into a musical. A plot description might suggest a Mary Poppins vibe as it’s about a governess who comes into a widower’s troubled family. But Thompson says that her unfortunate-looking character is “living proof that you should never judge a book by its cover”. Intriguingly, she also notes that the film is structurally similar to a western in that “an unorthodox authoritarian figure comes into a chaotic situation, uses unorthodox methods to restore harmony ... and then has to leave”.
In addition to the film and TV roles, Thompson’s comedy training has come in handy with her talk-show appearances. Seeing her as a guest on Graham Norton’s red couch is a guaranteed delight. Wherever she appears, she manages to make the typically cliché-ridden treadmill of promoting a production a whole lot more interesting. She arrives armed and ready with funny, often self-deprecating anecdotes, delivered in animated style and with precision timing.
