Emma Thompson: Top of the Class

Thank heavens for Emma Thompson! The House of Lords may fall. Our MPs may act like lemmings, and poor old Susan Boyle is surely the British cultural icon we deserve… but as this week’s cinema release Last Chance Harvey proves, Emma Thompson prevails, a comforting reminder of Empire and order, a Britain where quality, common sense and self-deprecating wit trump tabloid fame and sleaze.

She would demur, I’m sure, but Thompson is your mum’s idea of what a British film star should be. Like it or not (of course she’s a socialist) she represents a degree of class, the “Great Tradition” she will have learned about at Cambridge University. There she studied Literature and joined the famous comedy troupe, Footlights. Her classmates included Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Tony Slattery… All of whom would appear with Emma in Peter’s Friends (1992), directed by her then husband Kenneth Branagh and written by two more Cambridge chums, Martin Bergman and Rita Rudner. (Emma’s mother, the actress Phyllida Law, also had a role, as the housekeeper.)

Inevitably the movie smacked of privilege and self-indulgence, but these old school ties certainly didn’t hinder Thompson’s career, and she’s never given the impression that lack of self-confidence is a problem for her. At the same time she’s also worked hard for her success, grabbing her opportunities and putting herself on the line, whether that meant doing her own (not so great) freeform TV sketch show (Emma Thompson Up For Grabs, 1985) or touring with Branagh’s Renaissance theatre company.

The partnership with Branagh was mutually beneficial: they were a cool couple; attractive, enterprising and talented, and they appeared together frequently, onstage (Look Back In Anger), on TV (in the mini-series Fortunes Of War) and in films (Henry V; Dead Again; Much Ado About Nothing).

At the time he was being touted as “the new Olivier”, but she actually fared better in the films he wasn’t involved in. Case in point: the romantic comedy The Tall Guy (1989) was Richard Curtis’s first produced screenplay. Thompson was Kate Lemon (a very Thompson-ish name, that, a bit quirky but tart). Kate was a nurse who falls in love with Jeff Goldblum’s frustrated straight man, the second banana to Rowan Atkinson’s stage-hogging comic.

This was our first glimpse of that quintessentially English mixture of reserve and candour that Thompson pulls off so expertly. People remember the film for its rollicking sex scene, of course, broken furniture, milk cartons et al, but Thompson plays her emotional scenes with real finesse, hinting at the sadness and maturity she would soon show to greater effect in the acclaimed literary adaptations of Howard’s End (1992) and The Remains Of The Day (1994).

She won the Oscar for the former and was nominated for the latter – picking up a matching nomination for her supporting role as lawyer Gareth Peirce in In The Name Of The Father the same year. Two years later she was nominated twice more, for best actress and –winning – for best adapted screenplay, for Sense And Sensibility (a unique combination, incidentally).

That’s an amazing run of high quality drama, enough to earn Thompson comparisons with the most esteemed actresses of any era, Meryl Streep and Katharine Hepburn. To her credit she mixed it up with a screwball romantic comedy opposite a pregnant Arnold Schwarzenegger (Junior), a fair indication that she wasn’t taking success – or herself - too seriously. (And if that’s not proof enough, look up her sardonic Oscar acceptance speeches on YouTube – or her pole-dancing antics on Ellen.)

If she hasn’t earned another Oscar nomination since 1996, that’s partly because she put her family first – having a daughter with actor Greg Wise in 1999 – and partly because her extraordinary performance in Mike Nichols’ Wit (2001) was ineligible – she was nominated for the Emmy instead, and again for her three roles in Angels In America (2003). She played a writer very plausibly in Stranger than Fiction (2006) and wrote herself a plum comic role as the crooked-faced Nanny McPhee (2005; a sequel in the works).

She was easily the best thing in Richard Curtis’s Love Actually (2003), hitting melancholy emotional truths that withstood the farcical contrivances of the movie around her. And she’s equally impressive in Last Chance Harvey. The screenplay, by director Joel Hopkins, was written specifically for her, and inspired by the character of Kate Lemon. Hopkins wondered what the nurse from The Tall Guy might be like in middle age – capable, controlled, but fraying at the edges, is the answer he came up with. Kate doesn’t like to think she needs a man to complete her, but she can’t deny a certain creeping loneliness, the suspicion that time is slipping through her fingers.

Her rapport with Dustin Hoffman is enough to let us overlook the alarming age gap (she’s 50; he’s 71)… but then that’s not surprising, Thompson has enjoyed terrific chemistry with leading men as different as Alan Rickman, Arnold Schwarzenegger and John Travolta.

She seems unencumbered by vanity – she’s probably the last actress you can imagine going under the knife – and she’s no snob. Much as I enjoyed her Lady Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited last year, it was twice as sweet to see her pop up so unexpectedly at the beginning of Will Smith’s blockbuster I Am Legend – promising a cure for cancer, no less.

Most actresses struggle to keep busy in movies in their 50s but I suspect Thompson will be the exception. She’s already something of a British institution, like Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and the Queen, the kind that the Americans cherish as much as we do. If no one else finds useful roles for her to play she will doubtless write her own. At the half century mark she’s enjoyed greater success than any of her college peers, and she’s still the girl most likely to succeed.

Come what may to the Lords, but I’ll wager we’ll see Dame Emma Thompson before she’s through. If, that is, she can bring herself to accept it.

Tom Charity

tom.charity@lovefilm.com