A Beginner’s Guide to… Emma Thompson
Being a national treasure can be a double-edged sword. It carries a sense of predictability, of recycling character types. But for Emma Thompson, blasting into her 60s as a caustic chat show host in Late Night, all that is promised is another decade of subverting expectations.
Thompson, the daughter of actress Phyllida Law and The Magic Roundabout’s Eric Thompson, burst onto the scene as part of a power wave of British thesps straight out of Cambridge’s famous Footlights troupe. Alongside Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, she wove her way through sketch shows and TV dramas before clinching her first cinematic role in Richard Curtis and Mel Smith’s The Tall Guy.
In those early days, Thompson’s personal and professional partnership with Kenneth Branagh produced a run of high-profile projects — from his critically acclaimed Henry V to the melodramatic noir thriller Dead Again (the scissors from which appeared to have been among the inspirations for Jordan Peele’s Us). But it was Thompson’s turn as Margaret Schlegel in Merchant Ivory’s acclaimed 1992 adaptation of Howards End that propelled her to international superstardom.
