Emma Thompson

• 1. Introduction

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  Emma Thompson holds a distinction that no one else in Hollywood history has matched: she has won Academy Awards for both acting and writing. In 1993, she sat in the same Oscar ceremony with two nominations in two different acting categories for two entirely different films. She wrote the screenplay for Sense and Sensibility over five years and still found time to act in it, then walked away with the award. None of this arrived easily. She grew up in a family of actors, studied at Cambridge, learned clowning in France, buried her father at twenty-two, and rebuilt herself on stage in the West End before film ever called. What shaped someone capable of that range? And why does the industry keep calling her back, decade after decade, for roles that no one else can make work?

• 2. Roots and Cambridge

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  Eric Thompson, her father, was best known not for the stage but for writing The Magic Roundabout, the beloved children's television series. Her mother, Phyllida Law, was a Scottish actress, and the family settled in the West Hampstead district of London. Thompson spent stretches of her childhood in Scotland, often visiting Ardentinny, where her grandparents and uncle lived. She credits her father with giving her a love of language, and after A levels in English, French, and Latin, she arrived at Newnham College, Cambridge on a scholarship in 1977.

  At Cambridge she encountered the Footlights troupe and was invited in by its president, Martin Bergman. Stephen Fry remembered the group giving her the nickname "Emma Talented" because there was no doubt, as Fry put it, that she was going the distance. Hugh Laurie was also in the troupe, and Thompson had a romantic relationship with him. In 1980 she served as Vice President of Footlights and co-directed the troupe's first all-female revue, Woman's Hour. The following year her team won the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for the sketch show The Cellar Tapes.

  She graduated with upper second-class honours and then studied clowning under Philippe Gaulier at Ecole Philippe Gaulier in the early 1980s. Her father died in 1982 at age 52. She later said the loss tore the family to pieces but also gave her a feeling of inheriting space and power that she might never have found while he was alive.

• 3. Stage and Early Television

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  Her first professional role came in 1982, touring in a stage version of Not the Nine O'Clock News. Television followed quickly, with the regional ITV comedy There's Nothing to Worry About! alongside Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Ben Elton, and Robbie Coltrane. That show returned as the networked sketch series Alfresco, which ran for two series from 1983 to 1984.

  The West End provided her real breakthrough. In 1985 she was cast in the revival of the musical Me and My Girl, co-starring Robert Lindsay, and played the role of Sally Smith for fifteen months. The production earned rave reviews, and she later recalled with characteristic directness that performing the Lambeth Walk night after night left her exhausted enough to throw up at the thought of it.

  Two television miniseries in 1987 changed everything. Fortunes of War was a World War II drama co-starring Kenneth Branagh, and Tutti Frutti was a dark comedy about a Scottish rock band with Robbie Coltrane. For both performances Thompson won the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress. That same year she met Branagh while filming Fortunes of War, and a romantic relationship developed between them. Her first cinema appearance followed in 1989 in The Tall Guy, written by Richard Curtis, where the critic Caryn James in The New York Times called her an exceptionally versatile comic actress. That same year she appeared as Princess Katherine in Branagh's film of Henry V.

• 4. Howards End and the Oscar Years

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  James Monaco, the American writer and critic, described Thompson and Branagh as having led the British cinematic onslaught in the 1990s. Thompson wrote to director James Ivory to pursue the lead role in Howards End (1992), the Merchant Ivory adaptation of E. M. Forster's novel about social class in Edwardian Britain. Ivory agreed to an audition and gave her the part. Roger Ebert wrote that she was superb in the central role: quiet, ironic, observant, with steel inside. The film received nine Academy Award nominations and Thompson took home the Best Actress Oscar, the BAFTA, and the Golden Globe.

  At the 66th Academy Awards in 1994, she became the eighth performer in history to receive two Oscar nominations in the same year, for Best Actress in The Remains of the Day and Best Supporting Actress for her role as lawyer Gareth Peirce in In the Name of the Father. The latter film, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as one of the Guildford Four, earned sixty-five million dollars and a Best Picture nomination. The Remains of the Day, reuniting her with Anthony Hopkins and Merchant Ivory, received eight Oscar nominations including Best Picture. Thompson has called that film a masterpiece of withheld emotion and one of the greatest experiences of her career.

  Much Ado About Nothing (1993) arrived between those two pictures, with Thompson and Branagh playing Beatrice and Benedick alongside Denzel Washington, Keanu Reeves, and Michael Keaton. Critics praised the natural ease of her performance. Then in September 1995 she and Branagh announced their separation. It later emerged he had been having an affair with Helena Bonham Carter. Thompson said that while making Sense and Sensibility that same year, her co-star Greg Wise picked up the pieces and put them together again.

• 5. Writing Sense and Sensibility

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  Thompson spent five years developing the screenplay for Sense and Sensibility, a project that grew from the period sketches she had written for her BBC sketch comedy series. She took the role of Elinor Dashwood despite being, at thirty-five, sixteen years older than the literary character. Ang Lee directed; Kate Winslet co-starred. Film critic Graham Fuller of Sight and Sound saw Thompson as the film's auteur.

  She won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, making her the only person in history to hold Oscars for both acting and screenwriting. She also received a third Best Actress nomination for the same film, won a second BAFTA Award for Best Actress, and a Golden Globe for Best Screenplay. Shelly Frome remarked that she displayed a great affinity for Jane Austen's style and wit. The film ranks among the highest-grossing of her career.

  The same creative impulse produced Nanny McPhee in 2005, a project she had been developing for nine years. Loosely based on the Nurse Matilda stories she read as a child, she wrote the screenplay, took the lead role alongside Colin Firth and Angela Lansbury, and delivered a film that reached number one at the UK box office and earned $122 million worldwide. Five years later she wrote the sequel, Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang, transplanting the story to Britain during World War II. It was also a UK box office number one and widely regarded as an improvement on the first. Also written by Thompson: Last Christmas (2019), co-written with Greg Wise and Bryony Kimmings; Bridget Jones's Baby (2016); and three authorised Peter Rabbit children's books for the publishers of Beatrix Potter, the first authorised Peter stories since 1930 and the only ones not written by Potter herself.

• 6. Television and Range

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  For the HBO television film Wit (2001), Thompson took the lead as a self-sufficient Harvard University professor diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She called it one of the best scripts to have come out of America. Adapted from Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, the film required Thompson to shave her head for the role; she described it as a daredevil part she had no qualms about accepting. Roger Ebert, reviewing the performance in 2008, called it her finest work. Caryn James of The New York Times wrote that we seem to be peering into a soul as embattled as its body.

  Angels in America (2003) gave her three roles in one production: a nurse, a homeless woman, and the Angel of America. The HBO miniseries, also starring Al Pacino and Meryl Streep, dealt with the AIDS epidemic in Reagan-era America and earned her another Emmy nomination. Her BAFTA-nominated turn in Love Actually the same year, as a middle-class wife who discovers her husband played by Alan Rickman is being unfaithful, produced what one critic described as the best crying on screen ever. Thompson said in 2013 that she gets commended for that role more than any other, joking that she has had so much bloody practice at crying in a bedroom then having to go out and be cheerful.

  The Song of Lunch (2010) reunited her with Rickman for a BBC television film about two unnamed characters meeting at a restaurant fifteen years after their relationship ended. Her performance earned a fourth Emmy nomination. In 2019 she returned to regular television in Years and Years for BBC One and HBO, playing Vivienne Rook MP. On the 29th of October 2025, she began a new regular television role, appearing as Zoe Boehm in Down Cemetery Road for Apple TV+, alongside Ruth Wilson.

• 7. Activism and Personal Life

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  Thompson says she feels Scottish, not only because she is half Scottish but because she has spent half her life there. Her husband Greg Wise, whom she met on the set of Sense and Sensibility in 1995, is the anchor of that second act. They married in Dunoon, Scotland, in 2003. Their daughter was conceived via IVF when Thompson was thirty-nine. The family's permanent residence is in West Hampstead, London, on the same road as her childhood home.

  In 2003, Thompson and Wise informally adopted a Rwandan orphan and former child soldier. They had met him at a Refugee Council event when he was sixteen; Thompson invited him to spend Christmas at their home, and slowly, as she described it, he became a sort of permanent fixture, came on holiday to Scotland, and became part of the family. He became a British citizen in 2009.

  She chairs the Helen Bamber Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, holds a patronage at the Refugee Council, and maintains a therapy room in her own office for traumatised refugees. In 2017 she marched in support of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the Iranian-British charity worker held captive in Iran. Time magazine named her a European Hero in 2009 for her work highlighting the plight of AIDS sufferers in Africa. She has described herself as an atheist who regards religion with fear and suspicion, stating that she finds certain passages in the Bible and the Quran actively distressing. On the 29th of October 2025, the Finnish president Alexander Stubb personally called Thompson to thank her for a letter she had written praising Finnish film workers by name, which was published in Helsingin Sanomat after she filmed Dead of Winter in North Karelia.