I read a lovely profile of Emma Thompson yesterday in The New York Times. It was written by Nicole Sperling. You can read it here.
I think my cover story on Emma for Vanity Fair, which was for its February 1996 issue, could have been my best, or at least in the top five of the 25 or so I did over the years. I certainly spent more time with her than any other subject. She was so welcoming and effortlessly charming and keenly intelligent and deeply kind. I remember, after spending one whole day with her in LA at poolside at a friend's house and then taking a long drive, our hours walk together along the beach in Malibu the next day with equal fondness; we ended up, as planned by him and me, at Barry Diller's funicular when he had his estate out there on the bluffs overlooking the ocean and rode it up to have a picnic lunch with him for a bit until he left us alone for another hour or so.
I also visited her in England at her home in Hampstead over the Thanksgiving holidays. She lived out there on the same block as her mother and sister. She was unaware of the American holiday and was overly apologetic when I mentioned its being the next day as I was leaving after spending the whole day with her. Her mother had even joined us for tea after Emma had prepared our lunch and then we lounged around her kitchen for most of the day before taking another long walk about Hampstead Heath.
The next day at the Dorchester, where I was staying back in my Dorchester days, a big bottle of champagne and a vase of roses arrived with a Happy Thanksgiving card from Emma. She also, after the story came out, called and left a rambling and lovely message on my answering machine - we had such things back then - and quoted her favorite lines of the story back to me. No star had ever done such a thing before. I adored her. And admire her with the fervor of my admiration.
Her new film is titled Good Luck to You, Leo Grande and is much like an onstage two-hander. It has been directed by Sophie Hyde. From the The New York Times story: “Thompson plays Nancy, a recently widowed, former religious schoolteacher who has never had an orgasm. At once a devoted wife and a dutiful mother harboring volumes of regret for the life she didn’t live and the dull, needy children she raised, Nancy hires a sex worker — a much younger man played by relative newcomer Daryl McCormack (‘Peaky Blinders') — to bring her the pleasure she’s long craved. The audience gets to follow along as this very relatable woman — she could have been your teacher, your mother, you — who in Thompson’s words ‘has crossed every boundary she’s ever recognized in her life,’ grapples with this monumental act of rebellion.”
Below is an excerpt from my own profile on her back in 1996 in Vanity Fair in which we discuss another orgasm she had onscreen as well as her own sexuality:
“Part of growing up, it has occurred to me - while I was sitting on the loo yesterday - is admitting to what you are.” Emma Thompson expounds one day in California. We are walking on the beach beyond Malibu and popping in to visit friends along the way. “I think that certainly during my 20s my intelligence and my articulateness were very important to me .. I thought I was much stronger than I am. I was frightened of being vulnerable and possibly even frightened of being ‘feminine,’ because that seemed a weakness .. There is a wonderful story by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own where she describes Shakespeare’s sister.” Thompson stops and stares out at the surf. “God! It’s so touching. It’s a melancholy story about a woman with a poet’s heart in a female body, therefore unacceptable”
“Could one describe Shakespeare as having a female heart in a poet’s body?” I ask
“He did seem to understand both sides in an extraordinary way. I think he understood that we contain everything . That’s what’s such a fucker about having to define oneself as male or female, full stop. Can’t we just leave it at genitals?”
“Do you think you’re sexy, Emma?”
“Well, in private, yes. I think of myself as sexual in a human way, but not as a kind of bombshell. I would never be cast in those roles. I think the sexuality I represent is less to do with fantasy. I tend to represent ordinary women … I’m sexual in the way that Tony Hopkins is; we can create an erotic charge rather quickly. It’s so much more erotic - that hidden, unspoken, un-shown sex, than the full thing.”
“You give us rather the full thing in Carrington. In one nude scene, you’re even entered from the rear.”
“That’s right!” she says, laughing robustly at the memory, then quickly calms herself. Her voice takes on its sly, high-Brit tone. “Did you like my silent orgasm?”
Laughter rises again in her at the absurdity of discussing Virginia Woolf and Dora Harrington here in the California sunshine. She scampers about the beach and falls into a kind of dance, reminding me that her first big commercial break came in the West End as the female lead opposite Robert Lindsay in Me and My Girl. For 15 years, eight times a week, she tap-danced her way int the hearts of the British audience. “I thought if I did the fucking Lambeth Walk one more time I was going to fucking throw up,” she recalls now with characteristic irreverence.
It is just such irreverence she put on display in Thompson, her comedy series for the BBC back in 1988, but the public and the critics were quite put off. “I was roundly punished for it .. but it also taught me a great deal. I’ma rather dog-like person who will go bounding up to everybody and go, ‘Let’s play!’ and then not understand when they give me a kick in the stomach because they’re not interested.”
“Are you a people pleaser?”
“Yeah. It’s a sickness.”
The BBC disaster was, however, a blessing in disguise, for it was those television sketches, most of which she also wrote, that caused producer Lindsey Doran to offer the actress the job of adapting Sense and Sensibility for the screen. “There were a couple of skits in Thompson - especially the ‘Victorian Mouse’ skit, as Emma calls it,” Doran says, explaining her choice. “It was the first episode. She plays a Victorian woman who comes to see her mother on the day after her marriage. Her little sister is there also. They’re having tea and very polite conversation. Emma’s character tells them that the oddest thing happened last night, that after dinner her husband said to her, ‘Have you seen one of these?’ She then says to her mother and sister, ‘He opened his trousers and out came a sort of bald, pink mouse.’ It was hilarious. It wasn’t that it was raunchy. it was that the language was very precise and very funny. It was the voice I was looking for.”
A penis joke led to Jane Austen?
“I’ll read those books and I’ll get to a point where I have to put the book down because I’m laughing so much,” Thompson insists. “People don’t associate that with Jane Austen, but Jane Austen is sexual “
“Are you ready for the criticism from the stodgy aficionados of Austen?” I ask. “You’ve jettisoned a few characters. Left out Willoughby’s return to Marianne’s sickbed.”
“I fully expect there to be pickets outside the theatre … The great burden of writing the script was trying to find a structure that was going to work. Every time I had to deconstruct and write something different, I’d get into a terrible bungle and cry a lot. But once I got that structure, it became more and more fun. I could work a little more on the shape of the scene and the dialogue and the jokes.”
As we continue shuffling along the expensive beachfront, I ask her, “Does the glamour part of show business put you off?”
“No. Not at all. I love it. It’s dress-up. I like all that. I would be awful to lose that. It’s like the monarchy. I might not necessarily approve of what it represents, but I’d miss the hats.”
….
A couple of weeks later on Thanksgiving, Thompson repays my California beach tour by taking me on a walk through Hampstead Heath. It has been an unseasonably warm autumn here, and golden leaves still cling to the trees. Thompson is wearing a large window-pane-patterned wool coat. Her hair has been ponytailed, and earmuffs hide her ears. As much as she enjoys the California climate and clear skies, she is happy to be back where she belongs.
“Could you ever live in America?” I ask.
“I’m sure I could,” she says, to my surprise. “But I do love England. I love the people. Even if they’re not friendly, at least they’re funny. The Northerners. The Scottish. The Irish. God, how I’d miss the Celts.”
After a visit to Kenwood House, a stately home built in the 17th century, where she had the first read-through of her Sense and Sensibility script, Thompson takes me on a tour of the favorited arbored paths of her youth. “This must be where you’d walk with your boyfriends,” I propose. “Do you, by chance, remember your very first kiss?”
“I do. I remember it very clearly. I was 12, and the chap I was kissing was 17. So he knew a thing or two. He’d been drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, and ti was the best taste I think I’ve ever encountered.”
Laughing at her schoolgirl memories, we both fall suddenly silent and stop in our tracks at the sight before us: three greyhounds are posed in a valley of trees, mist surrounding the sleek, muscled profiles of their bodies, as if they had come to life from a Mantegna painting. She’s trumped me - this is not something that Malibu can offer.
As we approach the hounds and their owners - a crisply precise older couple - Thompson and I realize that one of the dogs, named Jessica, is blind. One eye has been removed, and all that remains is a furry slit of a scar; the other eye is fogged to a beautifully opaque blue. Thompson bend down, cups the dog’s face in her hands, and whispers secrets in its ears; understanding, the animal licks her face and nuzzles her woolen chest.
Thompson stands, flushed with the British air and the hold that even a simple hound can have on her heart. Her own blue eyes are misted now with the empathy that is the very essence of, yes, her art. “That’s a face you’d want to film,” she says of the slightly scarred, instinctively regal female animal. Her tone is neither sly nor highly British. It is instead quite practical. She turns her collar up and strides heathward home.
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