TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93TT1305> <title> Mar. 29, 1993: Emma's Gem </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993 Mar. 29, 1993 Yeltsin's Last Stand </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> CINEMA, Page 52 Emma's a Gem </hdr> <body> Britain's Emma Thompson glides from Howards End to Oscar's favorite By RICHARD CORLISS--With reporting by Barry Hillenbrand/London and Adrianne Jucius Navon/New York Emma Thompson laughs--A hearty, conspiratorial, practiced laugh--as she listens gleefully to an American telling her that her comic sex scene with Jeff Goldblum in The Tall Guy was shown on New York City's X-rated cable show Midnight Blue. Emma Thompson frets--she knits her brow into a virtual sweater of remembered frustration--as she recalls her years as an academic grind at Camden School for Girls in London. "The one thing I really regret," she says, "is not having read Homer in the original Greek." Emma Thompson is not your typical Oscar-nominated actress. Oscar sure-thing actress, most touts would say. The English star of Howards End, the bride of all-everything show-biz phenom Kenneth Branagh, is an odds-on favorite to win Best Actress. And an Academy Award is Hollywood's certification of radiance. If the movie industry gives Thompson an Oscar next Monday evening, it will show it recognizes a potentially great movie lady in spring bloom. Thompson, 33, doesn't care to analyze her craft. Ask her why she makes movies, and she roars back, "Filthy lucre!" So we turn to James Ivory, her director on Howards End and on this fall's Remains of the Day, to enumerate her gifts. "First of all," he says, "Emma is sane. That's a wonderful thing. She also has intelligence, tremendous acting talent and terrific style. She's funny and fun to be with--always. American actors mercilessly dissect everything. They worry and wonder about it all the time. The British tend to act instinctually." As Christopher Reeve, who also appears in Remains of the Day, notes, "She reads the script, gets it under her skin and leaves herself alone. She doesn't make Great Moments; she stays light on her feet, and the emotions flow because she's not trying too hard." Reeve has hit on a key difference between stage and screen acting. On the stage an actor can seduce with gifts of voice and gesture; from the rear mezzanine all faces are equal. But the movie camera, that meticulous voyeur, is no respecter of technique. Its X-ray eye scans an actor's face for a fineness or boldness of line. Because most movies are illustrated fables, the camera wants faces that communicate--in the immediate emotional shorthand of a close-up--the character's pedigree to the audience. So film stardom is often the luck of the genetic draw. Thompson has that luck; she can bear the camera's scrutiny. Her face is common sense emitting star quality, wit raised to beauty. Her bright eyes and ironic smile suggest an intelligence of the cultivated heart--what used to be called breeding. No wonder six of Thompson's eight feature films are period pieces, closer in spirit to the West End stage than to the West Coast sound stage. She is comfortable as Katherine in Branagh's Henry V or as Beatrice in his new film Much Ado About Nothing, as a 1930s English domestic in Remains of the Day or a '40s femme fatale in Dead Again. Especially, delightfully, in Impromptu, as a 19th century French duchess who plays hostess to a rowdy houseful of artists. Her take on this French version of the upper-class twit is cutting but not hostile--a sweet satire in the Joyce Grenfell manner. This actress knows where the camera is: nearby, as close and attentive as a lover, alert to the minutest inflection of voice or glance. Her Howards End work--as Margaret Schlegel, a domestic diplomat mediating between warring families, classes and principles--is a compact master class in screen subtlety. She punctuates an argument with a gay laugh, as if to say, "We surely aren't fighting!" Just before she first kisses her future husband, the self-deceiving predator Henry Wilcox (Anthony Hopkins), her body shivers, her hand flutters. The gestures, measurable in microseconds, give a brilliant hint of Margaret's doubt smothered by her resolve. The film's deepest friendship is between Margaret and the frail Ruth Wilcox (Vanessa Redgrave). In a lovely scene, Ruth summons her ebbing strength to secure a sprig in Margaret's hair. It is also a laurel from Redgrave, the great actress of her generation, to Thompson, the next generation's Most Likely to Succeed. "I've always thought of Emma as our generation's Katharine Hepburn," says Martin Bergman, an English writer who wrote the Branagh-Thompson Peter's Friends with his wife, the U.S. comic Rita Rudner. Bergman cites "the poise, the professionalism, the ability to perform comedy or drama with equal skill, the ability to create female characters we know and recognize, and whose personalities begin with their minds rather than their cleavage." Thompson was to her manners born. Her mother is actress Phyllida Law, who plays the pruney maid in Peter's Friends and Hero's attendant Ursula in Much Ado; her father was actor-director Eric Thompson; Emma's younger sister Sophie was a successful child actress. Of her parents Emma says, "The main influence is that actors are so good with children. They do not patronize them--perhaps because they are so close to that state of childishness." Emma's parents were certainly close to her. "Anything I was interested in made them happy," she says. "I had no rebellious stage, because my parents gave me so much freedom that I didn't need to rebel." Bergman met Emma when she was 15 and he was 17. "Em had lots of jewelry on and jangled loudly," the writer remembers. "I thought she was immensely sophisticated." Later, when they were both at Cambridge, Bergman "bullied Em into joining the Footlights," the theatrical troupe that has launched so many British comics. "When the annual revue opened, London smelled Em's star quality. A top agent wisely signed her, even though she had two more years to go at university." By the time Thompson was 25, she was a song-and-dance star on the Strand. Me and My Girl, a 1930s musical revival about a Cockney couple who topsyturn a country estate, was Emma's coming-out party. Since then she has rarely been out of work. She played Suzi Kettles, the Glaswegian pop singer with hair the color of a petrochemical sunset, in John Byrne's engaging mini-series Tutti Frutti. She was the long-suffering Englishwoman abroad in the BBC mini-series Fortunes of War. Her co-star was a young sensation from the Royal Shakespeare Company, Kenneth Branagh. Since their marriage in 1989, most of Thompson's work has been with Branagh. Their latest project, Much Ado About Nothing, due in May in the U.S., is a kind of summer holiday from hard work. Filmed in sunny Tuscany, this robust romp displays a Thompson lighter in tone and darker of skin; next year at the Oscars she could win Best Tan by a Leading Actress. The Branaghs are, of course, those all-bark, some-bite lovers Beatrice and Benedick. When the two battlers realize at last that they are doomed to a life of love, together in public, the viewer thinks of the Branaghs, witty monarchs of the modern screen. By all credible accounts, the Branaghs' marriage is a hit. Ivory and Reeve describe them as one of those magic couples that grace British theater every generation or so. The British tabloids treat them like royalty--weave a tissue of tattle about them, that is, based on blind sources and broad inferences. "The Golden Couple myth was created by the press," Thompson says, "and then we were vilified by the press. But what we've realized is that we have to get on with our lives and our work." Obviously, it's the Branaghs who behave regally and the Windsors who act like movie stars in rut. So how about Ken and Em for Britain's next King and Queen? Thompson, though, might settle for Prime Minister. She has a sinewy social conscience, tithing her income to charities, serving on Central and South American action committees, protesting the Gulf War, appearing in TV spots for the Labour Party in the past general election. So don't try telling Thompson that acting is hard work. "Acting is the ultimate luxury," she retorts. "This is one of the luckiest things you could possibly be doing. `Hard' is going down a bloody coal mine or living in Somalia or in a war zone. That's hard." We have a hope for Thompson, and for movies: that Hollywood and Britain will not find it hard to make room for her and the best kind of cinema she represents. Stars create projects. Just now she is writing a screenplay of Austen's Sense and Sensibility. And after that, another Austen heroine might suit her: "Handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition..." Emma. Whatever her ambitions, she will not be cowed. "About 18 months ago," Bergman recalls, "Ken, Emma, Rita and I went skiing. All novices, and the way we individually tackled it said a lot about the four of us. I struggled feebly onto the snow, gave up immediately and went looking for a bar. Rita, the ex-ballerina, stood stock-still and waited for the instructor to tell her exactly what to do. Ken fearlessly flew down the mountain without instruction, fell over a lot, but by the end of the day had moved on to an even bigger mountain. Emma glided gracefully past the seasoned skiers, looking like she belonged in the Winter Olympics." She does belong, anywhere, this earthy enchantress, this reconciler of old Hollywood's finest glamour and New Britain's independent intellect. On Oscar night or anytime she steps onto the stage or onto the slopes, the word for Emma Thompson is winning. </body> </article> </text>