Emma's pleasure project 'I'M FINALLY OKAY WITH MY BODY!'

The fun-loving dame had a point to prove when she stripped off for the cameras

Throughout her 40-year career, she's played a snaggle-toothed child tamer in Nanny McPhee, a dignified housekeeper in The Remains of the Day, and the adorably aloof Professor Trelawney in the Harry Potter movies. Then, in her sixties, Dame Emma Thompson decided it was time to do something entirely new - full-frontal nudity and unabandoned sex!

The British icon, 63, has bared all in her new movie Good Luck to You, Leo Grande- out in New Zealand cinemas on August 18 - and the irony of performing her most risqué role ever in her mature years is not lost on her.

"I knew I couldn't not do this movie," explains Emma, who in the film plays Nancy, a repressed 50-something who has never had an orgasm. Finding herself widowed and retired, she decides to "see what all the fuss is about" and hires a high-class male escort.

"Surely we're allowed to have one movie - just one - where a woman wants something and does something men do all the time, and we get to see what happens next," reasons the actress. "Don't we want to know what that story is? How it might change everyone involved?"

Emma set the internet abuzz in February this year when she spoke at the Berlin Biennale press conference about the trauma of baring her ageing body in all its glory to all in sundry.