Emma Thompson – Acting Up

Emma Thompsons third act.

- By John Lahr

Emma Thompson has what she E calls the habit of continuity,” an impulse hardwired into her by her parents, Phyllida Law and Eric Thompson, who were both actors and children from broken families. Thompson, who has been dubbed a Presbyterian in the high church of celebrity, still lives on the West Hampstead street where she grew up. She shuttles between London and a lush remote glen above Loch Long, in Scotland—where, in 1959, her parents paid three hundred pounds for a cottage—which was the rural idyll of her childhood. Those two places provide her with an unassailable context” that protects her, she said, from her capacity for self-deception.” She added, I’m surrounded by people I’ve known since I was a child. They’re not going to put up with me being grand.”

Her road in London is a sloping quarter mile of comfortable semidetached houses, a football field away from the swankier dwellings across noisy Finchley Road. Among those currently residing there are Thompson’s extended family: her now ninetyyear-old mother; her informally adopted son, Tindyebwa Agaba, and his wife, He Zhang; and a collection of A-team actors, most of whom she’s worked with through the years—Imelda Staunton, Jim Carter, Derek Jacobi, Jim Broadbent. We're terrible gossips, but gossip in the sense that Phyllis Rose described it, the first step on the ladder to self-knowledge,” Thompson said, adding, Gossip is discussion about life’s detail. And in life’s details are all the little bits of stitching that you need to hold it to-fucking-gether.”