Soaking up the atmosphere of Venice in the iconic Harry’s Bar, when a woman started smiling and waving at her, Oscar winning actress Dame Emma Thompson assumed she was a fan. Usually adept at blending in when she is off-screen, her cover had clearly been blown – or so she thought.
Dame Emma, 67, says: “I was sitting there and this woman kept peeling off these massive smiles and waving. I thought, ‘ok, so she must know my work’. Anyway, she came over as she was leaving and said, ‘I’m so happy to see you in here. You know, I still wear those shoes. I wear them all the time. I love them. You were so right. I was wrong and you were right’.
“I sat there thinking ‘shoes? I can’t work this out. I haven’t made a film about shoes, have I?’ “The woman then stunned me, saying, ‘you remember the fifth floor in Barney’s in New York?’ She thought I’d sold her a pair of shoes in the department store Barney’s. She was thrilled to see me in Harry’s Bar, because clearly that meant I was doing quite well for myself.”
Appreciating the stranger’s good intentions, Dame Emma adds: “I said, ‘I’m so glad they still fit.’” The actress, whose film, The Sheep Detectives, co-starring Hugh Jackman, is now available for streaming on Amazon Prime and who is currently filming a new series of the Apple TV hit, Down Cemetery Road, says not all encounters with the public are as heartwarming.
She says: “When you’re buying sausages with your daughter, you don’t really want people coming up to you saying, ‘can I have a selfie?’ I wouldn’t say no to a child, but sometimes if I’m with the family, I’ll say, ‘would you mind awfully? I just, I’m with my family.’’
“What’s so interesting is that every time I have said no, and it’s quite rare, people have taken it so well, because they seem to understand.”
Fortunately, most of the time, Dame Emma – who won a best actress Oscar in 1993 for her role as Margaret Schlegel in Howard’s End and a best adapted screenplay Academy Award in 1996 for her script based on Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, remains incognito.
She says: “Nobody takes any notice of me on the tube. They’re all looking at their phones.” She says while action film stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone always get a response from the public, even in Europe, she seldom gets bothered.
She says: “I can pass, not necessarily unnoticed, but certainly it’s never been an issue. People just tend to say ‘love your work, bye’. It’s lovely. I’ve also many times got from people, ‘oh my god, you’re…’ so and so. And then they say the name of a completely different actress. I either say, ‘yes, I am. I would love to give you a photograph’. Or I say, ‘I’m 20 years younger’ or ‘sorry, I am 20 years older,’ or I say, ‘no, she’s dead, actually.’ But then I just kind of move gently on through.”
As well as playing power-suit wearing lawyer Lydia Harbottle in The Sheep Detectives – a movie about the murder of shepherd George Hardy (Hugh Jackman) – a musical version of her 2005 film, Nanny McPhee is set to hit London’s West End next year.
Of The Sheep Detectives, a comedy crime caper, she says: “I loved the part. I mean I was like ‘I’ll play a sheep. I’ll play a broom. I’ll play anything!’” She might not have been quite as enthusiastic, however, if she’d been filming during the recent heatwave.
Describing life in the capital at its hottest, speaking on the American podcast Smartless, she says: “It has been 35C in London and things are just dying in front of you. Pets, household appliances, flowers…everything is just wilting. It’s like Dracula’s walked into the town.
“How am I coping? You just lie face down on the pavement, panting, hoping that some dog will come and whittle on you and cool you down!”
Married to actor and film producer Greg Wise, 60, Dame Emma’s base is a £3m home in London’s West Hampstead. She says of Brits dealing with extreme heat: “We don’t have methods here to cope. We don’t have air conditioning. It’s ridiculous. We normally have three hot days a year.
“Also, we don’t have much ice here and Americans have always been obsessed with ice. When I first arrived in America you were practically put in an ice bath when you arrived. We don’t have that obsession, because we don’t have probably as much money and our refrigerators are not as big. And they don’t produce ice. We all get fridges that say they produce ice. And within a week, they’ve broken down.”
But she feels UK theatres – many of which do not have air con – will find it difficult to cope if temperatures continue to rise, blaming climate change for the rising mercury. She says: “There is no air conditioning in our theatres because we’ve never needed it before and we haven’t adapted yet to climate change. Because of climate change, look at my face. I mean, I’m the same colour as one of the stripes on my shirt. It’s tragic.”
Her solution could be to spend more time in her second home in Scotland, a retreat on the shores of Loch Eck, near the town of Dunoon, Argyll, where she likes to go with Greg and their daughter, Lord of the Rings actress daughter Gaia, 26.
Dame Emma, who married in a secret ceremony on the banks of the Loch in 2003, says: “I’m a Londoner, but I’m also a Scot. For me the most beautiful countryside is in Scotland. It is wild and it’s unbound and full of the most extraordinary energies. But London is also, you know, a very precious place, because it is this great, teeming bowl of people living in this kind of massive sushi, generally speaking, quite peacefully.”
Continuing to land brilliant roles, like that of misanthropic private investigator, Zoe Boehm in Down Cemetery Road – the second season of which is likely to be screened at the end of 2026, or beginning of 2027 – Dame Emma remains refreshingly modest about her achievements.
Made a dame in 2018 for her outstanding services to drama, she says: “What do I do with all my awards? Well, the Oscars are in the lavatory, because that just keeps them in their place. The Golden Globes and the BAFTAs are on a very high shelf somewhere, where I can’t see them. But I don’t know, I think that’s very British.
“I could put them in the doorway, so when people come in they just trip up over them. That enables you to say, ‘sorry, those are my Oscars. Sorry, I’ll just move them. Do come through. Would you like to freshen up?” And then have copies of them in the toilet so they can’t get away – ever.”
*The Sheep Detectives is available to stream on Prime Video now.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: mirror.co.uk
