I’ve had a long week of writing about Kardashians and Kanye West, so this post is just intended as a brief respite, a chance to write about someone I love and adore. Emma Thompson covers the new issue of Variety to promote her film Saving Mr. Banks. Many people believe that Emma will be nominated for an Oscar for this role, which means… the awards season is going to be like Christmas for me. Emma waging an Oscar campaign? Come on, that’s just the best thing ever! Here’s what I love too: Emma will actually campaign. Here she is on Variety, which will probably be the first of many magazine covers. She’ll give tons of interviews. She’ll say witty, amazing things. I’m looking forward to it! So honk (or comment!) if you love Emma. Anyway, you can read the full Variety piece here, and here are some highlights – including the admission that Emma got a terrible perm for the role.
She doesn’t want to direct: “My dad always thought I would be a director because I was so bossy,” says Thompson, who suffered a devastating blow when she lost her father, Eric Thompson, when he was just 53. She briefly considered directing, but realized she had no interest. “Why would you?” she asks, in an erudite voice that sounds like a college literature professor’s. “It’s a horrible job. It’s so hard directing. My father was a director and I was married to a director (Kenneth Branagh).”
Why she agreed to Saving Mr. Banks: “I hadn’t worked for a while, and I said to my agent, ‘I’ve got to earn some money,’ ” says the 54-year-old thesp. “I got offered, in quick succession, a very old lady in a wheelchair; Bradley Cooper’s mother (in ‘Silver Linings Playbook’); and Mother Teresa. And I thought people must assume I still look like Nanny McPhee,” in which she plays a British caretaker with a single scraggly tooth and a wart on her chin.
Relating to PL Travers: “I think when my father died, I swallowed him whole, and I think she did too. She swallowed a lot of pain, which she spent the rest of her life metabolizing.”
Emma got a perm for the role: An unforeseen battle in the making of “Saving Mr. Banks” had to do with Thompson’s hair for the role. In real life, Travers had a simple bubble cut with frilly curls. The hairdo matched her steely personality, and was a crucial foothold into the character. But Thompson is wig averse: “I think a lot of energy comes off the top of your head when you’re acting,” she says, “and a wig really puts the lid on it.” So she visited a salon to get the Travers cut. “I went in willingly like the proverbial woolly lamb to the slaughter and I came out looking like a baby woolly mammoth,” Thompson says. She wasn’t expecting her hair to feel so tight after her perm. She tried to unspool the curls, even going as far as rubbing olive oil on her scalp, but it was no use. “I did everything I could,” Thompson says. “I rolled around. I pulled at it. I think the spirit of P.L. Travers was going, ‘If you’re going to play me, I’m going to make you suffer — you’re not going to have sex for months on end.’ ”
Being able to act without dialogue: “I was doing a mime course in Paris with a great French clown who I learned a lot from,” says Thompson, who was 24 at the time. “At bottom, I am a clown.”
Bill Clinton hated her role in Primary Colors: “He said, ‘We feel so much the same about so many things, but you did that horrible movie.’ And I’d completely forgotten. I said, ‘Which horrible movie?’ I thought he’d seen something that he hated.” She tried to get the president to understand what she had been doing. “I said, ‘Bill, did you ever see it?’ He said, ‘Of course not.’ I said, ‘Listen, the movie was about the press.’”
She doesn’t want to live in LA, but she likes to visit: “I love coming to California and I love coming to Hollywood,” she says. “I’ve always been so warmly welcomed.” Thompson recalls winning her first Oscar, a leading actress statue for “Howards End,” at age 33. While she called receiving the award onstage “extraordinary,” she enjoyed the aftermath backstage even more — “that feeling all the crew were so lovely to me because I was a foreign lady they never heard of.”
Her two Oscars: Thompson keeps her two Oscars in the downstairs bathroom in her London home so that guests can see them. “I had them redipped,” she says. “I sent them over to America, and they came back all sparkly.”
Doing her hand and footprint ceremony at Grauman’s Chinese Theater: She wasn’t sure what the ceremony would entail. “Perhaps they’ll just throw me in the L.A. River afterwards, which won’t matter of course, because it’s just six inches deep,” she says. “I’ll just lie there looking at the stars, thinking, ‘At last, I’ve arrived.’ ”
In the Variety story, they speak to Richard Curtis, who says that he had dinner with the permed Emma and her husband Greg Wise, and that the dinner was simply, like, three hours of perm jokes and jokes about how Greg wouldn’t have sex with her when her hair was so horrible. God, I love them. I love HER. We should all be so lucky to have more Emma in our lives.
Photos courtesy of Variety.
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