48 TImE June 17, 2019
told TIME in an email that although the
Footlights had been “distressingly male,”
it was not her gender but “her frankly ra-
diant presence and range of extraordinary
skills as a performer” that stood out. “Like
Athena, she seemed to have been born
fully armed,” he wrote. Among her weap-
ons were a knack for character and bound-
less charisma. She dabbled in stand-up; a
short clip of her performing at 23 appears
in Late Night, though little was usable be-
cause the raunchy subject matter (“sex-
ually transmitted diseases and Margaret
Thatcher, which were both pretty big at
the time”) didn’t fit her character.
Thompson didn’t abandon comedy
after that—she just got famous for some-
thing a little more corseted. In the early
1990s she appeared in the Merchant Ivory
period dramas Howards End and The Re-
mains of the Day, playing women who were
pragmatic and witty but restrained by cir-
cumstance. She was hired to adapt Jane
Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and later
to star, based on a parody of Victorian-
era manners in her late-’80s sketch show,
Thompson. (She married her Sense and
Sensibility co-star Greg Wise, with whom
she had a daughter, Gaia, in 2000, and in-
formally adopted a teenage Rwandan or-
phan, Tindyebwa Agaba, in 2003.)
Kaling fell in love with Thompson
the comedic performer at age 11, when
she saw her in then husband Kenneth
Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing. (The
pair split in 1995, amid allegations of an
affair between him and Helena Bonham
Carter that was heavily covered by the tab-
loids.) Kaling wrote Late Night in part to
tell a funny story based on her experience
as an Indian- American woman breaking
into a nonmeritocratic Hollywood. But
she also wanted to create a vehicle for
Thompson. “She has the gravitas and
the comedy chops to pull this off,” saysKaling. “And since no one else is going to
write a role like this”—one that encour-
ages a post menopausal woman to devour
the scenery—“I thought I should do it
myself.” Audiences responded: Amazon
bought the movie for $13 million in one of
the biggest deals ever at Sundance.
As Katherine, Thompson plays a
woman who broke the glass ceiling by
leaning away from her femininity. Her
wardrobe is all neatly tailored variations
on menswear, her hair short and unfussy.
She’s witheringly unsentimental, refer-
ring to longtime staffers by number in-
stead of name. “Anyone who started in
that world will have been very alone.
Starting in comedy, I was always the only
girl,” says Thompson. “So in a sense you
kind of have to be one of the boys.”
When she accepted the Oscar for
Best Actress for Howards End in 1993,
Thompson said she hoped her award
“inspires the creation of more true
scene heroines.” Over our pre-shopping
breakfast, throughout which Thomp-
son poaches bites of sausage and po-
tato off my plate, I say it feels old hat
to ask if things have gotten better since
then. She says I’m not the only young
woman who’s apologized for asking her
that exact question. “The point is that‘Starting in
comedy, I was
always the only
girl. So in a sense
you kind of have to
be one of the boys.’Culture
blind spots that come with her age, race
and privilege. Thompson, on the other
hand, is doing just fine on her own. She’s
been an activist since long before we pre-
ferred, or expected, our celebrities that
way. She’s protested the Gulf War and
the Iraq War, fracking, arctic drilling and
Brexit. Recently she’s spoken plainly and
fervently about the #MeToo movement,
climate change and the refugee crisis.
She speaks plainly and fervently—and
irreverently and wittily—about pretty
much everything. It’s kind of her thing.
It’s ruffled some, especially in her home
country —one headline a decade ago read:
doTh ThE Lady proTEsT Too much?
She’s never seemed to think so.
One week from this early April morn-
ing, Thompson will turn 60, and she’s
feeling it more than she felt 40 or 50.
“Suddenly you’ll be in this place where
all the roles that society has so success-
fully forced upon you—from daughter to
wife to mother to professional person—
could be questioned. You could take these
things away from your face, one after the
other, and go, ‘Who actually am I?’ Which
I’ve always thought was a terribly boring
question, and I now find fascinating.”
But even as she meditates on who she
is without the context, one can never truly
escape their context. And Thompson, who
for so long was ahead of her time, finds
herself in a time when women are getting
their due, protest is popular and caring is
cool. Has the moment finally caught up to
Emma Thompson?
If you weren’t watchIng regional
British TV in the 1980s, you might have
missed a spiky-haired Thompson playing
a hapless slacker who accidentally sat on
her roommate’s cat. And if you skipped
right to the string of 1990s period dramas
that made her the only person ever to win
Oscars for both screenwriting and acting,
you might have missed the fact that much
like her character in Late Night, Emma
Thompson wanted to be a comedian.
Thompson grew up between London
and Scotland, the child of actors Phyl-
lida Law and Eric Thompson. At Cam-
bridge, she was one of the few women
admitted to the Footlights, a sketch-
comedy group that counts several mem-
bers of Monty Python as alumni. Fellow
member Stephen Fry, who performed
with Thompson throughout the ’80s,