Oliver James

She probably feels most real when she is pretending to be someone else - acting. But secondhand living carries an emotional price tag, as she recently admitted.
‘I’m going to stop working for a while. The first project I am going to deal with is Life. I’m frankly quite fed up with fiction. I’ve done it too much. I have to pay a bit more attention to reality.’

Thompson’s famously ‘Luvvie’ persona blows up emotions, melodramatizes them. Her speech is peppered with superlatives like ‘fabulous’, ‘incredible’ and ‘amazing’, inflating and devaluing her emotional currency.

It is likely that she lives her real life ‘as if’ she were the actress Emma Thompson rather than feeling it is truly happening to her.

She has been a many-sided person since childhood. as the conflicting recollections of her at Camden Girls School show.

Some of her peers, like the novelist Rose Boyt, say she was Ms Normal. ‘She seemed to be a deeply healthy and attractive human being’.

But another peer, who preferred to stay off the record, painted a different picture. ‘She was competitive and ambitious’.

She admits to having been a chameleon from the time she attended a working class Primary School. From a middle class home, she did not fit in.

‘I was unfortunate in having a posh accent. I was simply disliked, then I changed my voice, learnt how to swear and it was alright’ she remembers.

She has never been very comfortable with herself. ‘I always feel I was a deeply punchable child, overweight with a plait’. Throughout her career she has felt she was ‘too meaty’ to play sexy roles.

‘The sort of parts Michelle Pfeiffer or Sharon Stone get, I wouldn’t. Because I don’t look right. Even if my face was right, my body isn’t’.

Her negative self image comes partly comes from her father. He once told her that ‘you’re just like me’ - a man with a ‘grouchy’ personality concealed behind facetiousness and a surreal humour.

He had a heart attack when she was 8 and died after a long illness when she left university.

‘Even as a child I was aware he wasn’t very well. He had a knack of being witty about the things that hurt. He always talked about Romeo and Juliet as if it were a comedy’ she remembered.

Being taught that tragedy was comic encouraged her to deny the truth of what she felt, fostered her ‘as if’ personality.

Visitors to the house recall that both her parents used to wander around stark naked. This may also have created a pressure to deny the evidence of her senses - to blank out what she was seeing or pretend it was something else.

The Thompson’s nakedness around the home symbolizes the lack of boundaries there. Her parents denied the most basic fact of her existence: that she was a child.

‘When we were children we were treated as grown-ups, respected as adults who just hadn’t lived as long’ she said.

But children need to be treated as children. They cannot fend for themselves, need parents to meet their needs for nurture.

They also need boundaries to be set defining right and wrong, when to go to bed, who to be. This is the foundation of a person’s identity.

Emma’s consequent lack thereof is both the cause of her talent and sets its limits. Interestingly, her greatest roles have been in costume dramas playing characters far removed from her real life.

The more she is required to supply something from inside herself, the less satisfactory her performance.

She has always fancied herself as an alternative comedian but artistically, her darkest hour was when she was allowed to write and perform her own series, called Thompson, on BBC1.

The critics went ballistic. ‘One of the most embarassing things I have ever seen on television: sluggish, self indulgent and totally unfunny’ wrote one not atypically.
Whereas in Howard’s End or Sense and Sensibility she pretended to Oscar winning effect, in Thompson she was merely pretentious.

Pretence is at the heart of creativity. It is the key to many professions including being an artist (‘artifice’), a conman and a politician.

But to feel most real when pretending to be someone else leaves you dissatisfied because it did not happen to you, it happened to someone else. You feel fraudulent and empty.

Thompson is near to realizing this. Recently she said ‘You skate over a period of a week a month a year and think "what have I done? I may have made two films but I haven’t lived"‘.