Emma Thompson breaks from her jolly image in another movie she adapted. But she doesn't have to feel in charge, she tells Donald Clarke.
Emma Thompson notices my eyes passing over the sparkly things on her blouse.
"Are you wondering why I am so glittery?" she says. "Well I have to wear this sort of thing because I am doing all this telly today." Indeed she is. Ten hours later I am flicking through the channels and up she pops on three different programmes: matter-of-fact on Sky News; cheeky on Jonathan Ross; in depth on the Late Late Show.
On each of the shows she puts across the same blustery no-nonsense attitude. She keeps both of her Oscars in the loo. She still lives across the road from her mum, the equally jolly actress Phyllida Law. She doesn't really feel comfortable being so glittery.
Who better to play the title role in Nanny McPhee? Kirk Jones's film, adapted by Thompson from Christianna Brand's Nurse Matilda novels, tells the story of a magical child-care specialist - sound familiar, Poppins fans? - whose arrival introduces order to a family of deranged children. Thompson does have something of the ebullient Poppins about her.
"I don't see it as a being similar to Mary Poppins at all," she says. "But the essential myth of this film and Mary Poppins is the same. It's a Western. It's like Shane: the stranger comes into a town where there is conflict and uses different methods to change things."
As it happens, Nanny McPhee, two warts sitting either side of one huge tooth, is rather a sinister figure. Delivering her lines in a firm monotone, Thompson lurks with such malevolence that all memories of Julie Andrews are rapidly dispelled. Though Nanny McPhee is ultimately a force for good, Thompson's performance might be calculated to counter her image as a decent, unpretentious sort who is always up for a laugh.
The world first got to hear of her when she performed as part of a particularly talented generation of the Cambridge University Footlights comedy troupe. Also in that company - which went on to win the first ever Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival - were such future celebrities as Tony Slattery, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.
"I remember Hugh coming to the audition for the pantomime and auditioning as the Emperor of China," she says. "I remember whispering to my friend: 'This man is going to be a star.' Then he met Stephen Fry, who I knew separately, and we never saw the two of them again, of course - I'm joking."
She may indeed be kidding, but I imagine Footlights was a very competitive environment. "I suppose it may have been. But we were so busy that we probably didn't have time to notice."
Thompson's experiences in Footlights led her to redirect her ambitions towards comedy. Coming from a fabulously theatrical background - her father was Eric Thompson, a TV director, who also wrote the scripts for The Magic Roundabout - she originally had thoughts of being a writer or a straight actor. As matters worked out, she became all those things.
In 1987, seven years after graduating from Cambridge, she won a BAFTA for her performance in Fortunes of War, the BBC's adaptation of Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy. Her packed CV suggests that, to this point, there were few significant periods of unemployment for her to contemplate a return to the straight world.
"No, there weren't really. I was very lucky. When I left university me and Stephen and Hugh toured Australia and then went to Manchester and did the sketch show, Alfresco. Then I went to France and did a mime and mask course. I was doing a show at Edinburgh every year. So I was very lucky. And I say that advisedly, because so many of my friends are actors and I know how hard it can be."
Thompson's co-star in Fortunes of War was Kenneth Branagh, her future husband. Over the next few years the two pursued a formidable professional partnership. Dubbed "the Ken and Em Show", the couple did attract their fare share of ridicule from luvvie watchers. Keeping in mind how Thompson's career subsequently eclipsed that of her former husband, it seems surprising that she was then content to be the junior partner in the relationship. He was, after all, the director of such dubious joint ventures as Peter's Friends and - pause to shudder - the legendarily dreadful Dead Again.
"I think it's perfectly fair he was in charge," she says with characteristic decency. "That was the great attraction for me, really. He was so energised, then. That really was part of the reason I was so drawn to him. He was so full of ideas when he was a boy, which is what he was then. He was 25 when we met. Now he's, what, 44. Bizarre. Actually I don't like being totally in charge. Nanny McPhee, for instance, is very much a collaborative thing."
When Branagh ended the marriage in 1995, the press were very much on Thompson's side. The fact that Branagh attached himself to Helena Bonham Carter with unseemly haste certainly didn't win him any more friends. But - though she wouldn't see things this way - professional and personal vindication came Emma's way quickly.
Her script for that year's Sense and Sensibility won her an Academy Award and, having already picked up a statuette for her performance in 1992's The Remains of the Day, she thus became the first woman to garner Oscars for writing and acting. The adulation was welcome. In a diary she published focusing on the shooting of Sense and Sensibility, she confesses that it was a pretty low time for her.
"Well, it was the end of a marriage. Not just any old relationship," she confirms.
So Sense and Sensibility's subsequent success and the happiness she found with Greg Wise, who played the fiery Mr Willoughby in the flick, must have served as significant fillips. "Yes. I think it was very healing and helpful. And I was lucky to have met somebody who put up with me afterwards. It took quite a long time to recover after the marriage. I think I stopped working after that and tried to get myself back onto an even keel. I didn't actually go back to work until 1997, when I did Primary Colors."
Wise and Thompson, whose daughter Gaia was born in 1999, live in apparent scruffy bliss at the slightly less posh end of Hampstead. Though rumours about her quitting acting were just gossip - "people seem to have forgotten that I have to earn a living" - she has been taking it reasonably easy over the past few years. She was one of the few people to emerge with no tarnishes on their reputation from Richard Curtis's lachrymose Love, Actually. She fared less well in Christopher Hampton's deranged Imagining Argentina. And she was excellent playing multiple roles in the television adaptation of Tony Kushner's Angels in America.
So, why has she not directed a film yet? Notwithstanding her earlier comments about not enjoying being totally in charge, that would seem to be the most obvious path for her career to take.
"Having been married to a director and having had a director as a father, I know how much like hard work that is," she says. "I do get offers, but the first question I always ask is: can you explain to me how to be a director and a responsible mother at the same time? Nobody has yet come up with a satisfactory answer."
Nanny McPhee opens tomorrow
