EMMA AND SENSIBILITY: THOMPSON, SAYS THE DIRECTOR OF HER JANE AUSTEN ADAPTATION, "IS AN EXTREMELY FUNNY LADY. LIKE AUSTEN, SHE'S LAUGHING AT HER OWN CULTURE WHILE SHE'S A PART OF IT."

By Matthew Gilbert

(Boston Globe, December 12, 1995 )

 

With her toothy smile and her fondness for terms like "Oh, crumbs" and "snog," Emma Thompson could be a cheery British schoolmarm. She could be Britain's latest tight-jawed export, a new Maggie Smith destined for a career in the tweediest of art films. She could become the Corset Queen.

Except there's something irrepressibly ironic about Emma Thompson - a robust smirkiness that makes every "Heavens!" and "Goodness!" into a private joke. While she is the Serious Actress who won an Oscar as the tempered Margaret Schlegel in 1992's "Howards End," her roots are so firmly grounded in comedy that she cites Monty Python as a major influence. Indeed, until Thompson was 27, she was strictly a sketch comedian who took Lily Tomlin - and not Vanessa Redgrave - as her model. It's no wonder, then, she has chosen to write a screenplay of "Sense and Sensibility," an early novel by the sharpest of comic ironists, Jane Austen. The spirited film, which stars Thompson, Hugh Grant, Kate Winslet and Alan Rickman, opens Wednesday.

Conversation with Thompson, 36, is a largely tongue-in-cheek affair, punctuated with sly jokes and droll eyes. "It would have been a real sin if one had rendered Austen humorless," she says about her first screenwriting experience. "Actually I would have had to drown myself, I would have had to put an end to it all, leaving a short note of apology." About the heavy costuming for the movie, she notes: "Your boobs are up around your ears." About her computer: "I regard it with the apprehension one might regard an elderly relative with incipient Alzheimer's: You just don't know if it's going to recognize you or any command you're going to put in." Ang Lee, the director of "Sense and Sensibility," says Thompson's comic touch may be her greatest gift: "Emma is an extremely funny lady. Like Austen, she's laughing at her own culture while she's a part of it."

Alas, Thompson nearly lost her humor through the 15-plus drafts of "Sense and Sensibility." "It's horrible while you're doing it," she says, ''although having done it, it's satisfying." In the five years she labored over the script, she interrupted her progress to act in seven films, including ''Remains of the Day" and "In the Name of the Father," for which she won Oscar nominations, and "Carrington," a Bloomsbury Group drama still in theaters. "I didn't write while I was shooting," she says, "except during 'Much Ado About Nothing,' when I had two weeks off, so I wrote the Italian draft, which was a disaster. It was like, 'Betsy brings in a large steaming bowl of pasta.' 'Elinor pours Colonel Brandon a goblet of chianti.' " Even with support from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, screenwriter of "Howards End" and other Merchant-Ivory classics, she hated the endless cutting of scenes and characters.

To pull her through, Thompson embraced Austen's notion of The Happy Ending. While Austen characters suffer - in "Sense and Sensibility," sisters Marianne and Elinor lose their father, their home and their lovers - their hard work is always worthwhile. "We need to be rewarded for pain," Thompson says. "We need to know that going through pain is a good thing. It makes all human beings much more human. OK, it didn't do much for Hitler. Four years as a tramp in Austria did not help, let's face it. But he's the exception.

"Most people are nicer after they've had their heart broken a couple of times."

The elephant in the corner, of course, is the recent news of Thompson's breakup with actor-director Kenneth Branagh. Columbia Pictures, the "Sense and Sensibility" studio, has asked the press not to question Thompson about her personal life, and Thompson herself clearly has no taste for tabloid titillation. After Thompson and Branagh fell in love filming "The Fortunes of War" for the BBC in 1986, they began to be dogged by the British press, which took a strong dislike to their growing mainstream success and caustically dubbed them Ken 'n' Em. As they proceeded to get married and make movies together - "Henry V," "Dead Again," "Peter's Friends," "Much Ado About Nothing" - the couple was plagued by rumors of extramarital affairs and accusations of uppity attitudes.

Although she says "it's no good just yelling at somebody or getting cross about it," Thompson abandons her sense of humor to explain her ban on the personal: "The bottom line is that I wouldn't dream about asking you any questions about your personal life because I think that would be rude. I don't know you well enough. If you were my friend, I would say, 'I hear you've been having a bit of a hard time. Are you OK?' But to be asked it in a public situation, it's a kind of a-politeness. It's like amorality. Perfectly normal, well-brought-up people will suddenly behave as though they've never heard the words 'good manners' or 'courtesy.' It's bizarre, actually, finally. There is no place for it. . . .

"It doesn't matter how often you ask me, I will not answer, but don't ask me, because it's not good for you. . . . Actors don't really matter, we're just performers. But if we can re-establish good relations between the press and politicians - that's where it really gets scary. No wonder Colin Powell didn't want to run. Who would want to run? Who. Would. Want. To. Run? No wonder a decent man thought, 'I'm going to have a vile time, if I run for office they will dredge through my dustbins.' That to me is what's really, really dangerous."

Thompson finishes her impassioned defense with a related point about the sound-bite mentality, "the bastardization of our language" and the dangers of fascism. "Gawd!" she laughs after a beat, her face red. "I'm just old- fashioned. Take no notice. I get like this sometimes."

She jokes that she may be in denial, but she is nonetheless extremely wary of fame. "I regard it with a certain degree of jaundiced skepticism at the moment. And certainly if it were to snowball into anything worse, I'd stop acting. . . . It would be sad to stop something I love so much. But I would, I really would. I would write instead."

Thompson's love of writing has defined her life as much as acting. "I'm deeply shortsighted because of having done nothing but read when I was little," she says. She developed her taste for literature from her late father, an actor and director named Eric Thompson. He was a "country lad" from a working-class background, she says, but he educated himself. "He was absolutely self-taught, and he loved language and he loved irony in particular." When she went on to study at Cambridge University, Thompson majored in English literature, opining in her thesis paper that novelist George Eliot had failed to create a satisfactory heroine.

At Cambridge, Thompson began writing her own comedy material. She was a performer in the university's Footlights revue, a mostly male club that had been the training ground for members of Monty Python. Hugh Laurie, who has a small role in "Sense and Sensibility," and Stephen Fry were there at the same time as Thompson. "It was Hugh and Stephen who wrote most of the material," she says. "I'd always complain that there wasn't enough for me to do, so I thought, 'Well, I'd better write something. I can't just keep complaining.' " She proceeded to write monologues and sketches, a talent that eventually fueled her six-part TV series "Thompson," which co-starred her mother, Phyllida Ann Law, and her sister, Sophie Thompson, both actresses. (Sophie currently appears as the ever-complaining Mary Musgrove in ''Persuasion.")

When she accepted her Academy Award for "Howards End," Thompson told the world, "I hope it encourages the creation of more true screen heroines." Now she says that her drive to finish the "Sense and Sensibility" script was partly fueled by this wish for screen heroines for actresses "from 12 to 65," she says. "There aren't many good roles for women, something that's not a wife, mother, murder victim, prostitute. Just a real person with a story to tell, and not someone who is shoring up the main moral protagonist in a story."

The biggest surprise about "Sense and Sensibility" is its director, Ang Lee, the Taiwan native who made "The Wedding Banquet" and "Eat Drink Man Woman." While his films cover the same kind of territory as Austen's novels - familial relationships, particularly among women - he was certainly not an obvious choice by the film's producers for the $15 million production. "I did have a lot of fear of doing this," Lee himself says.

"I thought it was the most brilliant idea," says Thompson, who has had luck with another outsider, James Ivory, the American director of "Howards End" and "Remains of the Day." "With such a British script, a classic author and very clasically trained, very British actors, you needed someone from outside to come in and shake it all up. And stop us from doing 'and now we're doing period acting.' " Thompson says she knew Lee was the best choice when she found the same line in both "Eat Drink Man Woman" and "Sense and Sensibility," when one sister says to the other: "What do you know of my heart?"

The set of "Sense and Sensibility" ended up as a lesson in Eastern vs. Western leadership styles. "He pulled all the energy out of us in a very still way," Thompson says. "We weren't used to that. We misinterpreted his silences a lot of the time. . . . And Ang learned that when we made suggestions it wasn't because we were doubting his vision. It was because we're used to offering suggestions. Which is not how things worked back home, where he would say what he wanted, and the actors would do it, and there was no discussion."

Right now, it seems to be raining Jane. In addition to the opening of ''Sense and Sensibility," a new 6-hour BBC production of "Pride and Prejudice" will air in January; an adaptation of "Persuasion" is still in theaters; and three versions of "Emma" are on the way, two from British TV and the third an American feature starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Greta Scacchi.

Thompson sees no cosmic plot. "It's like what happens in London in the theater. After 15 years, suddenly all the companies do 'Macbeth' at the same time. It's osmotic; something happens in the air as soon as someone has had an idea. It's like when you learn a new word, and the first thing you hear the next day when you get up is that word."

She says Austen still works for audiences because people haven't changed radically. "They're modern people. It's only 200 years ago. That's 10 minutes ago." Men and women still need to choose between love and money, she says, just as does nearly every character in "Sense and Sensibility." "Now, of course, we go to see psychoanalysts. But it's still the same." Austen's humor, she says, is also modern in its bite.

The bottom line, she says, is a sparsity of ideas. "There are so few really well-written scripts, that's one of the reasons people are turning to great novels."

And how would Austen feel about her newfound popularity? "I think she'd want a percentage of the gross," Thompson says.

 

 

Originally on KelClancy's Page - now not accessable