Emma Thompson

Attempts to classify Emma Thompson continue, like the search for the philosopher’s stone. The quest is doomed, but you can’t blame people for trying. She tends to daunt. As the darling of Cambridge Footlights she was set for a career in the higher variety, but she kicked in the afterburner and kept on climbing. Her key role in the series TV series Tutti Frutti proved that the small screen wasn’t big enough. But she couldn’t even be pigeonholed as a movie star, because sometimes she wrote the movie. Oscars were duly bestowed, and America strove to understand when she said she kept them in the loo. Everybody has a cherished Thompson moment amongst the heap of treasure. Mine is her multiple performance in Angels in America, although I have never fully got over her early revue sketch with Stephen Fry in which the graves of Robert and Elizabeth Browning (Grow Old Along With Us) were so thoroughly turned over, with silver shovels of glittering elocution. One wishes her every success as a Greenpeace activist but I hope it won’t mean that the power to the cinemas is turned off. Abject adoration is a default male mode vis-a-vis the protean Emma but I hope my pitiless interrogation proves that I’m above all that.