GREG WISE OPENING UP ABOUT CARING FOR HIS ADORED LATE SISTER ON HOW GRIEF CHANGED HIM AND HOW HE AND WIFE DAME EMMA THOMPSON KEEP THAT SPECIAL SPARK

When HELLO! speaks to Greg Wise, he is sitting alone in his daughter's old bedroom and the house is rather quiet. 

- EMILY HORAN

"Both the women in my life are in Finland at the moment," says the 57-year-old actor of his wife, Dame Emma Thompson, 64, and their daughter Gaia, 24. "Em's out making a thriller [The Fisher-woman] and Gaia is playing her in flashbacks, which is wonderful. They're having to plunge themselves into ice-cold water and roll around in the snow every day. I'll go out and visit when I can." 

Last year marked two decades of marriage for Greg and Emma, who met on the set of 1995's Sense and Sensibility for which Emma wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay. As well as Gaia, they also share son Tindy, 36, a former child soldier in Rwanda whom they informally adopted in 2003, after meeting him at a Refugee Council event.

DOING THE HARD YARDS

The secret to their long-lasting love, Greg says, is quite simple. "To keep bloody working at it. If it's a friendship that also has a love and children attached, you've got to work that much harder.

"Possibly the secret is not spending the entire time together," he adds. "As actors, there is a lot of separation in our life because we get ripped away to spend months filming or touring. So we are probably quite good at plumbing ourselves back in after long times of being apart.

"Then the flaming row, which my mother-in-law calls 'the reentry', is fantastically important. You clean all that out and you get on with it."

Full of pride as he talks about the two leading ladies in his life, Greg has an air of easy charm, wit and openness and remarkably, that demeanour remains when our conversation turns to the difficult topic of grief.