Emma Thompson

‘Acting’s Just My Job. Fame Is A Completely Accidental By-product’

- Michelle Davies

She’s one of the most versatile actresses in the business, a screenwriter and campaigner on climate change. With two new movies in the pipeline and a renewed enthusiasm for street protesting, we’ll be seeing a lot more of her this summer

It was 1978 and Cambridge undergraduate Stephen Fry was in the audience as a group of first-year English students performed the Tom Stoppard play Travesties.

Fry, himself a budding actor and comedian, was expecting it to be a stellar production as befitting the university’s reputation for drama, but found himself blown away by one cast member in particular. ‘What stood out for me above all else was the performance of just one of the actresses,’ he later recounted. ‘This girl was really something. Medium height with a perfect English complexion, she was gravely beautiful, extraordinarily funny and commandingly assured beyond her years. Her name, the programme told me, was Emma Thompson.’ Afterwards, Fry and Thompson, then 18, became friends and through him she joined Cambridge University’s illustrious Footlights comedy sketch troupe, setting alight an acting and screenwriting career that’s spanned four decades and earned her two Oscars.

This year, as she turns 60, Thompson (also a Dame) can boast one of the most eclectic careers of any British actress. She segues seamlessly between Shakespeare, period dramas and big-budget Hollywood blockbusters, including this month’s Men In Black: International reboot, in which she stars as the enigmatic Agent O. Her other major film release this summer is Late Night, a satire on American talk shows in which she stars as a host accused of being out of touch, who employs