She’s won Oscars for writing and acting, and has been made a DBE for services to drama. She’s also a revolutionary idler. Tom Hodgkinson chats with star of page and screen Emma Thompson

Most of us know that Emma Thompson is a star of stage and screen. She’s the only person to have won an Oscar for both acting and writing. She won Best Actress for Howards End in 1992 and Best Adapted Screenplay for Sense and Sensibility in 1996. More recently she played Miss Trunchbull in the film version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda. This year she was presented with the Leopard Club Award at the Locarno Film Festival in recognition of her career as a whole (she delighted the audience by delivering her acceptance speech in Italian). Less well known is her support for the magazine you read, and the Idler project in general. She opened our shop in 2011 and contributed to our fund-raising project in 2017. And this year she said “yes!” when I asked her to appear at our summer festival. She spoke on the Saturday, and after the show, she and husband Greg Wise cheerfully drank beer with us. “Oh we love Tribute!” She came back the following day with her entire family and spent all day there, checking out every stall and event, and spreading an amazing amount of good cheer. She’s a star in every way. Here’s an edited transcript of our chat, which ranged over grief, the necessity of protest, the art of beekeeping, Jane Austen, her Dad’s death, Nanny McPhee: The Musical and her working secret: the two-hour day.

Tom Hodgkinson You mentioned that you might like to talk about grief today.

Emma Thompson My husband, who is here somewhere, in a vest, is writing a book about grief. He’s writing about grief in his own life, but also about the fact that we don’t appear to be able to talk about grief and death very easily in our society. There was a very extraordinary statistic – Greg, what was it? Something like 80% of people in this country say they’re very willing to talk about grief, but only 14% actually do. He looks at how men deal with grief, because they’re not encouraged to share, whereas women do that pretty naturally.

TH You were saying just now that your Dad was really quite strict in your manner of speech – he would tell you off for using words like “like”.

ET My father, who had not had much of an education and was mostly self-taught, valued language above all things. So he used it very carefully. And he was very strict about me not peppering my language with “sort of” and “like”. He said, just take a pause, because those phrases are just you waiting for the right word. People don’t have to be told everything all at once. You can afford to wait. It was a very useful lesson. And the irony, of course, that he was killed by a stroke. That was very hard. The only words he could remember – and this is common in people who have had strokes – were the swear words. He was 48 when he had the stroke and 52 when he died.

TH What are you working on at the moment?

ET I’m writing the musical of Nanny McPhee, which we’ve been working on for eight years. It’s also about grief. It’s about a family where the mother has died and no one’s talking about it, and everyone’s very upset, and the children are very angry, and they’re acting out, and the father doesn’t understand. Actually, it’s all about giving yourself time to heal. There’s a song in the middle of it called “Patchwork Heart”. It’s sort of inspired by my grandmother, who said, “Your heart’s really no use as a heart until it’s been broken at least ten times.” If you think about it, it’s those breaks and tears and the repairs you make that help you to become stronger. We talk about resilience, and “post traumatic growth”. And a broken heart gives you access to more compassion. When you’re hurt, you’re more able, I think, to be vulnerable and to accept other people’s vulnerability. Every day, we read stories about healing, about grief. I was born post war, and the entire country was in grief, but nobody talks about that. It’s not discussed. And I think it affected everyone for many decades. The trauma passes through the generations.

TH You don’t like the word “career” but you’ve had a successful time as an actor. Did you always want to tread the boards?

ET When I was at school, at Camden School for Girls, I wanted to be a hospital administrator. That might come as a surprise, but there was a lady who came to the school who was a hospital administrator, and I liked her shoes, and I thought she sounded capable, which she probably was. Actually, I would have made a very good hospital administrator.

Later I did one of those careers things. People would ask you questions, and then they’d suggest careers. And my top thing was the church. And I thought, that’s very interesting, because at the age of 16, I was actually interested in becoming a Christian, until I found out that gays would not be welcome.

I didn’t want to be an actor. I wanted to be a comedian, and was sometimes even a paid comedian. On my 25th birthday, I earned 60 quid doing stand-up at the Croydon Warehouse. I was the warm-up act for Ben Elton. I was telling jokes about Margaret Thatcher and herpes being equally irritating and painful and really hard to get rid of. The socialist, leftist male comics at the time were about as brutally laddish as you could possibly hope for. They were shitty to the women, except for Ben Elton, who was amazing. On another occasion, Billy Connolly was supposed to do the compering for Elvis Costello who was playing a huge thing at the Palladium or something. But he didn’t turn up so they asked me to do it. And it was the most terrifying thing. I had to just make it up as I went along. I was awake for three days afterwards, just the adrenalin, the fear.

But those times [the eighties]… they were times of real protest before the police were given so many powers to control and suppress protests. Your chapter in How to Be Idle about riot is extremely important. We must be allowed to do that. Nanny McPhee believes that children’s protest should be listened to. Children should be heard and when they protest, taken seriously. It’s a legitimate protest.

TH What was the genesis of Nanny McPhee?

ET The author of the original books is Christianna Brand. She had white parents, but they lived in India. She wrote a book in 1964 called Nurse Matilda, and it was illustrated by Edward Ardizzone, a wonderful artist. There’s a kind of ancient druidical presence in her, and she’s not apologetic. She’s not female in the sense that she has to mother or be loving or even be subtle about her methods. She’s just very, very clear and often rebellious herself. If you think about what she does to the children, it’s quite mean. The first song we wrote for the musical is called, “Is it Wrong to Eat a Baby”?

These were, in fact, stories that Christianna Brand’s grandfather told the children to send them to sleep at night. So the children are always naughty, and this nanny person does weird things and makes them carry on and go to extremes until they’re exhausted. And they say, Please, let us stop. But there was no narrative. I invented a family [for the film version and now for the stage musical version], at the centre of which was a huge gaping hole, which was the death of the mother. The family was in chaos because their father wasn’t talking about this. He wasn’t able to help his children or understand their grief, which actually happened to me and my sister when my father died. It was very difficult for anyone to help us, because it wasn’t understood that that kind of traumatic grief needs to be addressed. We all just got on with it. Very post-war of us.

And then you have to decide – who is Nanny McPhee? What is she? We’ve been having lots of conversations about this. She’s a sort of crone. PL Travers, who wrote Mary Poppins, writes a lot about the nymph, mother and crone. I think I’m in between mother and crone. Some days, I feel a lot more crone. When I was young and discovered feminist writings and the work of the suffragettes and all of that, I honestly thought that by the time I got to the mother stage, that we would have got there – at least to equal pay, for instance. But we’re not there yet. That’s actually mad, because even equal pay would make all the problems we’re having with poverty in this country much better.

The musical has puppetry. Our baby is a puppet. At first you think, well, there’s a person behind the baby, but then you stop looking at the person. You don’t see them at all. This is an ancient form of theatre, and it’s so beautiful to see it today. What we want to do with this show is bring back some of that ancient stuff. I was thinking about having a ventriloquist because ventriloquism is also ancient. We also have a puppet donkey called Clementine. When we were taking a break and puppeteers had the donkey head on, they would rest like a donkey. That’s dedication for you.

Don’t forget, I was brought up by parents in the theatre. Sometimes they were in work. And when they were in work, there was money. And when they weren’t in work, there wasn’t money. And my father would pin the bills on to the fridge and say, “That’s the telephone bill this month. It can’t be that. It must be halved.” Actually, that was quite a big thing to share with your children. It meant that my sister and I would not use the phone at all. We were so anxious about spending all our parents’ money. I’m still anxious about money, actually.

TH Matilda is a lovely film.

ET That was during Covid. It was a six-month shoot, and the crew had to wear masks all the time. And I was the lucky one, because I was wearing so much prosthetics, I didn’t have to wear the mask. The 200 children who worked on it were so wonderful, and we used to all hug each other. We weren’t allowed to do that, of course, so we would conduct these massive hidden hug-ins behind buildings.

TH The film is very warm. Was there a good vibe on set?

ET It was a huge movie, lots of money. And I would say that huge movies, generally speaking, are not as compassionate in the making as smaller, independent jobs. And those smaller films are being made much less now because they’re making the same thing over and over again. You know, those things you see sometimes in magazines, “What are the 100 Best Movies?” Just look at the list. It’s always got The Godfather on it. And just tell me if all the women in those movies could not be replaced by a sexy mannequin. I read a wonderful article recently that said exactly that – can’t remember the author. And I love a superhero movie, occasionally, but they’re just wall-to-wall now. Why do we keep telling the same story? And it’s such an unhelpful story, if you think about it. Superhero movies generally say: we need one person to solve the world’s problems, and they’ll do it. Instead of what actually happens, and should happen, which is getting everyone together and doing it together. The single heroic saviour is a sort of dictator myth, isn’t it?

Actually, I think more beautiful stories happen now in animation. And I also have to mention that there’s a lovely film coming out next year called Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Movie, written by Craig Mazin. It’s about a shepherd who gets murdered and his sheep solve the crime. That’s the sort of thing we need – the idea that animals and people can be that close, which is terribly important.

TH Am I right that you and Greg have started keeping bees?

ET Bill Anderson, the Idle Beekeeper, is my idol. He’s here tomorrow. I thought keeping bees was really complicated, and I didn’t want to let them down. You know, one feels a great responsibility to bees at the moment, since we’re not creating an environment that is useful for them. So yes, we followed Dr B’s plans for an idle hive. We took a little honey as rent, and that’s just been the most incredibly sacred substance.

There was a bee accident in America recently. Greg, what was it? A lorry crashed somewhere, and 250 million bees, which were all being taken off to work as slave bees, were released. All the hives had to be taken out of the lorries and put by the side of the road for days until the bees came back from, you know, fucking off.

Oh, sorry. I’ve just seen a small person. I beg your pardon. I’ll stop swearing.

Talking of small people, that brings me back to something I wanted to add to the whole Nanny McPhee thing. I actually did a little speech at the beginning of presentations that we showed to theatre owners yesterday and the day before, and there were lots of young people, so I directed my remarks to them. And I said that the thing about Nanny McPhee is that she looks very strange on the outside, but is in fact very beautiful on the inside. That is very useful: we should remind ourselves not to judge people on how they look. Including ourselves, crucially.

But going back to my dad – he wrote a programme called The Magic Roundabout, which a lot of you will know. He said you don’t write for children: who wants to hear “the cat sat on the mat”? He would use phrases like “hoist with your own petard”. And then he would get irate letters from parents saying, “My children simply don’t understand these things.” And he would write back, and pepper those letters with the longest words he could find in the Oxford English Dictionary. He would find really abstruse phrases and words and use those. And he also got a letter from a little lad who said, “My mum just told me off for calling my sister a mollusc. Is that a bad word?” He wrote back and explained what a mollusc was, suggesting he ask his mother if she had anything against snails.

Audience member When you wrote the screenplay for Sense and Sensibility, was it made easier in the sense that you could just use lines from the book?

ET There hadn’t been many Jane Austen adaptations at that point. They’re everywhere now. It’s mushrooming. And Lindsay Doran [the producer] said, “Do you fancy writing this?” And I said, “I’ll give it a go.” And I spoke to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who’d done the screenplays for Howards End and The Remains of the Day. And she said, just adapt the whole thing. That is to say, make a scene, write the scene. You have to make scenes. You have to dramatise it. You can’t use much of the dialogue, actually. Hardly any dialogue from the actual book is in the screenplay, because it’s quite, well, literary. I could check next time I read the book … it was a long journey. I’d never written a screenplay before. It took five years to write. Jane Austen’s letters were really helpful. They kept reminding me what a sharp observer she was, how funny, how satirical, how deeply human.

Audience member: I’m an actress and I despair at the lack of parts for older women.

ET We must write them! We have to recognise what we already do. We have to write about the painful changes in our lives. We have to write about birth. I mean, I’m lucky. I get to work, I get to do wonderful things. I have no complaints at all. I understand. But it’s really the same question, you know: how do we get women into more stories? Well, we have to tell more stories about them. It’s very difficult because sometimes they can get a little bit pious and sad. And actually, I find that the women I know, and women generally, are full of joy and laughs and fun and positive energy. So that’s what I want to see as well. I’d like to tell stories about how joyful it is and how wonderful is, and what power we have, and inhabit that power and see those women doing their extraordinary thing, even if it is, you know, at home, or even if it is in some small capacity that isn’t saving the world single handedly… actually, women do save the world single handedly, almost every single day, just by being a mother, just by being helpful.

Audience member How do you balance working and idling?

ET I had a little Post-it note in my office for years, which said, “Inspiration is the act of drawing up the writing chair to the table.” What I do in my writing practice is as follows: I sit down with my cup of tea at eight, and I work for two hours, and then I go for a long walk. I very rarely go back to work in the afternoon. And I don’t write in the evening. I’m a morning person. I think a lot of stuff goes on in my head when I’m walking. And when I’m sleeping.

There you have it. Emma Thompson’s two-hour day. Spoken like a true idler.

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