Emma Thompson

Dame Emma Thompson has spent more than four decades on screen and stage, and the shape of her career is unusual because she is a genuine double threat in the technical sense: she holds two Academy Awards, one of them for writing. Her adaptation of Sense and Sensibility won Best Adapted Screenplay and the Golden Globe for screenplay, which makes her a rarity among leading actors of any era. The rest of the shelf runs to three BAFTA Awards, two Golden Globes, a Primetime Emmy for guest comedy work and two Grammy nominations. She was made a dame by Queen Elizabeth II in 2018 for her contributions to drama.

Her early screen run reads like a syllabus of British prestige filmmaking: Henry V, Dead Again, Howards End, Much Ado About Nothing, The Remains of the Day, In the Name of the Father. What she brought to those parts was not stateliness but intelligence under strain. Watch her in The Remains of the Day and the whole performance is a woman being witty at a man who cannot hear it. That is her signature move, and it survives translation into much lighter material.

The later career has been deliberately promiscuous. She is Sybill Trelawney in two Harry Potter films, Mrs. Potts, Captain Amelia in Treasure Planet, Elinor in Brave, the Baroness in Cruella, the title role in Nanny McPhee, P.L. Travers in Saving Mr. Banks. Alongside that she has kept making small, unglamorous things: The Children Act, Late Night, and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, which asks more of her at sixty than most films ask of anyone.