Sophie Thompson
Sophie Thompson is an actor, born 1962.
Her heaviest shelf is a theatre one. Sophie Thompson won the 1999 Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical for the London revival of Into the Woods, and has been nominated six further times over more than thirty years, for Wildest Dreams, Company, Clybourne Park, Guys and Dolls, Present Laughter and When We Are Married. That is a body of work most screen audiences will never see.
What she does on camera is a species of English comic acting close to extinction: precise, unvain, built on rhythm. Her Miss Bates in the 1996 Emma is the definitive account of a woman who talks continuously and says nothing, played so that you also understand how frightened she is underneath the chatter. Her Mary Musgrove in Persuasion is comic hypochondria performed without a single wink at the audience. As Lydia in Four Weddings and a Funeral she is the bride at the wedding where the priest cannot get through the vows, and she gets a laugh out of a handful of reaction shots.
The film career has never matched the talent, partly a matter of type and partly her own bias toward the stage, but she has been used steadily and well: Dorothy in Gosford Park, Rose in Dancing at Lughnasa, Miss Lacreevy in Nicholas Nickleby. On television she is everywhere worth being, Sheila in Detectorists, Jan in Inside No. 9, Maggie in Feel Good, Bunny in Ghosts, and Gloria Hildebrandt in Silo, the most unlikely address on the list and a reminder that she plays grave as easily as she plays funny.
Movies (13)
TV (13)
Where to start with Sophie Thompson
Go to Emma for Miss Bates. It is the performance other actors cite, a comic turn that keeps tipping into something sadder without ever slowing a scene down, and it is the best single argument for her.
Gosford Park next, because that film is a machine for demonstrating what good English character actors do with small parts, and she is a large part of why the downstairs half works. Then Persuasion for the funniest Mary Musgrove committed to film and Four Weddings and a Funeral for the scene everyone has already seen.
On television, take Detectorists and Inside No. 9 as the pair, one gentle and one distinctly not. Feel Good gives her a straighter and sadder register, and Silo is the science fiction outlier for anyone who needs proof she is more than a comic actor.