Emma takes control of role (From Basingstoke Gazette)

Emma takes control of role

10:53am Monday 13th October 2008 in

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AS IS appropriate for the film’s matriarch, the press conference for Brideshead Revisited in London’s Knightsbridge is dominated by its elder stateswoman, Emma Thompson. It isn’t that she’s the oldest by much, more so that the 49-year-old actress has had a long and successful career since breaking through on stage in Me and My Girl, and on television in Fortunes of War, compared with the relative novices alongside her on the panel.

And where, say, Ben Whishaw is more restrained, she grabs the event by the throat, throwing out quips and longer musings, dominating proceedings as her character Lady Marchmain dominates the lives of her children in this adaptation.

She also enjoys recollecting her recent shenanigans for the press, where she made quite an entrance for waiting photographers – “What was I to do? When we were walking in, there was a press line of photographers, and I had to walk past, in quick succession, a lamppost, a no parking sign, two bollards, a bicycle – which, obviously, I had to get on because it would be funny – and a bin!” Graham Greene once had a stab at converting Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel for the cinema, a long time before it became the subject matter of one of the most beloved costume dramas of all time in 1981. Even though Emma is one of the cast members who would have been old enough to appreciate it, she didn’t see it at the time – and has still never watched it.

“I didn’t see the TV series,” she reveals. “I was 20, I was a punk rocker. I was strolling around London in a lot of zips. I’ve grown into it now. I’ve made a point of not watching it so that I didn’t get put off.”

Her role, which was then played by Claire Bloom, is that of a particularly religious mother whose faith, inadvertently or not, puts a lot of pressure on her children. Her interference in the love triangle between her son, Sebastian (Ben Whishaw), his university friend, Charles (Matthew Goode), and her daughter, Julia (Hayley Atwell), is crucial for the way things end up for them all.

Emma enthuses: “I thought Lady Marchmain was so interesting, so different and quite peculiar – dark and controlling as well as controlled.

“I also felt I knew that world, having been brought up in Britain. That kind of upbringing is just part and parcel of our heritage, even if you don’t know that world personally. “She is an incredibly complicated character. I think she was brought up by people who withheld all affection in lieu of the love of God, damaging her emotionally, which she then carried into her own parenting, and her children are damaged too.

“She had also lost all her brothers in the First World War – these wonderful strong men in her life – and when we first meet Lady Marchmain, it is at a time before women had the vote in this country. So all her power is invested in her children and the form behind which she lives, which includes her house, her clothing and her manners”.

Does she think of her as in any way a cold character?

“The thing about Marchers is that she really does believe that if she doesn’t do right by her children, they will go to hell. In the same way as I believe that if I do not prevent my child from running out into the road, she will get run over.

“So I pursue her with the same vehemence in relation to cars as Lady Marchmain pursues her children in relation to anything really, from food to sex to marriage.

“She believes she is doing the right thing – she’s giving them the tools with which they can save themselves. She’s giving them the religious version of the Green Cross Code. So while her emotional methods with her children are cruel and dysfunctional to the point of psychosis, she does believe that she’s doing the right thing, for all the right reasons.”

As a mother of one eight-year-old daughter (with the actor Greg Wise), did she feel old enough to play Lady Marchmain, with three on-screen adult children? “It was a struggle,” she smiles.

When she looked in the mirror for the first time with her make-up on, did her mum (actress Phyllida Law) look back at her?

“She certainly did. She pursed her lips and said, [puts on Scottish accent] ‘You’re just right’. It was very alarming. I was a bit alarmed about playing a mother, I’ve tried to avoid it. But you see, my oldest child in the film, who I had when I was 13, Ed Stoppard (who plays her eldest son), God rot him, he was a bugger to push out at that age!

“We did have a very nice time and they didn’t treat me as though as I was the old bag not worth talking to, so I was very grateful for that.”

Emma is a veteran of British period films, having previously starred in Howard’s End and The Remains of the Day for Merchant Ivory, and in Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, for which she wrote the script.

Starring in Brideshead Revisited meant that she was able to enjoy unlimited access to one of the most fabulous properties in England, Castle Howard in Yorkshire. “Castle Howard is so interesting because it’s run as a business now. The difference between swanning around when Lady Marchers was in charge was that she lived in it in the way that the Queen doesn’t even live in Buckingham Palace. It’s like, ‘they will have to open the gilt room for you’, whereas Marchers would have been wandering around wherever she wanted with a vast quantity of servants.

“[During filming] we were living partly in that bit, which is run like a theatre, and partly in the bit where they keep the J Cloths and the linoleum. I’ve been backstage at Windsor Castle and there is a lot of linoleum. There is a backstage bit that is completely disconnected, and that’s what I found fascinating – that it’s like a theatre.”

Was it also fascinating to take a look at a time when Oxbridge was very male, given that she attended Cambridge as a student?

“When I went for my interview, the dons would literally hug the walls as women came past, and that’s not that long ago. So that’s Oxbridge from a woman’s point of view.”

• Brideshead Revisited is on general release now
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