One of the things that has made Emma Thompson such an enduringly popular figure is that she doesn’t act like a movie star. Having long ago given up wearing high heels (“torture things”), she accepted her damehood from Prince William in 2018 wearing Adidas trainers, and when we meet in the glamorous surroundings of the Locarno Film Festival, she tells me: “I just went caravanning with one of my oldest friends in the south of England. It was blissful.”
She has come to southern Switzerland to receive an award recognising her illustrious career and for the world premiere of crime thriller The Dead of Winter. It finds Thompson, 66, venturing into new territory as a Minnesotan widow who uncovers the kidnapping of a young woman.
The day after the premiere, Thompson arrives wearing a crisp white shirt and red-rimmed spectacles. “Last night was incredible,” she beams. “I felt like I was being welcomed as someone who had been a public servant, a public performer, for a long time.” The actor-screenwriter-producer is also a polyglot; she delivered her acceptance speech in Italian to a crowd of 6,500. “To sit in the full piazza, watching a film on this huge screen under the stars is something I’ll never forget, especially because this movie is hardly set indoors, so you look up and it appears as if the sky on screen is extending above into our world.”