Express & Star

Emma Thompson made a dame in Queen’s Birthday Honours

The actress has already received a string of accolades during her glittering career.

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Emma Thompson

One of Britain’s most acclaimed actresses, Emma Thompson has been a stalwart of the big and small screen since the late 1980s but has maintained an un-starry air throughout her dazzling career.

It is for her services to drama that the star, 59, has earned a damehood in the Queens’s Birthday Honours list, continuing a long list of achievements that includes Oscars, Baftas, Golden Globes and Emmys.

She has also enjoyed success at the box office and with critics, with literary adaptations such as Sense And Sensibility; for which she won an Oscar for writing the adaptation; Howards End; which scored her a best actress Oscar, and The Remains Of The Day as well as crowd-pleasers such as Love Actually, the Nanny McPhee films, which she also wrote, and the Harry Potter blockbusters.

Thompson/Oscars
Emma Thompson in Sense And Sensibility (Sony)

It was there she also discovered a love of performing and joined Footlights alongside Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.

Her professional breakthrough came in 1987 when she starred in Fortunes Of War and Tutti Frutti, the former opposite Kenneth Branagh, who would go on to become her first husband.

BAFTA Awards – Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh – London
Emma Thompson with Kenneth Branagh (Adam Butler/PA)

At the 1994 Oscars, Thompson became the eighth performer in history to be nominated for two statues in the same year, when she scored a best actress nod for The Remains Of The Day and a best supporting actress nomination for In The Name Of The Father, in which she starred opposite Daniel Day-Lewis.

One of her biggest commercial successes came in 2003 in Love Actually, in which she suspects her husband (played by Alan Rickman) of infidelity.

She has said this is the role she gets commended for more than any other.

Grant & Knightley Love Actually
Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant and Keira Knightley at the Love Actually premiere (Ian West/PA)

Also an outspoken human rights activist, she is a supporter of the Labour party and a campaigner for Greenpeace.

She still lives on the road where she grew up in London with her husband Greg Wise, whom she met while filming Sense And Sensibility.

BAFTA Film Awards 2014 – After Party – London
Emma Thompson with husband Greg Wise, second left, daughter Gaia and adopted son Tindyebwa Agaba at the Baftas in 2014 (Ian West/PA)
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