Managing Editor
They were British movie royalty. Everything they touched seemed to turn to gold. She was an accomplished actress who not only starred in his films but had already won one Academy Award as Best Actress and was in high demand. He has established his own film company, had managed to revive the general public’s love of Shakespeare and had the world at his feet. They appeared the perfect couple and were so often seen together that they’d become KenandEm. However, Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson’s seemingly perfect life came crashing down when they split in 1995 among rumours of an affair with Branagh’s co-star, Helena Bonham Carter.
Thompson and Branagh had been married for six years before their 1995 split. At the time, Branagh had been busy completing his 1994 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, while Thompson hot of her success with Remains of the Day and In the Name of the Father, was completing Sense and Sensibility in which she not only starred as Elinor Dashwood, but also wrote the screenplay for. It was easy to understand the claim that it was the distance between them caused by their work demands that led to the break up.
While it was never discussed by either party, rumours quickly surfaced that Branagh and Bonham Carter’s relationship had turned romantic while working on Frankenstein. Not long after the pair went public with their relationship and were together until 1999. In a recent interview with the UK’s The Sunday Times, Thompson has spoken about the alleged affair, saying that she had long forgiven Bonham Carter.
“[It’s] All blood under the bridge. You can’t hold on to anything like that. I just think… pfft,” Thompson said. “It’s pointless. I haven’t got the energy for it. Helena and I made our peace years and years ago.”
She’s even able to make a joke of it, hypothesising that the reason that Branagh had fallen for both women was because they were both “slightly mad and a bit fashion-challenged.”
One of Thompson’s most beloved roles is that of Karen in 2003’s Christmas film, Love Actually. In the film, her character discovers that her husband (Alan Rickman) is having some kind of affair and in a heartbreaking scene, excuses herself from the family festivities to escape to her bedroom where she breaks down to the dulcet tones of Joni Mitchell. Speaking of that particular scene, Thompson admitted that life had thrown her plenty of moments off-screen that she was able to draw on for playing emotional scenes such as that. “I’ve had so much bloody practice at crying in a bedroom, then having to go out and be cheerful, gathering up the pieces of my heart and putting them in a drawer,” she said.
Thompson can next be seen alongside Tom Hanks in the biopic Saving Mr Banks. The story of Walt Disney’s attempts to convince PJ Travers to allow him to produce a film of her hit novel, Mary Poppins, is in cinemas on November 29 in the UK and December 20 in the US.
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