A graduate of Cambridge University Footlights and the University's
first all-female troupe, Woman's Hour, Thompson worked in theatre in
the early 1980s with Kenneth Branagh's Renaissance Theatre Company.
She appeared first on television in 1987, playing a spiky Glasgow waitress
in John Byrne's six-part drama, Tutti Frutti, a wonderfully surreal
and tragic musical comedy of Scottish rock 'n roll and masculinity.
Thompson's performance was arresting: a star quality touched with a
dangerous eccentricity, a characteristic that has been masked by the
rather more predictable good taste with which she has come to be associated.
In the same year, she played opposite Kenneth
Branagh in the television adaptation of Olivia Manning's The Fortunes
of War, a casting which began a screen association both with Branagh
and with classic adaptation.
Moving into cinema, she played Katherine to Branagh's Henry in his
Henry V (1989) and Beatrice to Branagh's Benedick in his Much Ado About
Nothing (1993). It is not clear whether they were haunted by shades
of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh
or were courting them, but the connection was inescapable and they became
for a brief time a golden couple for the upwardly mobile. Independently
of Branagh, Thompson's association with quality adaptations led to an
Oscar for Best Actress in the Merchant-Ivory Howard's
End (1992), an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in the Merchant-Ivory
The Remains of the
Day (1993), a Golden Globe award for Best Screenplay, an Oscar nomination
for Best Actress and an Oscar for Best Screenplay for her own adaptation
of Sense and Sensibility
(1996).
Her attempts at versatility have met with less critical or popular
approval: given her own BBC television show at an early stage in her
career, Thompson (1988), she paid the price of hubris and over-exposure;
Branagh's Dead Again (1991) and Peter's
Friends (1992) won her few fans; and her appearance in In the Name
of the Father (1993) seemed worthy but miscast. The intelligence of
her acting is beyond doubt. Her problem will be to resist the narrowing
of her range to the English virtues of quality and good taste that Hollywood
rewards, going beyond mere versatility to rediscover some of the earlier
danger.
