Branagh, Kenneth, and Thompson, Emma

▪ 1994

      Who was the "better half" of the acting spouses Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh? That would have been hard to answer in 1993, a year in which both Britons accomplished big things in film. The sandy-haired Branagh popularized Shakespeare with Much Ado About Nothing, a film in which he served as screenwriter, director, and star. His main costar was Thompson, who played Beatrice to his Benedick, the thorn in his side and the throb in his heart. The breezy, colourful Much Ado won the praise of most critics and attracted an unusually large and diverse audience. Having achieved his third success in four years, Branagh was hailed as "a one-man British film industry" and appointed to the board of the British Film Institute.

      As for Thompson, she won an Academy Award for her work in Howards End as a pragmatic bohemian who befriends a dying woman and later marries her widower. The key element in this performance—and in her acclaimed work as a 1930s housekeeper in The Remains of the Day (1993)—was her strikingly large, pale blue eyes, through which she revealed more than her character could ever say. Despite her having achieved a prominence that rivaled her husband's, the couple's relationship remained—according to Thompson—one of "playful conflict."

      Branagh was born in troubled Belfast, Northern Ireland, on Dec. 10, 1960, but fled to London with his working-class parents nine years later. Forced to be English at school and Irish at home, the confused Branagh sought identity in acting. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and later, as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, wowed audiences with lead performances in Hamlet and Henry V. The film version of the latter earned him Oscar nominations for acting and directing. In 1989 he established his own Renaissance Theatre Company.

      Thompson was born in London on April 15, 1959, to actors Phyllida Law and Eric Thompson. Having a father who wore garishly checked suits and a mother who cleaned house wearing nothing at all, Thompson developed an appreciation for the ridiculous, and she parlayed it into comedy as part of the University of Cambridge's Footlights troupe. Soon after graduation she ventured into drama, distinguishing herself opposite an intriguing newcomer named Branagh in the BBC's "Fortunes of War" (1986). The two courted, clashed, and finally succumbed to marriage in 1989 after she played his queen-to-be in Henry V. They followed on with two more Branagh-directed films, the thriller Dead Again (1991), in which they played dual roles, and the sentimental comedy Peter's Friends (1992).

      Later, screen star Thompson wryly announced that "I don't have to work with my husband anymore. And I now sleep with my Oscar." But that did not faze Branagh, who planned to step out without her, starting with the title role in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. (MICHAEL AMEDEO)

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