With poignant symbolism, Redgrave appears opposite Thompson in “Howards End.” Thompson stars as Margaret Schlegel, a liberated woman in Edwardian England. “It’s the kind of character we haven’t had in a while in a movie, an intelligent, articulate, sympathetic woman,” says the film’s director, James Ivory. Thompson has her own firm ideas about the dearth of such meaty women’s roles. “The 1980s was the most morally bankrupt decade we’ve had this century,” she says. “It was ruled by profit, and there’s a connection between that and roles for women. If you make very expensive films, you need formulas. In the ’80s we represented either the good wife or the evil seductive temptress.”
But Thompson doesn’t fit into formulas. In “The Tall Guy” she was a happily lustful nurse. In “Dead Again,” she played the dual role of a murder victim and an amnesiac. In “Impromptu,” she was a ditsy duchess in the world of Chopin. In her new film, “Peter’s Friends” (review, page 50), she turns sexual confusion into comic charm. The movie was a reunion for Thompson and several other actors who were in Cambridge University’s revue troupe, Footlights.
This was how Maggie Smith started, at Oxford. When they met recently, the great comedienne said (Thompson does a flawless mimicry of Smith’s divinely nasal delivery): “Well, you’re the same as me, darling, aren’t you? You’re just the same thing!” You can see atoms of Smith and Redgrave fizzing about in Thompson: like Smith she can become a living cartoon (“Peter’s Friends”) or, like Redgrave, project a moral incandescence (“Howards End”). A sweetly impudent feminist, she wrote comic monologues for TV after university, sometimes nettling British tubemeisters. Her first role in a drama was a TV mini-series, “Fortunes of War,” with her future husband, Kenneth Branagh, who’s now Britain’s golden boy of theater and film. Branagh introduced her to Shakespeare, casting her in “King Lear” as the Fool, which she played as a deformed creature of deep pathos and lacerating wit.
Branagh, 32, and Thompson, 33, are like Olivier and Leigh without the neuroses. She credits him with more than directing her in several plays and four films: “I would say that I’ve been earthed. One of the most attractive male qualities is the capacity to earth a volatile woman. With Ken and me it’s symbiosis. Together you’re stronger, one and one make three.” They’ve just finished starring in Branagh’s latest film, Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.” And Thompson has also finished another movie with James Ivory, “The Remains of the Day,” from the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. But she’s most excited by the screenplay she’s writing, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility.” “We need new writers to create roles where women are morally central to the story. I grew up identifying with Marlon Brando. It’s time we created new myths.”
Miranda Richardson would agree. She turned down “Fatal Attraction,” she says, “because I didn’t want to be known as someone who sticks scissors in people.” Still, Richardson has become known for playing desperate women. Her sensational movie debut, in Mike Newell’s 1985 “Dance With a Stranger,” was as Ruth Ellis, the nightclub hostess who murdered her lover and was the last woman to be hanged in Britain. In Neil Jordan’s brilliant “The Crying Game,” she plays Jude, an IRA terrorist who’s ready to kill or copulate at a moment’s notice. In “Enchanted April,” she’s a repressed 1920s housewife who joins three other unfulfilled women on an Italian vacation that restores their souls. And in “Damage,” she makes something riveting and powerful out of the usually thankless role of a betrayed wife.
Unlike Thompson, Richardson began her acting career in the traditional way. No relation to the theatrical Richardsons, she was born in provincial Lancashire, trained at the Old Vic Theatre School in Bristol, followed by five years in provincial repertory. You’ll hear no hymns to the glories of rep from the tough-minded Richardson. “It was painful,” she says. Rescue came when she was spotted by the producer of “Dance With a Stranger.” Unprepared for her sudden fame, she was stricken by a debilitating two-year illness. “It was that awful sort of postviral thing where you just sort of weep all the time,” she says. She was still sick when Steven Spielberg cast her in “Empire of the Sun,” but she slogged through. Now she’s one of the busiest English actresses on stage, screen and TV, specializing in American plays by writers like Arthur Miller, David Mamet and Sam Shepard.
Like Thompson, Richardson has a luminous quality, but it’s the luminosity not of the sun but of the moon looming over a dark terrain. “I seem to be called upon to do people that break out at the last minute and do something wild and violent, usually against men. Don’t know what it’s about, really, but most of the writers are blokes.” Not as politically sensitive as Thompson, Richardson appears to be a kind of female De Niro, a pure actor who focuses on the nuances of character and craft.
Louis Malle, the director of “Damage,” calls her “an incredible chameleon. She can do anything.” In “Damage,” Richardson, 34, plays a mother with a son in his 20s. “We did a test,” says Malle. “She became someone 10 years older. And it had nothing to do with makeup. It was inside.” Perhaps her strongest moment is a nude scene in which she confronts her adulterous husband with fierce pride in her femininity.
Richardson lives alone in London. Her extraordinary cinematic triple play has drawn the attention of Hollywood, which she’s visited twice in the last month. She calls it “Bonkers, but with a nice, laid-back side to it.” Where Thompson is all energy and openness, Richardson has an air of mystery. What she does off-screen is her own business. “What’s the point of calling it a private life if it isn’t private?” she says. “I am not a secret smackhead or anything like that or a toe sucker.” She pauses. “Well, I could be a toe sucker. . .” These days, that’s royal behavior.
