Emma Thompson On ‘Cruella’, Life After 60, & Her Many Decades Of Activism #VogueUK

Love Emma Thompson in this shoot for British Vogue wearing all the kooky haute couture in streets of London . Read more here

‘When the world is about to see her play sartorial sensation Baroness von Hellman in Disney’s Cruella, who better to bring theatrical appeal to the season’s high fashion than the inimitable Emma Thompson?’

“This year and last year, the times I’ve really cried is when I’ve walked into a space my daughter used to be in and she isn’t there anymore…and tears like a river,”

“I have gone,” she says, that famous voice as smart and self-pillorying as ever, “a tad on the existential ticket.”

” Well, I tried to do Dry January, which was a total disaaaaster,” she drawls. “It got wet so quickly, I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror.” When did you crack? The 10th? “The fifth.”

“You can’t care about anyone else, everyone else is an obstacle”

“The worst thing you can do on a film set is be late, so I said, ‘We’ll get out and go by Tube. It’s fine. It’s Sunday morning, it’s 9am.’” She quivers.

“It was rammed. I was on the Tube in a dressing gown, Ugg slippers, a wig 3ft high, eyelashes out to here. And do you know what? Everyone completely ignored me. They just thought I was a drag act on my way home after the last performance.” She pauses wistfully. “I love London.”

“I am uncomfortable trying to look slim and fashionable because I am not, and now it’s allowed that I am not,” she wrote in a pre-shoot email, the merry-but-firm tone typical of her correspondence. She didn’t want to pose; she wanted to perform. “I fancy a bit of fun.”

So fun is what she got, striding the pavements of WC2 in the season’s most eye-catching creations “welded to my post-menopausal body and looking like a Christmas pony,” she says happily. She leans back in her chair, considering how many of her past insecurities have recently evaporated. Turning 60 was “a watershed,” she says. “I think what I feel principally now is free.”

I’m not really scared anymore,” she continues. “Well, I get scared.” Though mostly it’s the small stuff. Not, for example, death. “I feel like I could die at any time,” she says breezily. “Then Covid turned up. I’ve had pneumonia, so I thought I’d better be careful, but no one’s through the woods yet. Anyone could die of this thing.”

“I feel interestingly impermanent,” she continues, so delighted with the little phrase that a smile dances upon her lips. “Which is odd given I’ve been a permanent fixture here for decades.

Thompson believes life works in 30-year cycles, and she is intrigued by what her final one will bring (“if I’m lucky enough to see some of it”). Mostly she is thankful to feel less scared. “I don’t mind about any feeling now,” she says. “Feelings are what pass through us, you know. It’s our internal weather. It will always be there and it will always pass.” She smiles, her eyes squinting wisely. “That’s the nature of it.” Read more here