After 2 the breakup of marriage , Emma Thompson admits she suffered from passing blindness many years back.
“I was utterly, utterly blind to the fact that he had relationships with other women on set,” she tells, speaking about actor-director Kenneth Branagh, her first spouse. “What I learned was how easy it is to be blinded by your own desire to deceive yourself.”
Branagh and Thompson split in 1995, ending six years of marriage after he had an affair with Helena Bonham Carter, his leading lady from “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” a year earlier. Branagh and Bonham Carter were a high-profile item until 1999.
It took a relationship with “Sense & Sensibility” co-star Greg Wise to bring her back to life. The two got involved in 1995 while filming the movie and were married in 2003.
They are still together 19 years after exchanging vows.
But the “Bridget Jones’s Baby” and “Last Christmas” screenwriter did use the negative energy from her breakup to fuel her well-known “Love, Actually” performance, where she played a devoted wife who learns her husband (played by Alan Rickman) has been unfaithful.
In the film, she finds out the truth when she opens a Christmas gift she expects to be a romantic necklace she stumbled upon in his jacket pocket, only to realize he’s given it to another woman while choosing a Joni Mitchell CD for her.
“That scene where my character is standing by the bed crying is so well known because it’s something everyone’s been through,” Thompson said at an event in 2018. “I had my heart very badly broken by Ken. So I knew what it was like to find the necklace that wasn’t meant for me.
