When Real Life Broke Her Heart, Emma Thompson Gave One of the Greatest Performances of Her Career

In the spring of 1995, Emma Thompson was filming a heartbreak she was also living.
On the set of Sense and Sensibility, she played Elinor Dashwood — a woman who holds herself together while her world quietly collapses. When the cameras stopped rolling, Thompson was doing exactly the same thing.

Her six-year marriage to Kenneth Branagh was falling apart, and the tabloids were circling like vultures. For years they had been Britain’s golden creative couple, “The Ken & Em Show.” Now that image was shattering, and Thompson was carrying the private devastation of Branagh’s affair with Helena Bonham Carter.

She later admitted she had been “utterly, utterly blind” to his other on-set romances. The betrayal didn’t just break her marriage — it detonated her sense of self.

“I was half alive,” she recalled. “Any sense of being a lovable or worthy person had gone completely.”

Depression followed. Even simple tasks — getting dressed, stepping outside — felt unbearable. And every fresh headline made the wound deeper.

But production on Sense and Sensibility was already underway. The cast was hired. The script — which Thompson had spent years writing — was locked. The film could not stop.

So she went to work.

She slipped into the role of Elinor Dashwood, a woman hiding a breaking heart behind impeccable composure. Thompson didn’t need to act those emotions — she was living them.
“I’d had so much bloody practice at crying in a bedroom,” she once said, “then going out and being cheerful.”

Writing the screenplay had kept her alive. Filming it kept her standing.

Then something unexpected began to grow.

Greg Wise, the actor playing Willoughby, had been told he would meet his future partner on that set. He first pursued Kate Winslet, who kindly redirected him: “Try Emma.”

He did.

Slowly, quietly, love returned.

In September 1995, Thompson and Branagh announced their separation. “Busy schedules,” they claimed. The truth emerged soon after — and the tabloids feasted.

But Thompson was already rebuilding.

When Sense and Sensibility premiered in December, critics praised her performance and called her screenplay one of the finest Austen adaptations ever written.
Then awards season arrived.

Thompson earned Oscar nominations for both acting and writing — a historic feat.
She won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, becoming the only person in history to win Oscars in both categories.

It was a triumph built on the ashes of heartbreak.

Years later, she drew on that same pain for Love Actually. The scene where she silently cries to Joni Mitchell wasn’t acting, she said — she remembered exactly what it felt like when her marriage ended.

But she refused to let that pain define her life.

She wrote complex roles for women. She challenged Hollywood’s ageism and sexism. She raised her daughter, adopted a son, and kept creating work that mattered.

In 2003, she married Greg Wise. Nearly 30 years later, they are still together.

She even worked alongside Branagh and Bonham Carter in the Harry Potter films — not because she forgot, but because she chose to move forward.

Emma Thompson didn’t just survive heartbreak.
She transformed it into art — and into a life far fuller than the one she lost.