Emma Thompson Reflects on Feeling 'Grateful' for Her Body but Still 'Depressed About My Thighs'

Emma Thompson sits in the middle of three distinct generations of women. She has her 22-year-old daughter on one side, her 89-year-old mother on the other, and at 62, Thompson finds herself observing them both and reflecting on how their bodies change and adjust alongside hers.

In an essay for The Guardian, Thompson talked about the connections between the three of them and how it affects her own self-image.

Her daughter Gaia, she wrote, "has tattoos" on her body.

"I like them, which surprises me. I understand the urge to mark life's more seismic events upon your body. They sear themselves into our brains after all, so perhaps tattoos are just the outer version of the inner burns."

On the opposite end, her mother, former actress Phyllida Law, is figuring out her aging body, Thompson wrote.

"My mother's body bears witness in more traditional ways — watching her navigate its frailty and bentness is a daily learning, a meditation," she said. "She taught me to walk when I was a baby, and now, she teaches me how I will walk when I am old: how to reach for this, bend for that, move around the obstacles like an ancient, patient stream. I try not to help."

Thompson, meanwhile, finds that "living between these bodies is an odd mixture of joy and grief." Gaia "thrums" with energy, and "her life force changes the atmosphere in the room as soon as she enters," while she finds that her mother's skin is getting softer.

"Her skin reminds me of my daughter's when she was a baby: the same almost-not-there softness, lovely to stroke," Thompson says of Law. "It feels like she's returning to something."

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The three of them, she wrote, "change and reset one another's state," and that makes her feel more settled in her body.

"So instead of grieving my mother's ageing, instead of envying my daughter's youth, I find I am buoyed up and calmed down by turn."

Thompson said that she exists "between them."

"I'm grateful I can still get up a hill and I'm depressed about my thighs."

Thompson is in the middle of a press tour for her new movie, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, where she plays a widow who hires a young male escort so she can finally explore the sexual intimacy that her marriage lacked, and has spoken often about her relationship to her body.

In an interview last month, Thompson questioned why people would undergo plastic surgery, calling it a "form of collective psychosis."

"Why would you do that to yourself, I simply don't understand," she said. "I do honestly think the cutting of yourself off to put it in another place in order to avoid appearing to do what you're actually doing, which is aging, which is completely natural, is a form of collective psychosis. I really do think it's a very strange thing to do."

Thompson said that "one of the great triumphs" of the film, in which she appears nude at times, "is that it presents the untreated body."

"I don't think I could've done it before the age that I am," she said. "And yet, of course, the age that I am makes it extremely challenging because we aren't used to seeing untreated bodies on the screen."