Will Lawrence

There are any number of notable backdrops and moments in Robert Carlyle’s directorial debut, the big-screen adaptation of The Legend of Barney Thomson, but cinemagoers are sure to be moved by the scene that unfolds on the waste ground in front of the Red Road flats. 

 

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Emma Thompson as the 77-year-old former prostitute Semolina

 

In many ways, this particular extract lies at the heart of the film, carrying a venomous diatribe from a crumbling, monolithic character that plays out in front of the crumbling, monolithic structures that still blight the city’s skyline.

If viewers aren’t moved by the landscape – and the knowledge that even during filming one of these towering edifices was home to asylum seekers hunting a better life in Scotland – they’ll feel the pain of the film’s title character, brought to life by Carlyle, who suffers a soul-destroying barrage of vitriol from his termagant mother, played by Emma Thompson, who turns in a remarkable performance as Semolina, a foul-mouthed 77-year-old ex-prostitute.

“It was such a satisfying scene to shoot,” recalls Thompson when we catch up ahead of the film’s release. “It is so powerful and it is funny but also brutal, really brutal and it says everything you need to know about how these two people have been brought up and how they have had to cope with the violence that would have been part of their lives.

"I added some flinches so that you know that when she was a baby she was thumped, really badly. It is tragic.”

 

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Ray Winstone and Robert Carlyle in the Glasgow gangster movie


In many ways, this particular extract lies at the heart of the film, carrying a venomous diatribe from a crumbling, monolithic character that plays out in front of the crumbling, monolithic structures that still blight the city’s skyline.

If viewers aren’t moved by the landscape – and the knowledge that even during filming one of these towering edifices was home to asylum seekers hunting a better life in Scotland – they’ll feel the pain of the film’s title character, brought to life by Carlyle, who suffers a soul-destroying barrage of vitriol from his termagant mother, played by Emma Thompson, who turns in a remarkable performance as Semolina, a foul-mouthed 77-year-old ex-prostitute.

“It was such a satisfying scene to shoot,” recalls Thompson when we catch up ahead of the film’s release. “It is so powerful and it is funny but also brutal, really brutal and it says everything you need to know about how these two people have been brought up and how they have had to cope with the violence that would have been part of their lives.

"I added some flinches so that you know that when she was a baby she was thumped, really badly. It is tragic.”

Thompson, who has a deep connection to Scotland, recognised the importance of the Red Road backdrop. “There is just nothing there at all,” she says, “they’re totally marooned in a concrete wasteland. Some of the props littered around the waste ground are quite heart-breaking, like the wee teddy bear. That really spoke to me.”

In truth, there were many aspects of the film that spoke to Thompson, not least her admiration for Carlyle, who proved his mettle by not only overseeing the film with expert direction, but also by playing the title role. Thompson has long been an admirer, sending him a postcard early in their careers, even before he’d hit the headlines with his memorable turn as Begbie in Trainspotting, expressing her admiration for his talent.

 

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Thompson found fame in Tutti Frutti

 

“I do that a lot,” she says. “If I like something, I generally will write to someone because it is nice to get it off your chest if you haven’t got the chance to go see them. It is something I have always loved doing. I am a wee bit older than Bobby but we are more or less contemporary [she's 56, he's 54]. I can’t remember which film is was for though!”

Whatever the film, Carlyle was touched by the gesture and remembered her note across the years. When he wrote to Thompson about the Semolina role, he included a letter with the script saying how much that card had meant to him.

“He is an amazing bloke,” says Thompson, “an absolutely extraordinary bloke, and it was such a treat that he was directing as well acting because it meant that he was there all the time and we had access to him and to the way he thinks. He’s such a great thinker.”

Like Carlyle, Thompson has Glaswegian roots. She was born in London but her mother, the actress Phyllida Law, hails from Glasgow and she spent a great deal of time in Scotland during her youth. “I was there a lot when I was growing up and until I went to school because my grandparents lived there and I had an uncle who ran a tea room in a village called Ardentinny until I was 15, so me and my sister would help out in the tea rooms, and we spent all our holidays there with the family.”

The connections continue – her husband, actor Greg Wise, bought all the furniture for his flat from the Barras when he was living and working in the city back in the day, “and we’d visit the Barras for bits and bobs for where we stay in Scotland,” recalls Thompson.

“My mum went to the Barras quite a lot with dad when she bought a little croft that we still stay in and was furnishing it for as little as possible. The Barras in those days was absolutely remarkable. The market bit now isn’t the same as it was but it has still got its feel and its roots.

“We were always on the coast, or on the lochs so we rarely went into Glasgow,” she adds, “except when I was teeny and my gran still lived there. I have worked in Glasgow a lot, though, and I love the city very, very much.”

That said, the overriding attraction of The Legend of Barney Thomson, she concedes, was the character herself. Semolina is a truly memorable woman. “I loved the very badly applied mascara and lippy on her teeth,” smiles Thompson. “All of us in make up and prosthetics were sniggering to ourselves.”

The actress spent more than five hours in the make up chair each day as the extensive prosthetics were applied and removed. Not since her 2003 turn in Angels of America, where she played one scene as a tramp, had she worn so much facial padding. Even her performance in the two Nanny McPhee films didn’t require as lengthy a transformation as did The Legend of Barney Thomson, where the actress gains more than 20 years in age.

 

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Thompson with her second husband Greg Wise

 

“She is one of my favourite parts, one of the best that I have ever played. I just adored it,” she says of the Semolina role. “It was an amazing experience. As soon as read the first few pages of the script and I came across the line about Barney looking like a haunted tree that absolutely sold me. I didn’t even wait, I just rang up my agent and said, ‘I have got to do this.’

“It was like when I first read Tutti Frutti,” she adds, remembering the 1987 BBC Scotland drama series. “My mother and I read it when we were on a plane to somewhere and she said, ‘Em, this writing, John Byrne!’ And this too was fantastically brilliant and very, very rich but also so funny.”

It was Tutti Frutti that helped propel Thompson to prominence. She won BAFTA TV Awards for Best Actress for both that show and Fortunes of War, which aired in the same year, before her big-screen career took off when she turned in a hilarious performance in Richard Curtis’s screenwriting debut, 1989’s The Tall Guy.

Her star rose quickly, prompting one notable film biographer and critic to comment that by the spring of 1993 “she seemed like a guaranteed summer”. She’d shone in James Ivory’s 1992 E.M. Forster adaptation Howards End, winning a BAFTA and an Oscar, while she earned two Academy Award nominations for her work the following year in The Remains of the Day and In the Name of the Father.
Her involvement in 1995’s Sense and Sensibility, meanwhile, earned her a BAFTA for her performance as Mrs Dashwood, and an Oscar for her adapted screenplay.

In fact, that film proved of pivotal importance to Thompson, who credits it with dragging her out of the doldrums following the split from her first husband, Kenneth Branagh. She also met Wise, who would become her second husband, while working on set.

 

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Thompson win Nanny McPhee

 

“I have been very fortunate to have had such a good career,” she says with undue modesty. After all, she has proved supremely talented. “I’m grateful to have been in work and to still be in work.”
She laments the fact that her industry, and the media as a whole, does not make life easy for actresses, or indeed women in general.

“When I was younger I did think that things might change for the better in that regard, but when I look at it now nothing has changed at all. In fact, we live with media culture that really beggars belief. Our questioning natures have to work very hard to get above the layer of sticky, oily old ideas and ways of being that are pedalled daily.”

There are a number of media organisations with which Thompson will have no truck, and she is delighted that her daughter, Gaia, who is now 15 years old, looks beyond the mass media for her role models. “My God, all that is a horror, an absolute horror,” she says of today’s celebrity culture. “I think my daughter looks at that culture and sees nothing there for her.”

“I think my daughter looks at that culture and sees nothing there for her.” Though she is unsure whether Gaia will follow in her parents' and grandparents' footsteps, Thompson would not be surprised if performance played a part in her future. “I think that it is quite difficult if you are brought up by performers to go in a completely different direction,” she says.

That certainly applied to the actress herself who recalls fondly the performers and theatre folk that visited her parents’ home in her youth. Thompson will take her daughter to this August’s Edinburgh Festival to watch a number of one-woman shows. “That’s really important to me,” she says.

Indeed, Thompson’s own career began at the Fringe back in 1981 when she and fellow Footlights performers Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Tony Slattery won the first-ever Perrier Comedy Award for their self-penned The Cellar Tapes.

Writing has remained a presence in Thompson’s professional life ever since, and on the big screen in particular she’s enjoyed some phenomenal successes, following Sense and Sensibility with another adaptation, Nanny McPhee, and an original sequel, Nanny McPhee Returns.

She also wrote last year’s drama film Effie Gray (in which she also acted) and has penned two Peter Rabbit books. “I feel like I have never stopped, really,” she says of her work. “I have stopped for family reasons but that is not stopping. That’s doing something else equally stressful, which I personally think is harder.

“I now might try to write Nanny McPhee, the musical,” she adds when we talk about writing projects. “I would really like to do that because the film was originally going to be a musical. There’s a romantic comedy I want to try as well. I am very likely to spend the rest of this year and next year writing because I have done quite a lot of acting this year.”

Her acting this year not only takes in The Legend of Barney Thomson, but also Beauty and the Beast for director Bill Condon, a live-action re-treading of the animated Disney musical. Thompson lends her voices to the warm and cheerful teapot, Mrs Potts, though she also gets to sing and dance in a big final number once the curse on the prince is lifted and the staff members are released from the spell that morphed them into household objects.

 


“We did that a couple of weeks ago,” she recalls of the dance number. “It was absolutely divine. We were all remarking to one another because the set was decorated with real flowers. It smelt beautiful and it was so extraordinary to look at that none of us minded for a second doing it from dawn til dusk. It was beautifully choreographed and really good fun.”

She also takes a supporting role in Adam Jones, which features an all-star cast led by Bradley Cooper as an overstressed chef. “I am Brad’s shrink and it is a pretty intense drama,” she explains. “I suppose it is about the intensity, that kind of ambition and the madness. It is about obsession and perfectionism and all of those things. I also love the fact that it is related to food.”

A more prominent role, meanwhile, comes with Alone in Berlin, an adaptation of the celebrated 1947 novel by German author Hans Fallada, which is based on a true story. “It is an extraordinary book and it is an era that has always fascinated me,” she says. “When I was working on The Remains of the Day I did an awful lot of work on that period.

“Making Alone in Berlin was a great privilege, as was working with Bobby on Barney Thomson. I’ve been very lucky to have such wonderful opportunities.”

The Legend of Barney Thomson (15) is out on July 24
Tomorrow: Robert Carlyle on making his directorial debut ... and bringing his city’s past back to life.