Emma Thompson on new film Alone in Berlin, global warming and getting out of her comfort zone

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Emma Thompson can still remember a request from her mother – and sometime co-star – Phyllida Law: “Please don’t play another good woman in a frock.’” Thompson has, to be fair, made a respectable career out of this particular period drama archetype. She won an Oscar and a Bafta for her portrayal of Margaret Schlegel in Merchant Ivory’s Howard’s End, and gained a second Academy Award for adapting Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility for Ang Lee’s film.

Yet there’s a great deal more to Thompson’s career than frocks (as well as turns in Harry Potter, Nanny McPhee and assorted Richard Curtis movies). Mike Nichols’ Primary Colors springs to mind, in which she played the wife of John Travolta’s Democratic Governor (a film inspired by Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign). She took a risk too in Christopher Hampton’s Imagining Argentina, the story of a couple living under a dictatorship (“yeah, we got slaughtered,” says Thompson, wincing at the memory of scathing reviews).

Now comes Alone In Berlin, actor-turned-director Vincent Pérez’s adaptation of a 1947 novel by Hans Fallada, based on the lives of Otto and Elise Hampel, a working class German couple that secretly wrote and distributed anti-Nazi party postcards around Berlin during the Second World War. Starring opposite Brendan Gleeson, Thompson plays Elise’s fictionalised counterpart, Anna Quangel. “Sometimes, something comes along that has really a great depth and breadth of purpose,” she says. “Those are the jobs that you live for as an artist. This was one of those.”

In the very first scene with Otto and Anna, they learn of the death of their son in the war – a harrowing discovery that leads them to this journey of resistance. Talk about in at the deep end. “I’ve never done it before, to have to make a huge emotional statement right at the beginning of the film,” says Thompson. “When I got the script, I thought, ‘Bloody hell – the first time we see this woman, we don’t know anything about her. How am I going to do that?’ I had no idea until I tried it. But it was quite a challenge.”

Thompson was already well-versed in the era, having read William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich and Berlin Diary when she was preparing for The Remains of the Day. But taking on Fallada’s book was different, she says: “It being about ordinary people’s revulsion. That was so eye-opening. It’s like Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists – the book about poverty; poor people, working people who are political, and politicised by injustice.”

Like anyone who was raised in post-war England – Thompson was born in 1959 – her own childhood in London was deeply affected by the Second World War. “London was still post-war, rather austere,” she remembers. “My grandfather had fought in both [world] wars. My parents were deeply affected by being evacuated. All of these stories I heard all the time. So the war was very much a part of my childhood. All of the movies I saw were the propaganda movies, and of course I was completely brainwashed.”

It was only when she read Eric Maria Remarque’s All Quiet On The Western Front – “a life-changer, for me” – that Thompson began to gain a wider perspective. Unsurprisingly, discussions around the family dinner table were theatrical in nature – her father was actor and creator of beloved children’s show The Magic Roundabout, Eric Thompson. It was only when she got to Cambridge, reading English and joining Footlights, where she met fellow bright sparks Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, that she began to take an interest in politics.

It was during this period that Thompson began to write her own material, long before she evolved into a screenwriter on everything from the Nanny McPhee films to the recent Effie Gray, a biopic of Victorian critic John Ruskin’s wife. Back then, before making her breakthrough in TV show Fortunes of War (where she met former husband, Kenneth Branagh), Thompson trawled the stand-up circuit, doing benefit gigs to support those living under regimes in Argentina and Chile. “I’ve always been interested in dictatorships,” she says, “and what they do and what they don’t do.”

These days, her attentions are drawn towards the environment. She’s twice been to the Arctic in the past two years with Greenpeace – once with Gaia, her daughter with her husband, actor Greg Wise – to see the impact of climate change. “You really need to find out how many billions are spent on the lies that people are telling you about the climate,” she says. “It’s terrifying. Really, really terrifying. So I went to see for myself and that was amazing…you get a much more visceral understanding of what global warming actually means.”

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With her views chiming with those of Al Gore, whose eco-doc An Inconvenient Sequel is due in August, Thompson is currently developing a film about the Arctic 30 – the Greenpeace activists thrown into the Russian prison system for protesting drilling in the Arctic. Beyond this, despite the current political upheaval, she says she maintains a healthy optimism about the world. “I think really it’s in the service of trying to live longer. I think optimists are scientifically proven to live longer, so I’ve chosen optimism really as part of my health regime.”

Now 58, Thompson hasn’t stopped caring, whether it’s campaigning for human rights or against a third runaway at Heathrow. But despite her chosen optimism, does she have her cynical days? “You know what? I am cynical about certain things,” she nods. “Yeah, I am. I’m pretty cynical about politics. I’m cynical about the law. And I refuse to back down on that because I really do think there’s one law for the rich and one for the poor. I’m cynical about the money systems. I’m cynical about taxation. I’m cynical about a lot of things.”

At least her career is in rude health. She’s just received warm reviews for playing wife to Dustin Hoffman’s Jewish artist in Noah Baumbach’s acerbic New York-set comedy The Meyerowitz Stories, which just debuted in Cannes. It feels like a perfect palate-cleanser: “You know what is good for you? Just get out of your comfort zone,” she says. As the boozy Maureen, it’s a long way from playing a good woman in a frock.

'Alone In Berlin' opens in cinemas on 30 June