Emma Thompson says Kenneth Branagh's affair helped her act in "Love Actually"
Emma Thompson says she was able to conjure up real heartbreak while working on 2003's "Love Actually" by recalling her ex-husband Kenneth Branagh's affair with Helena Bonham Carter. In the scene when Thompson's character, Karen, finds jewelry that her husband has bought for another woman, the actress said she used her real-life experience to play the part.
"That scene where my character is standing by the bed crying is so well known because it's something everyone's been through," she said at a fundraiser for the Tricycle Theatre in London on Sunday. She added, "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. Well, it wasn't exactly that, but we've all been through it."
Thompson and Branagh married in 1989, but Branagh started an affair with Carter after he met her on the set of "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" in 1994. Thompson and Branagh got divorced in 1995 and Branagh and Carter continued to date for five years.
Thompson told the Telegraph, "I've had so much bloody practice at crying in a bedroom, then having to go out and be cheerful, gathering up the pieces of my heart and putting them in a drawer."
But the actress said in 2013 that she harbors no ill will toward Carter, saying, "You can't hold on to anything like that. She's a wonderful woman, Helena ... Helena and I made our peace years and years ago."
