Unlike Maye, they don’t take their authority home with them. “I know quite a lot of female judges now and I worship the f-ing ground they walk on,” she says. Thompson spent a lot of time behind the scenes in the courts to prepare for the role, thanks to the good graces of Ward he not only acted as an adviser to the film on legal niceties, but was able to swing her access to the judges’ chambers. Really! If you are treated in that way it’s very difficult not to ingest some of that sense of importance.” Backstage, there is a red carpet and only judges and their clerks are allowed to walk on it. Then, when people come to you, they are very, very respectful. First of all, you sit above everyone, you sit in judgment and it’s an immense responsibility. “The system of the law is designed to make you feel like a god. “What is so interesting about that world is that I would say it’s very, very difficult to avoid,” she says. If Fiona seems somewhat self-important, Thompson’s view is she could hardly be otherwise. Maye is a serious woman in authority, married to a mild-mannered academic called Jack (Stanley Tucci) with whom she lives in a fine apartment uncluttered by childish things. It will save his life, but his religion forbids it he is adamant he doesn’t want it but, as a minor, he is not responsible.Įmma Thompson plays Family Court judge Fiona Maye in The Children Act. Ward told McEwan how he had to decide – as Thompson’s judge Fiona Maye must decide in McEwan’s story – whether a teenage Jehovah’s Witness with leukaemia should be compelled to have a blood transfusion. The story is based on a real case heard by McEwan’s friend, Family Court judge Sir Alan Ward. The Children Act is directed by Richard Eyre and based on the eponymous novel by Ian McEwan, who also wrote the script. There are very few moments of hilarity in The Children Act, in which Thompson gives a dramatic performance as a Family Court judge “working with creased concern as only she can”, as the Irish Times put it. She is still earnest, really, under the theatrical flamboyance.

“Not much has changed,” Thompson says airily. It describes her as shaven-headed, a wearer of baggy trousers, hater of depilatories, soaker of dried pulses and voter for the Socialist Workers Party. Colbert reads out her biography from a program for Cambridge Footlights, where she mucked in with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie when the group won the first Perrier award at the Edinburgh Fringe. Click on it and you will see Thompson jiving with chat-show host Stephen Colbert, throwing herself on the floor in front of Graham Norton and making animal noises with Ellen DeGeneres. “Emma Thompson is hilarious!” yelps a title to a compilation of clips on YouTube.

Is the childrens act a true story