It’s an iconic Christmas movie scene: watching Love Actually‘s Emma Thompson grin and bear her way through the revelation that her husband, Harry, played by the late Alan Rickman, is cheating on her with his secretary Mia.
Every year we’re freshly appalled at the heart-wrenching moment where Harry gifts his wife Karen Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now album, inadvertently letting on that he’s given the gold necklace (which Karen had already discovered in his pocket) to someone else: his mistress.
While the cheating partner trope is (sadly) nothing new both on and off-screen, it’s Dame Emma’s character’s show of quiet stoicism in front of the couple’s, while clearly very much crushed on the inside, that has cemented this scene in the minds (and hearts) of audiences forever more.
And now we know that there’s something more—besides Emma’s excellent acting credentials—to why her portrayal was so memorable: It’s because she based it on her own real-life experience.
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Indeed, Emma has admitted that her tearful scenes in Love Actually were so persuasive because she was having her heart “very badly broken” by first husband Kenneth Branagh, who was having an affair with Helena Bonham Carter. Kenneth and Emma split after eight years together.
In a November 2022 interview with the New Yorker, Emma has spoken candidly about being “blinded” to the realities of Kenneth’s infidelity. “I was utterly, utterly blind to the fact that he had relationships with other women on set,” she said. “What I learned was how easy it is to be blinded by your own desire to deceive yourself.”
She continued, “I was half alive. Any sense of being a lovable or worthy person had gone completely.”
Emma credits her now husband, actor Greg Wise whom she met on the set of Sense & Sensibility, as the person “who picked up the pieces and put them back together.” Speaking about the affair in 2018, Emma said, “That scene where my character is standing by the bed crying is so well known because it’s something everyone’s been through.”
