BRITISH actress Emma Thompson wants to be an ‘Almodóvar girl’ and has reminded the cult Spanish film director that she wants to be considered for one of his future projects.
Thompson, perhaps best known for her roles in Sense and sensibility, as Professor Sybille in Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban and The Order of the Phoenix, also played middle-class wife Karen alongside Alan Rickman in Love, actually, where she was cast as the sister of prime minister Hugh Grant.
The 50-year-old has won two Oscars, but has yet to realise her ambition of playing the lead part in an Almodóvar film.
“I’ve begged Pedro Almodóvar to take me on and he always says, ‘yes, yes, yes’, but he never calls me,” complains Thompson, tongue-in-cheek.
“So, if anyone has any kind of influence over him, I beg them, please, to exercise it.”
Thompson considers the Castilla-La Mancha-born director to be one of the best in the world and has always wanted to work with him.
“He said he could do a film about a mad Englishwoman living in Spain, but he’s still not done it, so I’ll have to go to Madrid and threaten him.
“If friendly persuasion doesn’t work, I’ll have to resort to violence,” jokes Thompson.
Emma only spent one day in the capital on her recent visit to Spain, but long enough to make her presence felt – she is on the board of a charity that fights for human rights around the world.
“We should get more involved – not just write about human rights and let it just dissolve afterwards,” she stresses.
Her trip to Madrid was mainly to present a charity video, Journey, in which she plays Helena, a woman forced into having relations with 40 men a day.
The video, filmed alongside minister for equality Bibiana Aido, is aimed at exposing the plight of women who are sexually exploited.
Ever since the 1980s, Thompson has played major parts in blockbusters and worked alongside renowned actors, including her ex-husband Kenneth Brannagh in Peter’s friends, a black comedy starring Stephen Fry.
But the project that remains her favourite was the Jane Austen adaptation, since it was on the set of Sense and sensibility that Emma met her current husband, Greg Wise, now 43, with whom she has a daughter.
