Emma Thompson won Oscars for her work in Howards End and Sense and Sensibility — very dignified stuff. Yet Thompson's performances always have an appealing lightness. She is one of the world's best actresses, but she is also game, smart, funny and self-deprecating enough to know that neither she nor her work need be taken too seriously. And if one measure of movie greatness is how a star acquits herself in the worst piffle, then Thompson is a giant. Take Junior, her 1994 collaboration with Arnold Schwarzenegger, now California's governor. Emma and Arnie starred in a movie built on the cringeworthy conceit that he is the first man in history to get pregnant. Thompson got through the thing with her dignity intact — but that she consented to do it at all tells you much about her character.
So there are plenty of reasons to admire the on-screen Emma. But Thompson's real priorities are off-screen. Since 2001, she has been an ambassador for ActionAid, the U.K.-based antipoverty organization. Thompson, 45, is particularly focused on the crisis of HIV-infected women in Africa. You're right to be suspicious; Africa attracts a lot of publicity-seeking dilettantes. But Thompson refuses to beat anyone about the head with delusions of nobility. (She prefers not to be recognized for her philanthropy, and for that reason declined to be interviewed for this story.) In one of her rare public statements on the matter, she wrote about her first trip to Uganda in 2002 in the Mail on Sunday: "On the plane, I told my fellow ActionAid ambassador Noerine Kaleeba of my ailments: mild typhoid from my jab, some gastric thing, a bad back, thrush and a sty. In return, she told me of her husband's death from aids." Later, Thompson added, "When I got upcountry it made me cry which is, of course, faintly ridiculous."
Her modesty is charming, but should not be confused with a lack of expertise. In the year she spent immersing herself in the nightmare of HIV/AIDS in Africa, she learned that it is a mistake to reduce the problem's complexity. HIV is inextricably bound to poverty, which breeds ignorance, desperation and more HIV. ActionAid originally treated the aids crisis strictly as a health issue, dumping money into hospitals and clinics. These centers proved ineffective; the buildings were not places that African women felt comfortable talking about sensitive matters like sex and disease. Now ActionAid — spurred on by Thompson and others — funds small educational and health centers run by people the women already know: a thousand tiny solutions rather than a single grand one.
Thompson champions other causes (she works with Alone in London against homelessness) and has her day job, too (she wrote and stars in the film Nanny McPhee, out in the spring). But she has made a long-haul commitment to alleviating the suffering of African women. In February, she was appointed to the newly formed Global Coalition on Women and aids, launched by the United Nations in an attempt to improve social conditions for women as well as facilitate equal access to HIV treatment and drugs. The coalition hopes to fast-track research into microbicides, which, when administered as a lubricant, could kill the HIV virus, allowing women to protect themselves even if their sexual partner refuses to wear a condom. It wouldn't cure HIV, but it would quietly help. Which is all Emma Thompson wants to do.