No matter how many times you watch Love Actually (especially every Christmas), there’s one devastating moment that will break your heart every single time.
Yes, you guessed it: It’s the moment when Emma Thompson’s character, Emma, realises that her husband—played by the late Alan Rickman—is having an affair with his assistant. When she starts crying to the soundtrack of Joni Mitchell after finding a necklace bought for his mistress, it’s hard not to have a good cry with her.
Appearing at a fundraiser in London on Sunday, Thompson revealed how her performance in Love Actually was inspired by her own heartbreak over her then-husband Kenneth Branagh’s affair with actress Helena Bonham Carter. Thompson and Branagh publicly separated in 1995 after eight years together.
“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, The Telegraph reports.
“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.”
This isn’t the first time the Sense and Sensibility actress has spoken about the painful breakup. In 2013, 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 she added that she’s now “made her peace” over the affair.
We’re not crying, you are!
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