How many films has Emma Thompson been in?

Fifty-three released feature films as of July 2026 — and she wrote six of them. That second number is the one no other name on this hub can touch: Emma Thompson is the only person in Academy Awards history to hold Oscars for both acting and writing — Best Actress for Howards End, Best Adapted Screenplay for Sense and Sensibility, in which she also starred. Counting her films with one job title misses half the career; the filter below counts both.

The record nobody shares

The Best Actress Oscar came for Howards End (1992), the Merchant Ivory adaptation that turned a Cambridge Footlights comedian into a period-drama institution. The writing Oscar took longer: producer Lindsay Doran hired her off a sketch show to adapt Sense and Sensibility, and the screenplay consumed roughly five years of drafts before Ang Lee’s 1995 film won her Best Adapted Screenplay — a ceremony she marked with an acceptance-speech routine delivered in character as a time-travelling Jane Austen reporting back on the evening. Plenty of actors have written; plenty of writers act. Only Thompson has the statue for each.

The six films she wrote herself into

The dual credits form their own mini-filmography: Sense and Sensibility; the two Nanny McPhee films (2005, 2010), her adaptation of Christianna Brand’s Nurse Matilda books, in which she cast herself under warts and a monobrow; Effie Gray (2014), her original screenplay about the Ruskin marriage scandal; a co-writing credit on Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016), where she wrote herself the obstetrician; and Last Christmas (2019), the George Michael rom-com she co-created. The pattern is consistent: when Thompson writes, she writes character parts for herself and hands the glamour elsewhere — an author’s instinct, not a star’s.

The range: restraint, villainy, and late-career risk

The acting spine runs from total restraint — Miss Kenton’s unspoken decades in The Remains of the Day (1993), the wordless Joni Mitchell scene in Love Actually that critics routinely call the best acting in the film — to full-scale villainy as Cruella’s Baroness and Matilda the Musical’s Miss Trunchbull (2022), unrecognisable under prosthetics. Then there’s the late-career risk-taking: Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022), performed largely in a hotel room and ending with a nude scene at 63 that she framed publicly as a statement about un-airbrushed bodies. Four acting Oscar nominations, two wins across two crafts, and a damehood (2018) — the credentials of someone who stopped needing permission decades ago.

Why she’s famous, and to whom

The origin is Cambridge Footlights, in the same golden generation as Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie — comedy first, always audible under the corsets. The audiences split neatly: the period-drama faithful (Howards End, Remains, Sense and Sensibility); families across three franchises’ worth of icons — Trelawney, Nanny McPhee, Mrs Potts in Beauty and the Beast (2017), Trunchbull; the Love Actually rewatchers every December; and the awards-circuit audience that has tracked her since 1992. She also crossed the cluster twice: as P.L. Travers opposite Tom Hanks’ Walt Disney in Saving Mr. Banks (2013), and now alongside Hugh Jackman in 2026.

Now showing: sheep

Her 2026 entry is The Sheep Detectives (May 2026) — the adaptation of Leonie Swann’s Three Bags Full in which a flock investigates its shepherd’s murder, opposite Jackman, and one of the year’s best-reviewed comedies at 95% with critics. It follows the 2025 survival thriller The Dead of Winter. Thirty-seven years after Henry V, the pattern holds: one for the critics, one for the kids, and every few years, one she writes herself.

Was Emma Thompson in it? The Curtis-verse confusion test

Eight very British films. She’s in exactly half. Everyone fails the Bridget Jones round.

Fifty-three films, six of them written by the woman inside them — Emma Thompson’s filmography is the only one on this hub that counts twice.