Emma Thompson pens moving tribute to living in woman’s body: ‘I’m grateful I can still get up a hill and I’m depressed about my thighs’

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Greg Wise, Gaia, noticing how while the pair ‘recalibrate each other’, she’s balanced between the two.Penning the essay for Guardian special Living In A Woman’s Body, Dame Emma, 62, remarked that instead of grieving her mum’s frailty and ageing, and envying her daughter’s youth, she’s ‘buoyed up and calmed down by turn’.She wrote: ‘I exist between them.

I’m grateful I can still get up a hill and I’m depressed about my thighs.’The star revealed it was during their second ‘Covid Christmas’ together she noticed ‘the umbilical connection’ between the trio ‘tugging’ at her, reflecting on liking her daughter’s tattoos, and watching her mother navigate moving as she ages, trying ‘not to help’.She penned in the revealing prose: ‘“Why is my f**ny getting bigger?” my mother breathes at me one morning as she is washing the forks.

We laugh for quite a long time. Her skin reminds me of my daughter’s when she was a baby: the same almost-not-there softness, lovely to stroke.‘It feels like she’s returning to something.’Dame Emma mused that ‘living between these bodies is an odd mixture of joy and grief’ as her daughter ‘thrums’, reflecting she herself ‘must have done that once’.She noted ‘the meeting of these life forces now feels more essential than ever’ and feels she’s ‘held between the two states of departure’ intertwined between the pair: ‘One towards action and one into stillness.’Just us or are we getting misty-eyed in here?Readers were taken by the screenwriter’s words, with one musing it was ‘a beautiful read on the umbilical ties that connect generations of women’.While one wrote ‘Oh my, this is quite something.