(Photo: Getty Images)
Dame Emma Thompson has a birthday Friday, so we're celebrating by making her our British Icon of the Week. Here are just 10 things we appreciate and admire about her.
1. She has made Oscars history.
Thompson is the only person to have won an Academy Award for acting (Best Actress in 1992 for Howards End) and for screenwriting (Best Adapted Screenplay in 1995 for Sense and Sensibility). It's quite an achievement. 

2. She is a woman of principle.
In 2019, Thompson revealed that she had withdrawn from the animated movie Luck because the studio had hired John Lasseter, an executive accused by multiple women of workplace sexual misconduct. She wrote in a letter published by the Los Angeles Times: "If a man has been touching women inappropriately for decades, why would a woman want to work for him if the only reason he's not touching them inappropriately now is that it says in his contract that he must behave 'professionally?'" 
3. She has stayed down-to-earth.
As Vogue noted, Thompson has lived on the same street in West Hampstead, London, since she was seven years old. Her mother, the actress Phyllida Law, still lives right across the road from her.
4. She has no interest in playing the fame game.
Though Thompson is the daughter of a TV director and an actress, she has often said that her upbringing was very normal: something that shapes her attitude today. "Sometimes there was money and sometimes there wasn't. [My parents] weren't particularly famous, none of their friends was famous," she told The Guardian. "It was just a job. It's just my job. Fame is a completely accidental by-product. I don't have any feeling of, 'you've got to keep your face up there.'"
5. She is a really good sport.
During an appearance on The Graham Norton Show, Thompson revealed that she found an unusual way to cheer up her co-stars when they were shooting the 2013 movie Saving Mr. Banks. Never change, Dame Emma!

6. She tells a great anecdote.
Thompson revealed last year that she rode the London Underground in one of her fantastical costumes from the movie Cruella. "There was a demonstration and we got stuck," she told Vogue. "The worst thing you can do on a film set is be late, so I said, ‘We’ll get out and go by Tube. It’s fine. It’s Sunday morning, it’s 9am.' It was rammed. I was on the Tube in a dressing gown, Ugg slippers, a wig 3ft high, eyelashes out to here. And do you know what? Everyone completely ignored me. They just thought I was a drag act on my way home after the last performance."
7. She is a proud feminist.
Thompson told Vulture in 2015 that she has been "a card-carrying, radical feminist" since she was 19 years old. "Most women who I would want to listen to wouldn't have any problem at all with the word feminist," she added. "It’s bizarre. Any woman who says they’re not a feminist is basically saying that they don’t believe in equal rights for women."
8. She is charmingly self-deprecating.
Thompson is never afraid to make herself the butt of the joke, as this hilarious anecdote she shared on The Graham Norton Show demonstrates.

9. She is a staunch climate change campaigner. 
As Greenpeace notes on its website, Thompson has a "long history" of activism with the organization. In 2014 she and daughter Gaia even took part in a "Save the Arctic" expedition to raise awareness of the dangers of drilling for oil.
Explaining why she works so hard for this cause, Thompson told The Guardian at the time:  "It's your grandchildren. You've got skin in the game, mate. And if my daughter is lucky enough to have children, if she wishes them, and I have grandchildren, these are the people who are going to be dealing with the mess. So unless we get to grips with this instead of just wibbling on, it's going to be really hard."
10. And finally, she has the power to make us cry.
Who can forget the heartbreaking scene from Love Actually where Thompson's character realizes her husband, played by Alan Rickman, is cheating on her. It's a masterclass of understated emotion.

Do you have a favorite Emma Thompson performance?