Emma Thompson has what she calls “the habit of continuity,” an impulse hardwired into her by her parents, Phyllida Law and Eric Thompson, who were both actors and children from broken families. Thompson, who has been dubbed a Presbyterian in the high church of celebrity, still lives on the West Hampstead street where she grew up. She shuttles between London and a lush remote glen above Loch Long, in Scotland—where, in 1959, her parents paid three hundred pounds for a cottage—which was the rural idyll of her childhood.
