Emma Thompson has opened up about her aging body in a poignant new personal essay for The Guardian.
The 62-year-old Oscar winner says that she's both "grateful" for it and "depressed" about certain aspects of her body, as she compared it to her daughter Gaia, 22, and her 89-year-old mother, actress Phyllida Law.
"My daughter has tattoos. I like them, which surprises me. I understand the urge to mark life's more seismic events upon your body," Thompson wrote of Gaia's body art.
As for her elderly mother, Thompson wrote that watching her mother age "is a daily learning, a meditation ."
"She taught me to walk when I was a baby, and now, she teaches me how I will walk when I am old: how to reach for this, bend for that, move around the obstacles like an ancient, patient stream," Thompson said of Law.
According to Thompson, "living between these bodies is an odd mixture of joy and grief."
"I exist between them. I'm grateful I can still get up a hill and I'm depressed about my thighs," she concluded.
Thompson has been open about her struggles with body image as an older actress, especially for her new film, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.
The comedy - set to be released later this year - sees Thompson play a teacher who hires a sex worker in the hopes of experiencing her first orgasm.
According to Thompson, one scene in the film sees her character "stand in front of a mirror alone and she drops her robe".
Opening up about why she decided to shoot the scene, Thompson told Entertainment Weekly: "It's very challenging to be nude at 62.
"I don't think I could've done it before the age that I am. And yet, of course, the age that I am makes it extremely challenging because we aren't used to seeing untreated bodies on the screen."
She also spoke about the "dreadful demands" put on women both in the real world and in acting.
"Nothing has changed in the dreadful demands made upon women in the real world but also in acting," she said. "This thing of having to be thin is still the same as it ever was, and actually in some ways I think it’s worse now."
