By
The Associated Press
LONDON - Emma Thompson is describing what it's like to be scalped in front of a baby daughter who's used to seeing mum with hair.
"We shaved in front of her and did it gently so she wouldn't get frightened," said Thompson, her bald pate nearly glistening as she described the routine required for her latest role.
Playing Vivian Bearing, the fiercely intelligent woman who dies of ovarian cancer in "Wit," Thompson charts the decline of the 48-year-old scholar who specializes in the 17th century English metaphysical poet John Donne.
The 41-year-old English actress' first major project in three years, "Wit" is adapted from the 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Margaret Edson. It airs Saturday at 9 p.m. EST on HBO.
(Outside of the United States, "Wit," which premiered at last month's Berlin Film Festival, may get a theatrical release.)
Thompson's performance is bravely unsentimental and all the more wrenching for that. Its rigor could well bring the two-time Academy Award winner her first Emmy.
Thompson, who won the 1992 best-actress Oscar for "Howards End," talked not of awards but the demands of a part that has her on screen virtually every minute - though with a supporting cast including Eileen Atkins, Christopher Lloyd, and, fleetingly, English playwright Harold Pinter.
First, there's the hair, which Thompson's character loses after her first dose of chemotherapy. In the script, adapted by Thompson and the telefilm's director, Mike Nichols, Bearing receives eight cycles of chemotherapy at full dose.
Medical adviser Linda Schickedanz, who has spent 30 years working as an oncology nurse in her native Texas, was on hand to ensure accuracy.
"I'm weeping," she said, "because this brings to mind patients I've lost."
Thompson found that a sense of humor helped. So did daughter Gaia's reaction to her new look.
"Her favorite game now is to climb up on my head and pat it," said Thompson, chatting amiably during a break in filming last fall on the studio set just west of London. "(Gaia, 9 months old at the time of this interview) makes this smacking sound which is accompanied by triumphant screeches. I've turned into a human cat post."
Thompson - a performer equally adept as a writer (her 1995 Oscar was for adapting Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility") - would rather not work these days than take a part just for the sake of it.
Getting her to agree to "Wit" was a real coup, executive producer Cary Brokaw said.
"It was completely exciting," Brokaw said, "because of who Emma is but also because she had taken a break to have her child and this was sort of her return to the business."
Thompson brought in Nichols, a noted theater and film director and winner of seven Tonys and an Oscar - but an infrequent visitor to the world of television.
The two collaborated on the movie "Primary Colors" three years ago, Thompson's last acting assignment of any note. (In between, she made cameo appearances in two little-seen films.)
The original play was a long-running off-Broadway hit.
"We knew we could make the film of the play without Hollywood-izing it, if that's a word, or making concessions to the commerciality of the piece," Brokaw said.
Doing the film for HBO "freed us from the fact that Vivian dies in the end," he said.
In one crucial scene, Thompson's Vivian, looking sad-eyed and weary, her scalding energy beginning to ebb, simply sits on the edge of her hospital bed, absorbing the grim news.
"Gorgeous," says Nichols following a take, any hints of teariness leavened by humor: "Let's go home. No? Oh."
He turned to Thompson: "That had stillness in it; it was great, beautiful. Thank you."
Six months later, the result has won the admiration of its potentially toughest critic - Edson, the play's dramatist, who declined to be involved in the movie version.
"What the film is able to do that I am very pleased by is be so quiet," said Edson, speaking by telephone from Atlanta, where she still teaches kindergarten.
"It's very circumspect," Edson added, "very dignified. I love it."
