Although she was perhaps best known as the mother of two outstanding actors, Emma and Sophie Thompson, Phyllida Law, who has died aged 94, was supremely gifted herself – as an actor, costume designer and writer.
She was not averse to appearing with either daughter: with Emma in her scabrously funny movie Nanny McPhee (2005); and with Sophie in Douglas McGrath’s fine television film of Jane Austen’s Emma in 1996, in which she played the mother of Sophie’s impoverished Miss Bates.
In the period of Emma’s marriage to Kenneth Branagh, Law was sterling support in several of his films, including the delightfully Italianate Much Ado About Nothing (1993) – as the friendly confidante Ursula to Emma’s coquettish Beatrice.
Small, slight, with strong features and green eyes, Law was both calm and scuttling on stage, as required. She had a silken Scottish vocal delivery, a giddy sense of humour and, in later life, an elegantly tumbling head of smoky grey hair.
Her stage experience stretched back to the 1950s, with seasons at the Old Vic in London and the Bristol Old Vic, where, after graduating from the latter’s theatre school, she played multiple roles in Shakespeare, John Osborne and Arthur Miller plays, as well as Victorian and Greek classics.
There she met and in 1957 married her fellow actor Eric Thompson, the unforgettable writer and narrator of The Magic Roundabout on television between 1965 and 1977. Law herself was in many popular television series from 1960 onwards.
She appeared as Mrs Stanhope in the Barchester Chronicles in 1982, alongside Alan Rickman in his breakthrough screen performance as Obadiah Slope. Rickman directed her in one of her outstanding stage performances, The Winter Guest (1995), by Sharman MacDonald, at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and the Almeida in London. On a stunning Scottish beach design, Law’s wistful, lonely mother acted out a compelling, emotional tone poem with her independent but psychologically wounded daughter, played by Sian Thomas (a role taken by Emma Thompson in the film version two years later).
Such loving maternal conflicts coloured the two books Law wrote later in life: Notes to My Mother-in-Law (2009) and How Many Camels Are There in Holland? Dementia, Ma and Me (2013). A third book, Dead Now of Course (2017), included sly and affectionate accounts of working with Alec Guinness, Ralph Richardson and Michael Gambon.
More recent television work came in Kingdom with Stephen Fry, All or Nothing at All with Hugh Laurie, and in 2008, guest spots in Foyle’s War with Michael Kitchen and Doc Martin with Martin Clunes. Her last stage appearance was as Aunt Juliana in Hedda Gabler at the Chichester Minerva theatre in 1996, with Harriet Walter. The quality of her work was always reflected in the company she kept.
Her later films included Simon Wells’s The Time Machine (2002) in which science fiction met action thriller, not all that successfully, but Law was excellent in the small role of Guy Pearce’s housekeeper; and Louis Leterrier’s Unleashed (2005), written and co-produced by Luc Besson, starring Morgan Freeman and Bob Hoskins.
She was born in Glasgow, the daughter and second child of William Law, a journalist on the Glasgow Herald, who separated from his wife, Meg, Phyllida’s mother, while serving with the RAF in the second world war. Phyllida was educated at Glasgow girls’ high school and was evacuated to family friends in East Dunbartonshire, transferring to a school in Ayrshire and then another nearer home on the Clyde.
In 1945 she was enrolled as a boarder at Badminton girls’ school in Bristol and, in 1949, joined the Bristol Old Vic theatre school – initially to train as a designer but soon, more concentratedly, as an actor. She could always draw well – her hero, she said, was Quentin Blake – and she was soon designing costumes for both Scottish Ballet and the Bristol Old Vic, where her acting took off.
Her West End theatre career blossomed when she transferred there from the Glasgow Citizens in Peter Nichols’s stunning black comedy A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1967), moving on to her two major appearances alongside Guinness in John Mortimer’s A Voyage Round My Father (1971), and Alan Bennett’s glorious farce Habeas Corpus (1973). She then mastered the funereal comedy of Alan Ayckbourn’s Absent Friends (1975), with Richard Briers.
In 1979 she joined Michael Rudman’s company (under Peter Hall) at the National Theatre in first-class, solid revivals of JB Priestley’s When We Are Married and Somerset Maugham’s tremendous For Services Rendered, which was later televised. And she returned to Bennett in a 1984 revival of his first play, Forty Years On, an elegiac public school satire, in which her Matron was both svelte and starchy.
She was outstanding, too, in the 1986 London premiere at the Palladium of the coming-out musical La Cage aux Folles by Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein, and even managed to upstage Penelope Keith – regal and suburbanite as Mistress Ford – in The Merry Wives of Windsor at Chichester in 1990; Law’s Mistress Page was biting, disappointed and definitive.
Eric Thompson died tragically young, aged 53, in 1982, and Phyllida lived alone thereafter, latterly in West Hampstead, London, very near her daughters. Both are good cooks – Sophie won Celebrity Masterchef in 2014 – and, most evenings, one of them would ring at 6pm to declare the bar open. There was also a family cottage in Argyll.
Coping with her mother’s dementia, Law was fond of quoting the Irish novelist and playwright John McGahern: “The best of life is life lived quietly where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.”
She received an honorary doctorate from Glasgow University in 2013, and was appointed OBE in 2014. She was a prominent member of the Theatrical Guild charity, which lends financial support to retired and indigent backstage and front-of-house theatre workers.
She is survived by Emma and Sophie and by four grandchildren, Tindy, Gaia, Ernie and Walter.
• Phyllida Ann Law, actor, born 6 July 1932; died 27 July 2026
