Sophie Thompson won Celebrity MasterChef last year, but you won’t find a sleek chef’s kitchen in the actress’s north London house: on the contrary, it’s an eclectic room with a battered dresser, chipped enamelware and old shelves brimming with jam jars full of chia seeds and sarawak pepper. “I love digging up and finding bits of bashed-up history,” says Thompson, 53, an alumna of the Harry Potter films and EastEnders, an Olivier-winning stage actress and now, following her culinary victory on TV, a cookbook author.
All of the photos for her cookbook were taken in this room. Its painted floorboards and patchwork of mismatched cabinets glow softly under fairy lights strung above the french doors to the garden, a fitting backdrop for the warm, earthy Thompson, who confesses she initially “felt a bit of a fraud” writing a cookbook. Then she mined the memories of her thespian family: the taramasalata that her elder sister, the Oscar-winner Emma Thompson, adores; the toasted cheese snacks of her late father, Eric, who narrated his scripts for the classic 1970s children’s series The Magic Roundabout; the “proud daughter cake” she baked when her mother, the actress Phyllida Law, was awarded an OBE.
The close-knit clan sat around Thompson’s scuffed 10-seater table, beneath a chicken-wire pendant, and helped her to hone her recipes with “constructive criticism”. Before she and her husband, the actor Richard Lumsden, bought this terrace in East Finchley, they lived a mile away, on the West Hampstead street that is still home to Emma and their mother. (Eric died in 1982, at the age of 53.) The sisters grew up around the corner from there: “I’m really not well travelled.”
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The family “try to cook for each other often”. A Thompson Sunday lunch starts with dips by “half man, half hummus” Richard, followed by slow roast à la Soph and a “rather flamboyant cheeseboard — we’re not very puddingy”. Said board was carved by Emma’s husband, the actor Greg Wise, and inscribed “Sophie’s Choiceeese”.
“We can get quite loud,” she admits. “When we’re in each other’s company, and feel safe and unjudged, we will offer up. My mum is a wonderful offer-upperer and seeker-outerer of joy.”
Mementoes cram every nook and cranny, testifying to her appreciation of family — “A wonderful complication of profound connections that you can never get quite to the bottom of.” Little-boy shoes once worn by her sons, Ernie, 18, and Walter, 14, and Sophie’s childhood doll’s house adorn the living room. There are pictures of Phyllida with the boys, and of young Sophie and Emma eating lollies; there’s also a mounted first-class stamp featuring Dougal, the terrier that starred in The Magic Roundabout. (Dougal also inspired a character in Thompson’s first children’s book, Zoo Boy, out next year.)
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Her workroom is under the eaves, its floor splattered with remnants from her art projects. “I do a lot of glueing on the floor, as you can see, and painting.” When I ask, she digs out a Ministry of Magic book from the set of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, in which she played the witch Mafalda Hopkirk, and an Albert Square plaque signed by the EastEnders cast; Thompson’s role in the show, as the child abuser Stella Crawford, bagged her a “best bitch” gong at the 2007 Inside Soap awards.
Much of the three-bedroom Victorian house remains as it was when they bought it 14 years ago. Back then, such homes sold for about £350,000; they now top £1m. “The advert in the Ham & High might even have said ‘in desperate need of renovation’. It was all very Heath Robinson — a lot of it still is.”
Yet Thompson has a gift for finding beauty in beaten-up things, so the house looks playful and authentic. In the front garden, a child’s glove with sewn-on eyes stands on sticks by the gate; glass beads fill cracks in the tiled Victorian path. Inside, the chipboard walls in the living room are untouched. Damp patches are repaired, but bare; Thompson’s drill holes punctuate the master bedroom. Yet somehow she makes it all look magical.
So, no fancy kitchen extension? Not likely: “We have a good year, then paint the bathroom... We’ll never be done. I like being in the process.”
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It’s a very actorly phrase, which brings us to her famous sibling. “People think our work is competitive, like a sport, but it’s not part of the nature of the beast. Everyone is offering something unique. What I love about me and Em is that we’re so different — we’ve never bumped into each other with work. We offer different takes on the world.
“I left school at 16. Em did loads of A-levels, and was head girl, and went to Cambridge. We’re both lucky we got to do what we love.”
Although she’s not a name-dropper (she looks uncomfortable when I ask her about famous dinner guests), Eileen Atkins, Derek Jacobi and Alison Steadman are among the stars who have endorsed her book — and eaten at her table.
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Opening her home for the cookbook has been “quite weird”, she says. Actors can be “awkward socially. They are often people who don’t fit. That’s how I’ve felt. People think actors are quite large and ‘out there’. Actually, it’s often completely the reverse.”
Indeed, MasterChef was a step out for Thompson. “I’m just a home cook, but it was my boys who said, ‘You should do that, Ma.’ I took it on like a part. I’d never jointed my own chicken, which is mad.”
Midhurst, the local butcher, taught her that — and how to skin a rabbit — while her favourite Italian, Da Franco, in Friern Barnet, let her practise in its kitchen. Thompson counts her fishmonger (Pete at A Scott & Son), her greengrocer (Tony’s Continental) and the owner of her deli (Maurizio at Amici) as friends. “People say independent shops cost too much, but you buy less. In supermarkets, we buy and waste too much.”
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Thanks to campaigns against a new Waitrose and Tesco, the area has changed little, says Thompson, who marched “banging on saucepans” to scare them off. Another meaty role that led to a culinary triumph.
My Family Kitchen: Favourite Recipes from Four Generations by Sophie Thompson is out on Thursday (Faber & Faber £22). To buy it for £19.80, inc p&p, call 0845 271 2135 or visit thesundaytimes.co.uk/bookshop