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.
