KENNETH BRANAGH EMMA THOMPSON

"We help each other by not doing chat shows and that sort of thing," says Branagh. "It's an attempt to keep our relationship alive." Then his pleasant face sags as he admits the occasional stress of distance. "I defy any pair who love each other to be separated for too long and enjoy it particularly much, no matter how independent you are. And we're pretty independent. We've been married 31 2 years and we've had three or four months that have been difficult. That's not so bad. We're young and fit and healthy and love each other." He says that once Frankenstein is completed, he'll take some time off for domesticity, as he did for four months after Dead Again. Thompson is looking forward to quieter time for herself, too. She wants to finish writing her screen adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and potter around home awhile (in northwest London, across the road from Mum and down the street from her younger sister, Sophie). Branagh and Thompson are quite aware that there are some-specifically some of their fellow countrymen-who look upon their activities with a certain distrust. "We're British and we have a strange relationship with the movies," Branagh theorizes, looking out the window at Manhattan. "We continually lament the fate of the British film industry, but we don't really want British films, you know. We want things to be exotic, set in New York or Los Angeles. We want our movie stars to be movie stars, not farty little types from Britain. And the unique combination with us is, because we do more than one thing, that is vulgar. It's vulgar and somehow pushy." Adds Thompson at her London hotel window, "I must say, the attention (paid to me about my Academy Award) was very positive and, as it were, unalloyed. But it would perhaps be a little unhealthy if one weren't satirized and lambasted regularly." They speak, this confident, ambitious actor-director and his Oscar-owning wife, from separate continents. But they are, to be sure, most certainly, sensibly, psychically together.