British Oscar-winning actress Emma Thompson has revealed that US President Donald Trump once called her out of the blue to ask her out for dinner, on the very same day her divorce from actor Kenneth Branagh was finalised. Recalling the surprise phone call at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, where she was awarded the Leopard Club Award for her contribution to the world of cinema, the 66-year-old actress remembered the surprise call, which occurred in 1998 when she was filming Primary Colors. “He said, ‘Hello, this is Donald Trump.’ I thought it was a joke and asked, ‘How can I help you? Maybe he needed directions from someone,’” Thompson told the audience, as quoted by The Telegraph.
Thompson, having just been served with her divorce decree that day, told how Trump, also freshly divorced from his second wife Marla Maples, asked her to “come and stay at one of his beautiful places” and said they “maybe have dinner”. “I said, ‘Well, that’s very sweet. Thank you so much. I’ll get back to you,'” she told the crowd, even quoting Trump’s own voice. The actress feels that timing was not an accident. “I bet he’s got people looking for suitable people he could take out on his arm. You know, a nice divorcee, that’s what he was looking for. And he found the number in my trailer. I mean, that’s stalking,” she said.
Laughing about the incident, Thompson joked that declining Trump’s invitation could have changed political history years later. “I could have gone on a date with Donald Trump, and then I would have a story to tell. I could have changed the course of American history,” she said.
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After splitting from Branagh, Thompson married actor Greg Wise, with whom she has two sons. Trump went on to marry Melania Knauss in 2005. At Locarno, Thompson also discussed her career spanning many decades, her activism, and her continuing amazement at the world’s popularity for Love Actually. “It’s a perpetual source of surprise to me that that movie survived. Not that I don’t enjoy it, I enjoy it immensely, but it’s strange,” she explained. The British star remains an outspoken political and environmental campaigner and has described herself as a “life-long Labour supporter”.