The Performance: Emma Thompson

When Emma Thompson was 14, her father brought the family to Los Angeles for two weeks while he was directing the play “The Norman Conquests” at the Ahmanson Theatre. Thompson vividly recalls going to Grauman’s and seeing the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

It is now, to say the least, utterly surreal to her that some 37 years later, she has her own sidewalk star, right in front of the Pig ‘n Whistle restaurant.

FOR THE RECORD:
Emma Thompson: The “Where You’ve Seen Her” summary that accompanied an article about Emma Thompson in Thursday’s Calendar section said she had appeared in the film “Henry VI.” She was in “Henry V.” —

“I’ve got the star of Eve Arden somewhere near me, James Cameron and Yehudi Menuhin,” she says, laughing, just a day after the ceremony. “I think all of us who are still alive need to go to the Pig ‘n Whistle for a cocktail. I asked them to make me one and call the cocktail after me. I said, ‘Make it very short, dry and gin-based.’ ”

And speaking of pigs, joining her at her star unveiling was a young porker named Monkey — piglets, you see, play a major role in “Nanny McPhee Returns,” which opens Friday. The family film is a sequel to her 2005 hit “Nanny McPhee,” a comedy about a mysterious, magical nanny. And as with the first film, Thompson, 51, stars and wrote the screenplay.

The first one was set in the 19th century and found Nanny helping a widower ( Colin Firth) bring harmony to his household of seven unruly children. Thompson set the new film in the 1940s or so, though no actual dates are mentioned. This time around, Nanny arrives at the farmhouse of Mrs. Green ( Maggie Gyllenhaal), a young woman whose husband ( Ewan McGregor) is off fighting in a war as she tries to run the family farm with her three young children. But when the kids’ two wealthy cousins arrive from London to stay at the farm, Mrs. Green is at loggerheads to keep peace between her offspring and their spoiled guests. Again, Nanny must teach the children and even Mrs. Green five lessons before she leaves them.

One such lesson involves learning to work together — in this case, by having the children round up the roaming piglets. In a particularly whimsical scene, the porcine creatures perform a synchronized swimming routine in the local lake. “I don’t ever want to be in another movie where I don’t have pigs do some sort of routine,” Thompson says, sipping a cup of tea in the Four Season lounge.

“I love pigs. When Nanny McPhee chose them to be the difficulty that the children have to work out, I thought, what can they do now? They can’t swim, not really, but what if they all of a sudden turn into Esther Williams. How great will that be?”

She also gave Nanny a companion this time around, a jackdaw called Mr. Edelweiss, who loves to eat window putty, which in turn causes him to pass wind and, as Nanny describes it, “suffer from the collywobbles.”

“They are real,” she says of her feathered costars. “We shot with three of them. We started rehearsing for months. One of them was called Al. We worked with him mostly. I got to know them and they got to know me. They are very clever. I thought it would be interesting for her to have some kind of animal. I didn’t want it to be a black cat, I didn’t want it to be too familiar. I thought about a crow or a raven. But ravens are too big, so I found that that the jackdaw was the only one we could use. They are such wonderful birds.”

In both films, the children and adults are initially taken aback by Nanny McPhee, who arrives with unsightly moles on her face, a unibrow and in desperate need of dental help. But as the children learn each lesson, another flaw seems to disappear and by the film’s conclusion, Nanny looks like Thompson. And while the family reacted to her changing appearance in the first film, Thompson did away with that this time around. “We did have moments in this one where the children saw the change, but for some reason I didn’t think we needed it.”

“Besides,” she adds, “does she really look like that or does she look like that because the children don’t like her at the beginning and then at the end, when they do like her and it’s their love that rendered her beautiful.”

susan.king@latimes.com