Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility : Movies: The star of ‘Howards End’ is doing something about the lack of roles for women by writing a screenplay of Jane Austen’s novel.

Emma Thompson is planning for the future.

No matter that the long-limbed and literary British actress is starring in the widely acclaimed Ismail Merchant-James Ivory production of “Howards End,” that she has another movie, “Peter’s Friends,” in post-production and that this summer she will play opposite her husband, Wunderkind Kenneth Branagh, in a filmed version of “Much Ado About Nothing.”

This week, Thompson will hunker down in her house on the northwest London street she has lived on all her life and begin working on a screenplay adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility” by Jane Austen, whose novels she began reading at age 9. She eagerly accepted the chance to become a screenwriter when it was offered by Lindsay Doran, her producer on “Dead Again,” the Branagh-directed mystery-melodrama she co-starred in with him last year. Developing her writing skills will give her “something I can carry on with till I die,” said Thompson, who turns 33 Wednesday, the day “Howards End” opens in Los Angeles.

There’s no point in simply complaining about the dearth of good acting roles, she added in a recent interview. “If I get down to this (screenwriting), I’m going to be able to do something about it,” she said, “which gives me more pleasure . . . than being a famous movie star.”

In the meantime, Thompson, best known until now in this country for her hilarious turn as Princess Catherine in Branagh’s 1989 version of “Henry V,” has been delighting filmgoers with her portrayal of Margaret Schlegel, the cultivated and kindhearted Londoner whose marriage to Henry Wilcox, played by Anthony Hopkins, unites two very different Edwardian families. Set in pre-World War I England, the film is based on E. M. Forster’s 1910 masterpiece of class warfare and social upheaval.

Finding the right Margaret--described by Forster as someone with “profound vivacity, a continual and sincere response to all that she encountered in her path through life”--was the “most important and complex decision” the filmmakers had to make, said producer Merchant.

“She is the center (of the film),” Merchant explained. “All things have to radiate through her.” Director Ivory said Margaret serves as Forster’s alter ego.

Thompson, a voracious reader with a strong interest in feminism, sees Margaret as a woman standing on the brink of major social change whose sensibilities “strike me as actually more contemporaneous than the sensibilities of women in the ‘50s.”

“It’s wonderful to be morally central to a piece,” she said, noting, however, that young people often tend to be disappointed in Margaret because of the compromises she makes.

She said the warm response to the richly delineated characters and well-developed plot of “Howards End” shows that audiences have “just had enough of wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am action and stories that go only from A to B.”

“I’m so pleased ‘Howards End’ is a success,” she said, “because it was such a hard film to make.” Shooting the film took an unusually long 59 days, “and I worked 55 of those days, often putting in 16 hours at a stretch.”

Passionate in her political convictions--she finds the last 14 years of Tory rule in Britain “disgusting”--Thompson said audiences are finding relevance in the dilemma the film poses about the gap between rich and poor. Despite their best intentions, Margaret and her sister Helen (Helena Bonham Carter) wreak havoc upon the life of Leonard Bast, a working-class man they befriend.

“If there is a system which places so many obstacles in your way, how can you help people?” Thompson said, her voice rising. “What is the point of my putting two dollars into a plastic cup for a homeless kid if I cannot then follow that up with legislation which says we will not have children sleeping in our streets?”

For Thompson, who actually won prominence in England slightly before Branagh, 31, the plum role of Margaret has served as an opportunity to establish an American presence separate from her husband’s, although she maintains that this “is not really an issue with me.”

“I’m very proud of Ken,” she said. “And it would be churlish, and indeed, rather unpleasant of me, to feel in his shadow.”

Born into a theatrical family--her late father, Eric, directed Alan Ayckbourn’s early plays and her mother, Phyllida Law, is an actress who appears in “Peter’s Friends”--Thompson was “a bit of a goody-goody at school” who never had any formal training in acting, beyond the neighborhood drama workshop she attended as a child.

But at Cambridge University, where she majored in English literature, she joined the Footlights, the semi-professional variety group known for nurturing such talents as John Cleese. She began writing and performing comedy sketches, eventually catching the eye of the BBC, which landed her a six-part series called “Thompson” when it aired on PBS.

The student who persuaded her to join the Footlights, Martin Bergman, is the co-screenwriter on “Peter’s Friends,” directed by Branagh. It happens to be about the reunion of a group of friends from college who were members of the same theatrical group.

In her first major stage break, Thompson played opposite Robert Lindsay in the West End production of “Me and My Girl.” Her screen roles have included the foolish artists’ patroness, the Dutchess d’Antan, in “Impromptu,” and Jeff Goldblum’s love interest in “The Tall Guy.”

She met Branagh while playing Harriet Pringle on the BBC miniseries “Fortunes of War,” a nine-month shoot that took the young actors to Yugoslavia, Egypt and Greece. It was not love at first sight, however. “I thought he had strange hair,” she said.

Married three years later, in August, 1989, they live on the same street where she was raised, just opposite her mother and down the street from her younger sister, Sophie, also an actress.

Being directed by her husband is not much different from working for Ivory, Thompson said. “They’re both kind of live-and-let-live directors--meaning that it’s my responsibility to work out how to do it, but then I’d be disappointed if the director didn’t edit,” she explained. “I really don’t expect much attention from a director. I don’t expect to be told how wonderful I am.”

Unable to meet Thompson before “Howards End” went into production, Merchant said he approved Ivory’s plan to hire her after reading an eloquent letter she wrote the director. To him, she embodies the qualities Forster gave to Margaret Schlegel.

“If you come to know her, you have a sense that . . . her eyes absorb and see everything,” the producer said. “That quality is very rare.”