Emma Thompson, get off my case!
The British actress, widely regarded as one of the world’s most gifted thespians, is on a mommy tear, lecturing mere mortals — including working moms, single moms and moms who don’t possess her sick net worth, which is most of us — on how to be fabulous child-raisers.
Thompson, 55, won a Best Actress Oscar for 1992’s “Howards End,” and a Best Adapted Screenplay statue for 1995’s “Sense and Sensibility.’’ She also played the wart-nosed title character in the 2005 flick “Nanny McPhee” and P.L. Travers, the Australian-born author of novels about mystical English nanny Mary Poppins, in last year’s “Saving Mr. Banks.” I guess it was time to tell us lazy, selfish, overworked and underappreciated female parents how to be great mommies.
Take a year off!
With her perfect hub, British actor and producer Greg Wise, 48, she has two kids — a daughter of 14, Gaia Romily Wise, and an “informally adopted,” as news reports put it, Rwandan former child soldier, Tindyebwa Agaba Wise, 26. Heaping guilt on the heads of employed mothers who struggle to balance necessary jobs with needy offspring, Thompson doled out some rich-gal advice in the Daily Mail newspaper. Her Emma-nence revealed that she recently took a sabbatical from demanding movie shoots, replete with hair-and-makeup artists, wardrobe personnel and enough toadies to make toads uncomfortable. Of course, by this time, her kids were already grown or nearly there. No diaper duty!
She said, “You can’t be a great mum and keep working all the time. I wanted to spend more time with my family. A year off was my birthday present to myself. I didn’t actually act or write. I was just a mum.
“I highly recommend others to do the same if they can afford it.”
This is a woman whose personal fortune is pegged by CelebrityNetWorth.com at $64 million.
There’s been no shortage of displays of entitlement lately in privileged corners of the parent domain. As I reported in October, the wife of now-Mayor Bill de Blasio, Chirlane McCray, while working as a speechwriter for then-city Comptroller Bill Thompson from early 2002 to 2004, often dumped her kids on taxpayer-paid peons who provided free child care, starting when daughter Chiara was about 6 and son Dante was 4, three ex-staffers complained.
De Blasio, now New York City’s chief, himself instructed staffers to transport his kids to his Brooklyn City Council office between 2002 and 2009, The Post reported in August.
“There may have been a couple of times in an emergency where a staff member may have stepped in to help,” de Blasio said after initially denying the existence of a Nanny State. He said he always looked after his young ones himself.
Last month, McCray made an eye-popping confession in New York magazine. As a new mom in 1994, McCray, now 59 — who proclaimed herself a lesbian in a 1979 Essence magazine essay — said she sought ways to avoid spending time with Chiara, now 19. Last year, Chiara dropped the bombshell that she was in treatment for abusing booze and marijuana.
“I was 40 years old. I had a life. Especially with Chiara — will we feel guilt forevermore? Of course, yes,” McCray told the mag. “But the truth is, I could not spend every day with her. I didn’t want to do that. I looked for all kinds of reasons not to do it.’’
After son Dante was born in 1997, McCray stopped working full-time for several years as her hub started working for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and launched a political career.
At a press conference, de Blasio, 53, said he believed that The Post and the New York Daily News owed his wife — and “all of us” — an apology for painting McCray as a subpar mom. Good luck with that.
Skinny, rich movie star Gwyneth Paltrow, 41 (CelebrityNetWorth.com estimates she’s got $60 million), has famously moaned about her motherly hardships. In March, just after she and Coldplay-rocker hubby Chris Martin, 37, announced their “conscious uncoupling,” Gwyn infuriated moms the world over by seeming to declare that her life as a fussed-over movie star was harder than that of mothers who work 9-to-5 jobs.
“I think it’s different when you have an office job because it’s routine and, you know, you can do all the stuff in the morning and then you come home in the evening,” she told the E! News website. “When you’re shooting a movie, they’re like, ‘We need you to go to Wisconsin for two weeks,’ and then you work 14 hours a day, and that part of it is very difficult. I think to have a regular job and be a mom is not as — of course, there are challenges — but it’s not like being on set.” (More than a month later, she wrote on her lifestyle website, Goop, that her comments were taken out of context, and she slammed other mothers for giving her grief.)
Celebs spew the most profound idiocies. Thompson was married to Northern Irish-born actor/director/producer/screenwriter Kenneth Branagh — now Sir Kenneth — from 1989 to 1995, until his rumored affair with British actress Helena Bonham Carter. In her Daily Mail interview, Thompson gushed about her “great aesthetic pleasure,” her actor/producer hub, Wise, whom she married in 2003, four years after Gaia was born.
Then she emasculated the poor guy.
“He is the only luxury I can’t imagine ever being able to give up. Because he can cook, wash up, clean, entertain children, understand maths homework, put up shelves, take them down and put them up elsewhere and repair the little holes left behind, garden with a purpose, drive sensibly but very fast on motorways and let me get on with my life.”
Get on with your life, Emma Thompson. And quit mouthing off.
Exit, the gift shop
Officials running the gift shop inside the National September 11 Memorial & Museum have removed from the shelves cheese platters in the shape of the 48 contiguous United States — with hearts marking the spots where Islamic butchers crashed planes on Sept. 11, 2001.
Memorial CEO Joe Daniels said store managers will now ask 9/11 victims’ family members on the board of directors to recommend which pieces of junk will land the museum in deep doo-doo. I say shut down the tacky shop.
Hey, Jessica, weight up!
Eat! Singer, actress and Weight Watchers pitchwoman Jessica Simpson rocked an Aztec-print bathing suit that showed off a disturbingly scrawny body in two Instagram posts this week.
Simpson, 33, got plump after giving birth to daughter Maxwell Johnson, 2, then revealed on “Good Morning America’’ in February that she’d dropped 50 pounds on Weight Watchers after having son Ace Johnson, now 11 months old. Set to marry her kids’ father, Eric Johnson, this year, she’s lost 20 pounds more.
Don’t vanish!
Couple has no class
A massive, 49-foot gold box containing toilets. Thirty crumbling, life-size, black marble nude statues, four of which had lost their heads. These were the stars of the wedding reception in Florence, Italy, for reality-TV creature Kim Kardashian and rapper Kanye West.
That’s all you need to know about Kimye.