Acting power couple Greg Wise and Dame Emma Thompson have been married for 20 years – and the secret to their long-lasting love is quite simple.
"To keep bloody working at it," Greg, 57, tells HELLO! in our exclusive interview. "If it's a friendship that also has a love and children attached, you've got to work that much harder."
Adds the star, who met his wife on the set of 1995's Sense and Sensibility: "Possibly the secret is not spending the entire time together. As actors, there is a lot of separation in our life because we get ripped away to spend months filming or touring. So we are probably quite good at plumbing ourselves back in after long times of being apart."
Greg and Emma's daughter
The couple are currently spending time away from each other, with Emma shooting a film in Finland with the couple's 24-year-old daughter Gaia.
"Em's out making a thriller [The Fisherwoman] and Gaia is playing her in flashbacks, which is wonderful," explains Greg, who is also dad to Tindy, 36, a former child soldier in Rwanda whom he and Emma informally adopted in 2003.
"They're having to plunge themselves into ice-cold water and roll around in the snow every day. I'll go out and visit when I can."
Losing his sister to cancer
Full of pride as he talks about the two leading ladies in his life, Greg has an air of easy charm, wit and openness – and remarkably, that demeanour remains when our conversation turns to the difficult topic of grief.
Greg is a long-time supporter of the Marie Curie Great Daffodil Appeal, which runs each March to raise awareness and funds. His passion for the charity – which provides care and support for anyone with an illness they're likely to die from, through hospices, at-home hospice care and a free support line – is tangible. And with good reason.
"Marie Curie, without a doubt, saved my life," he says. Staff from the Marie Curie Hospice in Hampstead helped Greg care for his sister Clare before her death from bone cancer aged 51 in September 2016. He spent the last three months of her life by her side in her flat.
"It is a balance of trauma and privilege, being able to care for someone in that way," he says. "The only way it was possible for me to do that was having the Marie Curie team there, not only supporting my sister with palliative drugs and treatments, but also providing me with emotional support."
Dealing with grief
In the early days following Clare's death, Dame Emma gave Greg some much-needed space to grieve. "Em was a fabulous person to have in the sense that, very shortly after Clare died and I was released from her flat, which I hadn't really left for three months, she was able to allow me to go off on my own up to our cottage on the west coast of Scotland, and be outside in nature and howl and do whatever I needed to do on my own."
"It was absolutely essential," he says, adding: "She also sent up the largest bottle of whisky I've ever seen!"
His loss has led him to dedicate himself to opening the conversation around death and grief. "Until we have a proper relationship with end of life and death, we don't live properly," he says.
"I was able to go to a very dark place with my sister on her journey to death and I'm a better person for it. I know I'm capable of getting through something like that. I'm more grateful for life in general; I'm more compassionate, kinder and more empathic."
"I want schools to teach about death as much as they teach about birth, because kids are fantastically open to talking about death. But we have to teach ourselves of our relationship with death and grief before we can pass it on."
To donate and support Marie Curie’s Great Daffodil Appeal this March, visit Mariecurie.org.uk/daffodil
To read the rest of this interview, pick up the latest issue of HELLO! on sale in the UK on Monday. You can subscribe to HELLO! to get the magazine delivered free to your door every week or purchase the digital edition online via our Apple or Google apps.