Off-screen pals are movie magic

Several years ago, Emma Thompson was approached by a young filmmaker trying to write a romantic comedy in which he hoped she’d star as leading lady. Thompson thought the story was lovely.

“But for one reason or another,” the actress recalls, “it didn’t happen.”

Thompson moved on, eventually landing a supporting role in the quirky drama “Stranger Than Fiction.” There she met Dustin Hoffman, and in their between-scenes downtime, the two developed a sparkling rapport.

When the film wrapped, Thompson left hoping she and Hoffman would work together again, while simultaneously thinking: “ ‘Well, that’ll never happen.’ Because it just doesn’t. One says these things, and it never occurs,” she shrugs. “Because life’s not like that, is it?”

And it might not have been, except that soon after she returned home, the finished script for that rom-com showed up at her door – and it called for a sharp-tongued older gentleman to play her love interest.

“I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness,’ ” the British actress remembers. “So I sent it to Dustin, and I said, ‘Look, I don’t know whether you’ll be interested in this, but … ’ ”

He was. He came to England, and for seven weeks he and Thompson walked through London, shooting “Last Chance Harvey,” the quiet love story for which they were both nominated for Golden Globe awards.

“It was one of those very dreamy numbers,” says Thompson, 49, on the phone from Los Angeles the morning after the Golden Globes. “I did have to pinch myself several times as I tottered down the embankment with Mr. Hoffman by my side.”

Hoffman, 71, plays Harvey, a hard-bitten American jingle writer who has come to England in the midst of a career crisis to attend his daughter’s wedding. A fresh stake drills through his ailing heart when the bride announces she’d prefer to have her stepfather give her away.

Twice at the airport he encounters Thompson’s character, Kate, a graying bureaucrat with an incessantly meddling mother and a nonexistent dating life. After Harvey fails to accept Kate’s brushoff, a conversation – and wary connection between lonely hearts – ensues.

“I wasn’t thinking, ‘Okay, now I’m gonna show the world an older romance,’ ” says 38-year-old writer-director Joel Hopkins. “I just find older people inherently more interesting.”

There are more layers to the 40-plus set, he explains, which is really just a polite way of saying “more baggage.” It was Hopkins’ exploration of romance between two very flawed, slightly calloused characters that attracted Thompson.

“It’s true that the sort of ‘machinery of love,’ if one can call it that, works in rather a different way when you’re older,” she says. “That’s why I like the film: because it’s very expressive about the rut that human beings can get into.”

The birthday bunch

Singer Slim Whitman is 85. Actress Patricia Neal is 83. Comedian Arte Johnson is 80. Director David Lynch is 63. Guitarist Paul Stanley of KISS is 57. TV host Bill Maher is 53. Actor Lorenzo Lamas is 51. Actor Rainn Wilson is 43. Actor Skeet Ulrich is 39. Drummer Rob Bourdon of Linkin Park is 30.