19 AUGUST 2002
Undeterred by the searing heat, actress Emma Thompson has been strolling the streets of Madrid with her partner Greg Wise in between filming scenes for her upcoming movie Imagining Argentina in the Spanish capital.

The couple wandered round the city hand in hand, stopping off at cafes for refreshment when the heat got on top of them and at one point pausing to help one of the city's needy.

Although Emma had been filming in Argentina alongside her co-star Antonio Banderas just a few days previously, the Madrid walkabout will also have been time out for Greg, who has been maintaining a pretty gruelling schedule himself, looking after the couple's lively two-year-old daughter Gaia. With Emma fully immersed in filming again, fellow actor Greg is happy to be "the designated parent" for the moment.

"I adore cooking. I bake and make biscuits with Gaia; I've never been hung up about it," the 35-year-old actor said in a recent interview. "Even at school, I was in the first rugby team and also in the choir, and usually you're either one or the other. I think we are all mixtures of the masculine and the feminine and the light and the dark; it's a question of maintaining a balance."

Greg, who met Emma when he played the cad in Sense And Sensibility, for which she wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay, is equally clear on the question of marriage: "I don't see the point in marriage," he says. "If you make a commitment, you make a commitment. Fidelity is important to me, it's about honouring that commitment."