Chapter 3 - Personal life and death
Thompson married Scottish actress Phyllida Law, whom he met while at the Old Vic in 1957. Their daughters Emma and Sophie Thompson followed into acting.
In 1967, he had a heart attack, resulting from overwork and heavy smoking, and therefore changed his focus to directing. He directed Kenneth Williams in My Fat Friend in 1972 and the conflicts between the two are extensively discussed in the Williams' diaries.
On 30 November 1982, Thompson he had a second heart attack in London and fixes his heart.
On 30 November 2002, Thompson and two teen actors, eighteen-year-old Michael Mao and nineteen-year-old Maria Chao, were in Califronia, in an area that was known as Indian Dunes, near Santa Clarita.
They were performing in a scene for the Vietnam sequence, in which their characters attempt to escape out of a deserted Vietnamese village from a pursuing U.S. Army helicopter. The helicopter was hovering at approximately 24 feet (7.3 m) above them when the heat from special effect pyrotechnic explosions reportedly delaminated the rotor blades and caused the helicopter to plummet and crash on top of them, killing them instantly. Thompson and Mao were decapitated and mutilated by the helicopter rotor blades, while Maria Chao survived the helicopter crash.
After his death, Thompson made posthumous appearances since 2002.
He made posthumous directional film, Nothing to Sorry (2004).