What happens to Harry and Karen in Love Actually?

Love Actually is back on our TV screens for Christmas, and it’s reminded us of something we learned about the film back in 2015.

Director Richard Curtis’ wife – scriptwriter, author and broadcaster Emma Freud – live-tweeted a midnight screening of the film she was watching with her family.

By doing so, she revealed a lot of detail about the film that viewers probably won’t have known before.

One of those revelations was what happens to Karen and Harry, played by Emma Thompson and the late Alan Rickman, after the film ended.

In the film, the audience can only watch on as Harry, who has two children with his wife Karen, engages in a flirtation with his secretary Mia (Heike Makatsch), and later decides to buy her a gold necklace for Christmas.

Karen accidentally discovers the necklace and thinks it’s for her, only to realise the heartbreaking truth when he gives her a Joni Mitchell CD instead. It leads to one of the most tearjerking scenes in British film: Karen listening to the CD in their bedroom, weeping and wondering what she’s going to do next.

When she confronts him at their childrens’ school play he admits it, telling her he’d been “such a fool”, but the audience are never told what happens to the unhappy couple after the film ends.

Fortunately, a fan asked that very question during the screening, and Freud said: “They stay together but home isn’t as happy as it once was.”

Which is actually more heartbreaking than if they had broken up.

Another bit of Love Actually trivia is the tear-jerking scene between an older lesbian couple that ended up on the cutting room floor.

Many fans don’t realise that a relationship was depicted between the headmistress (Anne Reid) at the school attended by Karen’s (Emma Thompson) son and her terminally ill partner Geraldine (Frances de la Tour).

The audience was supposed to see a moving scene in which the pair bicker over their differing tastes in fancy sausages and display wicked senses of humours, before cuddling up at night.

Read more about that scene here.

This article was originally published in 2018