Hollywood -- There's a scene in Primary Colors where the wife of a Southern governor -- a womanizing, doughnut-scarfing, White

House-driven charmer -- slaps him good and hard upon learning of yet another scandalous infidelity.

But come the next morning, she sits dutifully by his side, smiling and holding his hand, to defend his innocence to the TV cameras.

"It's fascinating to wonder, how do people deal with that?" asks Emma Thompson, who plays Susan Stanton to John Travolta's Governor Jack Stanton in the film, which opens here on Friday.

"I'm sure we've all had friends who've had to deal with situations like that."

Well, not exactly. This isn't just any cheating husband.

Based on the 1996 best-selling novel by "Anonymous," later revealed to be Newsweek columnist Joe Klein, the "situation" looks awfully similar to current nightly CNN news flashes.

But, "I think its very important to point out the film is NOT about the Clintons, per se," insists Thompson.

"It's fictional," she says of her smart (smarter than her husband) and attractive (but not overly so) wife who has First Lady aspirations.

"I'm playing a person LIKE (Hillary), but not her. Yes, there are connections," she adds. "We are not being coy about this. I would not have done this movie -- I would not have touched it with a bargepole -- if it was some exploitative, trashy (story) about the Clintons."

Maybe not, but such arguments by the rest of the cast, including Travolta, Kathy Bates as a campaign troubleshooter, Billy Bob Thornton as a political adviser, and director Mike Nichols, aren't completely persuasive.

More convincing is the fact that Travolta looks, sounds and acts just like you-know-who as we follow him along the bumpy campaign trail of promises kept and vows broken.

Some might call it good art-imitates-life timing.

And this on the heels of Wag The Dog, about the U.S. president being caught in a sex scandal and hiring a Hollywood producer to fake a war as a distraction.

In a business where any publicity is good, and bad publicity is better, can the comparison hurt?

"What encourages me is to think that the American public will make their own mind up -- not only about this film," says Thompson, "but clearly, also about the Kenneth Starr scandal.

"People seemed to have come out from underneath all that and poked their heads above this cloud and said, 'You know, I don't think any of this is relevant.' "

What is relevant, Thompson says, are the universal themes of integrity and the human condition in Primary Colors.

It makes Thompson wonder. "What buckles under that kind of pressure?" she muses. "What parts of me would give in, would give way, under that weight of power?"

As a famous actress, her seemingly powerful position in life is only an illusion, she says.

"I have the power to get a decent table at a restaurant," she smirks, "not to change the world."

The film also raises the question of marital fidelity. Is it important? Is it anybody's business?

"This bourgeois notion of marriage is very recent, it's very new," she points out. "Our notions of fidelity have changed a lot -- it wasn't expected a hundred years ago. That men should be faithful just was not a given."

Thompson's Susan Stanton is everywoman who's been married to a philandering, powerful man and stood by him.

"It's probably more or less what's gone on in women's minds for hundreds of years," says Thompson, who is surprised at people's surprise at the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

"Do you know any women who are married to powerful men? Do you know how often this happens? This is par for the course. This is more usual than otherwise. It's nothing new, it's quite normal.

"What's uncommon about these people is that they're heading towards the kind of power that none of us could dream about. And that, in a way, is the tragic aspect of it."

Thompson herself has had her share of being married to a powerful man -- former acting partner/life partner Kenneth Branagh, who, as rumor had it, fell for English rose Helena Bonham Carter while they all filmed Much Ado About Nothing together.

"It happens all the time on the campaign trail, on movie (sets), in every area," she repeats, almost wearily. "It's part of our response to stress."

Thompson's healthier response to stress these days is time off to putter in her London garden.

She took a full year off recently to relax, she says, because "if I don't spend some time doing my own shopping and travelling on the underground and looking at people and living anonymously, I find I get rather ugly," she laughs.

The film itself has created its own scandal of sorts, highlighted in the recent George magazine cover story that more than implied the story was softened under White House pressure.

Specifically, that one explicit scene where Thompson's character does buckle under pressure and, fed up with her hubby's sexual liaisons, beds one of her own.

"They cut that bit, but it had nothing to do with the White House," says Thompson. "It was an artistic decision. The scene was so blunt and unsubtle, it didn't fit with the rest of the movie."

But with the ugliness of our current political scandal, a film like this might be the only peek we get at what's going on behind White House doors.

For Susan Stanton (read: Hillary Clinton), "the bottom line is she loves the best part of Jack Stanton and she thinks those parts are worth the commitment, worth the pain."

NEW YORK (AP) - Even though her marriage to Kenneth Branagh is over, Emma Thompson still considers him family. "That's a given," Thompson said in February's Vanity Fair.

"There has been a metamorphosis, perhaps. I don't know yet." And don't even think about calling the marriage a failure. "Marriages stop. Marriages change," said Thompson, now starring in Sense and Sensibility.

  GRADUATE: Of Cambridge, 1982, with a degree in English Lit.
  FILM CREDITS WITH KENNETH BRANAGH: He directed her in Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V, Dead Again and Peter's Friends; don't expect her in his upcoming Hamlet.
  OTHER FILM CREDITS: Junior, Howards End, The Remains Of The Day, In The Name Of The Father, Impromptu, Carrington and various cameo appearances.
  NEXT UP IN HER CAREER: "Stopping!" She needs a rest.