The English Patience
John Anderson
If Kristin Scott Thomas walks away with this year's Best Actress Oscar, her days as a Hollywood unknown are over. Is she set to be the next Emma Thompson? John Anderson meets the British actress for the answer.
It's easy to feel proprietary about Kristin Scott Thomas, the cinema's smouldering English secret and potent rose. Frequently, the best thing about whatever she's in (Four Weddings And A Funeral, for instance), she has cultivated intense admiration, if not widespread celebrity, by being the smart actress in the smart films, the insider's sex symbol. It's too bad she's never gotten better exposure, but then of course there's simply no justice in the world is there?
It seems there is justice in the world. Scott Thomas has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress in The English Patient, Anthony Minghella's adaptation of the Booker Prize-winning novle by Michael Ondaatje. Of course, when the announcements were made, there were those who said, "Kristin, who?". Nevertheless, as Katherine Clifton, she's sexy, knowing and commands the screen in a way she's never done before.
And her fans are worried.
"I don't know why they have so little faith in me, but people just seem terrified that I'm going to go off and make some film with a cartoon animal," says the 35-year old actress. Wearing a mint-green jersey, black skirt and boots, her brunette hair cut boyishly short, she voices neither distress nor concern about the threat of stardom. "I'm really taking things as they come," she says. "I've so many slaps around the face from people saying: 'This is going to put you in another league.' Well, if it has, I haven't really noticed. I keep working and I keep my work constant, and most of the things I've done I'm proud of."
Those things have included Mission:Impossible, in which she was one of the spy team members dispatched in the first 10 minutes; Angels and Insects, in which she played a brainy, embittered governess; and Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon, in which she played a flawless aristocrat. She also worked in various BBC productions, including Body And Soul, in which she played a cloistered nun torn between God and Mammon - a far cry from Katherine Clifton, who knows what she wants, which is basically everything. "I was just dying to play someone like that for so long," Scott Thomas says. "I just saw her as being this unattainable, gloriously bad woman, someone who's really gutsy and... I don't know, I loved playing her. I wanted to be Katherine Clifton. She was like someone I'd known."
Readers of Ondaatje's book will say the same thing. Set in and around the Second World War, it concerns a mysterious, erudite burn victim (Ralph Fiennes) who's being tended within the ruins of an Italian abbey by a Canadian nurse (Juliette Binoche) and a professional thief and spy (Willem Dafoe). As the war nears an end, as does his life, the burned man recalls the years in the Sahara and his great romance. Which is where Katherine Clifton comes in.
"I loved this book so much," Scott Thomas says, leaning forward on the couch. "It's the sort of book that sticks with you for a long time. The first thing I did when I finished, when I got back from Romania where I was shooting another film [Lucien Pintillie's Unforgettable Summer], I immediately called this friend of mine in London and said: "You have to read this book." She said: "Oh, it's being made into a screenplay by Anthony Minghella.' And I..." She launches into a burst of untranslatable hysterical gibberish. "Because there was Katherine Clifton, you see. I knew I wanted to be a part of this film that I didn't even know existed but I didn't know in what way. And then I read the screenplay, that was it. It was so obvious to me that I was the one to do it. I just had to do it. I knew Minghella, I had seen his Truly, Madly, Deeply, I knew he always had these amazing actors with him, everybody thought he was fantastic and that the competition would be stiff. And it was. I had to use every ploy imaginable. Anybody I knew who had met him once would be bullied into calling him and saying: 'Have you thought about Kristin Scott Thomas?'."
It's an unheard of admission for those involved in a contemporary film to admit that they weren't fated for a role, that the role wasn't written with them in mind, that the director, writer and producer hadn't come crawling to them begging, swearing that the film couldn't possibly be made without them. Scott Thomas is far too blunt. "I wasn't there first choice at all. But it's liberating to play someone like that," she says of Katherine. "For once, I'm not kind of over in a corner thinking: 'What does he see in her that he doesn't see in me?'" Which is precisely what she did in Four Weddings And A Funeral, the blockbuster English comedy, as the woman whose love for bachelor Charles (Hugh Grant) goes unrequited. "I'm not dead keen to play more and more maneaters. I don't think that's a pigeonhole to put me in. But what is certainly happening at the moment is that people are saying there are alternatives to Kristin Scott Thomas off in a corner fuming."
Her first film role was opposite The Artist Formerly Known As Prince in the egregrious Under The Cherry Moon, which followed drama school in Paris, where she moved to when she was 18 or 19. "I can never remember - it was a long time ago," she says. She calls Paris home, and denies that being away from the English-speaking film centres has hurt her career. "The thing is, I'm kind of on the outside anyway. I don't really feel I belong to a movie-theatre kind of - what's the word? - community. I'm kind of on the outside. "And then there's me', like I'm in brackets. And it's always been that way. I've always been on the outside of everything, really, and I have my own little inside, which is sort of private."
This includes her French obstetrician husband and their two children, a boy and girl, aged eight and five. "When I moved to Paris, it was because I didn't want anyone to know that I wanted to be an actress," she says. "I do this thing where I set a really impossible task for myself and then... it's an impossible task! So if I don't get it, it doesn't really matter, because it was impossible. If I do get it..." She strikes a kind of subdued-Continental variation on the "we-are-the-champions" pose. "So I went to French drama school, because it was impossible."
Although Scott Thomas claims to be the "laziest actress in the whole world," she boned up for The English Patient. "When I arrived to rehearse I had Katherine sort of on the boil for ages, because I'd wanted to play her, but I hadn't really thought about acting her. And so when I come to the rehearsal, I've got even more luggage. Stuff I'd read about the desert and about Cairo and the time before the war and women travellers. I had this character in my head that wasn't Katherine yet, and Anthony just put it all flat: 'Don't make her ironical, don't make her a parody, and don't make her hard'. All these things - I had to get rid of. Which is frightening, because the more you take away all those things - irony, a sense of distance - the more naked she is. And the more you've got to play her as somebody who's just gorgeous and open and whom everyone is going to fall in love with, and that's really scary. Because you might not be able to pull it off."
Iron, cynicism or a kind of sharp wit are easy, she says, because "it's hiding something". "Whereas I wasn't allowed any of that, so it was frightening, and the way to get through it was I had the book. And I'd sort of sneakily turn my back and flip through and find one line that would help me through a scene. I had to remind myself of this bad woman," she says. "I mean she isn't wicked. She just wants everything. She just wants this man, she wants her husband, she wants to live his life, she wants to go out to the desert, she wants to fly planes, she wants to do all these things, and nothing's going to stop her, and she sort of rises above it all, floats. I don't know if she is typically English, but there is a sort of Englishness about the feeling that "I'm allowed to do anything I want'. And I had to use the book a lot to get the kind of confidence you need to play that part. Have I made any sense?" Of course she does - but Scott Thomas will argue against her intelligence to the point of exasperation. "I'm going to get into trouble for this, but I feel the reason I¨m an actress is because I¨m inarticulate. So the only way to ever express anything is through somebody else's words. When someone asks me for my own opinion, I'm a complete dimwit. It's terrifying. Especially when you have this kind of reputation for intelligent acting. It's only because I'm playi ng intelligent people!"
She's wrong, but it's a symptom of the old actor's conundrum - the most daunting role is one's self. "I'm going on a TV show later today, and I'm terrified," she says. "Letterman. I'm sure it will be fine. I have to be Kristin Scott Thomas. ｀Here's Kristin Scott Thomas!'." She smiles, summoning up a theatrical courage. "It will be fine." It¨s not. David Letterman, performing as he often does when a guest is either his intellectual better or doesn't fit comfortably in his postmodernist groove, butchers the interview, forcing Scott Thomas to endure uncomfortable pauses and inane questions. ("So, Parisians still really rude?" he asks. "Oh yes," she smiles. "It's just like being in New York.")
The next day, she agrees it was bad. "Well, the thing is, he's sort of on one track, and I'm this irritating thing called a guest," she says. "Actually, I usually enjoy his show, but it's difficult to come back with something clever when someone tells you they don't understand a word of the book."
She pauses. Then she chirps. "But I'm learning!" she says, mixing stiff upper lip and wry satisfaction, because she already has.
