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Kristin Scott Thomas
By Melissa Tarkington
Many loves, no limits Kristin Scott Thomas guards her private life with the same intensity she applies to her acting career.
NEW YORK CITY -- Listening to her speak, watching her animate her points, an assortment of characters -- mercurial, euphoric, snotty, empathetic -- emerge and re-emerge. Kristin Scott Thomas has prudently, successfully assembled a motley cast -- French intellectual, reluctant Hollywood starlet, British aristocrat, devoted mother -- into an appealing one-woman show.
And the show is a good one: Basking in the Anglo-French exotica that, at the moment, so captivates mainstream America, Scott Thomas wickedly takes advantage. Her English accent is inflected with just enough French to ignite real curiosity -- and a little envy. The lucid, virescent eyes open wide, she wrinkles her nose and runs her hands over high, soft cheekbones and through baby-fine, auburn hair. She's got better things to do, you just know it, and she'd rather be home than here, in the vulgar, false luxury of New York City's Essex House hotel.
Scott Thomas is, however, on the verge of becoming a big American movie star and is suffering the requisite thrust into the glitter and glam of Hollywood. She is on the clock for Disney now, and is supposed to be selling herself, and her new movie, The Horse Whisperer, in which she co-stars with Robert Redford. But you find yourself trying not to disappoint her. She is radiant, witty and perfectly swathed in class: pearls resting on honey-colored skin, a light camisole skimming her chest, a small frame wrapped in a serious suit.
She'll tell you that she never tires of hearing people talk about how beautiful she is, but she won't engage selling herself in the Hollywood cat-and-mouse fashion. "I'm thrilled," she says, "To have the opportunities I have now. It's a relief, actually -- at least I don't have to take my clothes off." She laughs, rubs her face hard, as if she's trying to wipe off the tiredness of the day, and abruptly turns stone-faced professional.
The best actresses are masterful chameleons, and Scott Thomas, who seems to be so caught up in the essence of performing, turns herself on and off with so much hypnotic abandon and fluidity that you wonder if she herself knows who she is. Part of getting to know her is clearly about knowing that the part she most adores playing is herself.
But playing "K" was the role that put her into our heads -- and into Redford's movie, for that matter. From the moment she heard Anthony Minghella was working on a film based on Michael Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient,Scott Thomas says she knew that she should play the part of Katherine. She aggressively campaigned for the coveted part, something she never does. Her Katherine Clifton, an elegant, stunning, patrician English socialite who plays opposite the enigmatic Hungarian Count Laszlo de Almasy, played by Ralph Fiennes, was just what Hollywood had been waiting for: a contemporary, blond Audrey Hepburn, but older, wiser and more sophisticated than Hepburn's Holly Golightly.
The English Patientwon nine Academy Awards and Scott Thomas walked away with a nomination for best actress -- and instant cult celebrity status. As Katherine, she was not only credible but almost worshipful, which is shocking considering her initial movie debut in 1986. As Mary Sharon, a spoiled heir seduced by the artist formerly known as Prince in Under the Cherry Moon,she flashes the camera in an infamous birthday party scene and nobly delivers the radical melodrama.
"K" with Prince?
Definitely, thankfully, she says, although the pairing was an accident. Scott Thomas had moved to Paris from her native England after a debilitating encounter with an acting teacher who told her she lacked talent. She auditioned for Prince for a supporting role and was instead cast as the lead. "The whole experience was overwhelming to me then," she says, "It was the first time I had ever been to a hotel ... and here I was being whisked away in a limousine."
Between Prince's stab at filmdom and Minghella's glorious epic, Scott Thomas starred in quiet art-house hits such as Handful of Dust, Angels & Insects and Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon. In the big British hit, Four Weddings and a Funeral with Hugh Grant, Scott Thomas suffers as a wonderfully bitchy, starkly beautiful Englishwoman.
Kristin Scott Thomas, 37, was born into middle-class Dorset, England. She was 20 when she moved to Paris in 1980 to work as an au pair and attend drama school. It was in class that she met her husband, François Oliviennes, now a French obstetrician and leading fertility specialist. They live in Paris's Left Bank with their two children, Hannah and Joseph, and by all accounts, especially her own, live a quiet life as an average French family. About her family, she reveals little, if anything, other than vital stats. She is matter-of-fact in her effort to keep -- or simply protect -- her intimate lifestyle, a strategy that will probably ultimately result in her being labeled difficult and ungrateful.
It was partly this deep connection to family, she says, that drew her to The Horse Whisperer. It is a family story, with Scott Thomas playing opposite Robert Redford, who stars in and directs this predictable saga of a 14-year-old girl and her horse, both emotionally and physically scarred after a traumatic riding accident. Redford plays Tom Booker, a legendary horse whisperer -- a horse trainer with a special ability to heal troubled horses. Scott Thomas plays the girl's mother, Annie Maclean, a powerful New York City magazine editor who packs up her daughter and the horse and travels to Montana in search of Booker. As Tom begins healing the horse and family, Tom and Annie fall in love in a Bridges of Madison County kind of way.
"We talked a lot about what it would be like to be a parent and have this (accident) happen," Scott Thomas says of her and Redford, "How do you get up the next day after what happened? You cope with it. That's what interested me, that aspect... nothing personal, not the tragedy iitself.
Yet tragedy was a part of her early life: Her father and stepfather, both pilots, were killed in separate flying accidents before she left England. Did her own early tragedies affect her performance as Annie? The stoic professional surfaces: "Maybe it did, but I'm not going to tell you."
In an interview with Vogue, Redford revealed a little more: "After every take, Kristin would make a face," Robert Redford says of filming The Horse Whisperer."It was her way of dealing with that conflict -- whatever it was -- of releasing the tension. Finally, it became funny, and I just ignored it"
What Scott Thomas will admit is that she felt a kinship to Annie Maclean. "I loved this story and I fell in love with Annie Maclean," she says. "Part of what drew me to her was that she had guts... she handled the difficulty of juggling her job and family. She's somebody I can understand, having to be two different people at the same time, which is a woman's lot."
Perhaps the intensity she refuses to show in public serves her best when she's working. Minghella, who directed her in The English Patient, has said that when she is working, every take is flawless. And Miramax's Harvey Weinstein has said that she can do anything, as did Sam Neill, who plays her almost-wronged husband in The Horse Whisperer. "She is one of those actors that is capable of doing anything, there are no limits to what she can do," he says, "And that is very exciting to be up against."
Scott Thomas is next scheduled to star with Sean Penn in up at the Villa, directed by Philip Haas. The film, based on the Somerset Maugham novella, is set in 1938, in the expatriate community of Florence, Italy. Thomas will play a British widow who escapes to an Italian villa for rest, where she becomes involved in a love triangle and political conspiracy.
Italy is far from L.A. and Thomas's part seems an exotic enough role to keep her where the American public seems to like her most: in a foreign land, morally torn, embroiled in betrayal. Taking this role would seem to indicate that as much as she says she relishes being a Hollywood outsider, Kristin Scott Thomas knows how to play the game as well as anyone -- play what they want you to play. And if you are really smart, you keep the accent.
