Kristin beliefs
Johanna Schneller
Kristin Scott Thomas prefers to play spiky characters. As her latest film, The Horse Whisperer, is about to open, Johanna Schneller finds an actress who is wary both on and off
I SEE Kristin Scott Thomas before she sees me. She's sitting in a cafe on the Left Bank in Paris, wearing extra-dark sunglasses and staring down at a cup of cafe au lait. Her face is regally symmetrical, the long parallel lines of cheekbone and jaw perfectly balanced by the perpendicular of her nose. She does not look thrilled to see me.
After a few minutes, however, I realise that she is less frosty than serenely wary. And a bit hung over. She starts to remove her sunglasses, winces and immediately slaps them back on. She was at a party last night. At Valentino's. The couturier Valentino. Apparently he has a gorgeous little chateau outside Paris.
But she has a characteristically complicated reaction to the soirée, part thrilled, part thoroughly amused: 'Joan Collins was there! When I saw her, I let out a sort of yelp. There's my old man in his suit and me in my pearls.' She laughs. (She laughs a lot, but never uncontrollably, never more than a few ha's at a time.) 'I wore my pearls,' she says. 'I really was an English frump. I've gone to seed, rather.'
Now it's my turn to ha. Today, dressed in khakis and an unglamorous tan sweater, dunking her well-buttered baguette into her coffee, Scott Thomas, 38, may be incognito as a Paris mum. (She lives up the boulevard with her husband of 10 years, Francois Oliviennes, a leading French fertility specialist, and their two children, Hannah, 11, and Joseph, seven.) But add lipstick and she can go mano a mano with Joan Collins any time.
As Katharine, the leonine adventurer who devastates Ralph Fiennes in The English Patient, Scott Thomas sprang into our collective consciousness like Athena from Zeus's head - fully grown. Even in her earlier work - A Handful of Dust, Bitter Moon, Angels and Insects, Four Weddings and a Funeral - she was always a woman, fierce and intelligent, never a girl. She'd been places. She knew things. When she fell in love, it wasn't innocently, for the first time. It was with clear-eyed awareness of exactly what she was in for. And when her characters went to bed, it was startling because it was so unadorned. That was not some supermodel's pneumatic body up on the screen; that was a real woman.
The English Patient earned her an Oscar nomination and made her a star. Her next movie, The Horse Whisperer, is an altogether different animal. Based on Nicholas Evans's bestselling novel, it's the tale of a spooked horse, an injured girl, her hyper-successful mother and the Montana cowboy - played by none other than Robert Redford, who also directed the film - who changes their life.
'Kristin has an angular, sharp quality, a quick intelligence,' says Redford, 'but also a reserve, almost an imperious quality. I wanted to start there and then take her to a softer place that I had not seen her go before. I'd use the phrase "bring out the little girl in you" and that made her extremely nervous.'
Scott Thomas agrees. 'The thing that I do, it's tunnel vision, no-frills acting,' she says. 'I reveal a piece here, a piece there, and the audience has to put it all together. But Redford wanted something more American, more naturalistic, more. . . self-indulgent. I display everything. It was quite a shock when I saw it. It's not what I do.'
What she prefers to do, what she 'campaigns every day to do', she says, is 'to make tough, spiky people likeable. I will always be the ugly sister or wicked stepmother because I find that a million times more interesting than old goody-two-shoes Cinderella.'
Suddenly, a weedy, tobacco-stained passer-by thrusts a note into her hand. 'This was on the floor,' he mumbles, then disappears. It's a love note: 'If you are K.S.T. and I know you are, I just wanted to tell you how much you've moved me.' Signed: 'A French Patient'.
'On the floor, right,' she says drily. But she folds the note into her pocket when she leaves.
The next morning, Scott Thomas and I become Thelma and Louise. Except instead of hightailing it to Mexico in a green T-Bird to outrun police, we're rolling along a toll highway in an old Volvo, heading for the 100-year-old stone farmhouse in Burgundy that she bought two years ago, to move bedroom furniture before the painter arrives.
On the road, she is looser, less guarded, even mildly daffy. She can't figure out how to work a petrol pump; she's flummoxed by her various sets of keys; she realises too late that she hasn't brought money for the tolls.
We pass through her village, which is Euro Disney come to life, with medieval gates and an ex-moat and a restaurant owned by Leslie Caron. We stop at the butcher's for ham, and Scott Thomas tells me how he recently saved a local mushroom-picking festival from disaster. The mushroom sorters had overlooked a few poisonous ones in the town's pickings; the butcher, who was making the mushroom feast, sneaked a taste before he went to bed, became violently ill and cancelled the meal. Lucky for the town. Unlucky for the butcher. Scott Thomas loves this story.
Her farmhouse, in the middle of fields a few minutes out of town, is pleasingly undone, with odds and ends of her granny's furniture, lamps her husband found in flea markets and a wooden school chair she had shipped from Montana. The gardener stops by, and she accompanies him around her one-and-a-half acres (complete with a lily-strewn pond) discussing in animated French how to spruce it up. She proudly shows off the gherkins her husband made while she was in Montana. 'I find that so sad,' she says, smiling with all her teeth. 'The neglected husband pickling away.'
Back in the car, we discuss her hopes for her children. Only now do I hear faint echoes of her un-storybook-like childhood in Dorset, (near a village so tiny they'd remark if an unfamiliar car passed through). Her memories of romping in fields with her four younger siblings are darkened by disaster: her father, a Royal Navy pilot, died in a plane accident when she was five; her stepfather, also a pilot, died the same way when she was 11. But she fends off questions on personal matters with a crisp 'I'm not going to tell you.'
'The thing I want most for my children is to be self-confident enough to be interested in things,' she says. 'I think to express interest, and to develop an interest, requires a lot of faith in yourself - which I felt has been lacking in me and was certainly lacking in my upbringing. What I try not to say to them is, "Oh, you mustn't worry." It's diminishing to be told you mustn't feel this or that.'
As we re-enter Paris, she peers out of the window uncertainly. 'Now where are we?' Oh, God. Oh, my God, this is funny. Do you know what I've done? I'm taking you to my shrink's office. The only time I come in this way is to go to a therapy appointment.' She laughs, but almost immediately I feel her wariness from yesterday seeping into the space between us like wafts of air-conditioning. 'Oh, I'm sure you'll love writing about this,' she says.
She had invited me to today's Pilates class. But standing in the garret-like studio, it no longer seems such a great idea. We awkwardly take turns getting changed. We studiously avoid looking at each other's flushed face as we push and pull on the machines. Maybe she feels she has said too much, displayed too much. We get dressed and walk back into the murky Paris air. 'Well I can't hang about here all day,' she says briskly, and is gone.
