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Impatient English woman
David Gritten
She's spiky, scatty and now very successful. David Gritten meets Hollywood's latest grande dame, Kristin Scott Thomas
She's spiky, scatty and now very successful. David Gritten meets Hollywood's latest grande dame, Kristin Scott Thomas
HAS film stardom, which entered her life in a sudden rush, changed Kristin Scott Thomas? Startled by the question, she descends into a symphony of ums and ahs. "Well, I don't think so," she says finally. "Others may disagree. I'm still quite jolly on set. I just love it. I'm a terrible show-off, I suppose." She pauses to choose the right words. "I've got a little bit more short-tempered now."
Her admission is a relief because this is precisely what one hears; that she can be somewhat imperious, and not a little grand. Word is that Hollywood executives who wish to summon her across the Atlantic from her Paris home had better send Concorde tickets. Scott Thomas may think herself unchanged, but after our talk in her film-set trailer, there is a distinct touch of hauteur in the way she dispatches me.
At 38, she has left it late in the day to embark upon a career as a leading Hollywood actress, but a busy, lucrative future assuredly beckons.
She has hardly emerged from nowhere, of course. Scott Thomas notched up a reputation as one of Britain's most spiky, arresting character actresses in several low-budget films. She also played what she rightly calls "the best female role" in Four Weddings and a Funeral, as dignified, rejected Fiona. She was even a best actress nominee at last year's Oscars as the seductive Katharine Clifton in The English Patient, who fetches up in the desert for a doomed affair with Ralph Fiennes.
Yet Scott Thomas, remember, was a controversial choice to play Katharine. Director Anthony Minghella insisted on her, though executives at Twentieth Century Fox wanted a bigger, if less suitable, name - someone like Demi Moore, if memory serves. So opposed to Scott Thomas were the suits at Fox, they dropped The English Patient completely.
Having triumphantly vindicated Minghella's faith, she's now a Hollywood leading lady in her own right. Scott Thomas stars opposite Robert Redford in his high-profile film The Horse Whisperer, based on Nicholas Evans's best-seller. She plays Annie, a brittle, hard-driven New York magazine editor whose daughter is seriously injured in a riding accident. She persuades a Montana rancher (Redford) to re-tame the girl's horse, wounded and frightened in the accident, as a means to rehabilitate the girl. As is the way in such pulpy romances, affections stir.
Unhappily, The Horse Whisperer has not lived up to its hype since opening in America. Its box-office take is creditable but not spectacular. Reviews are grudging; the film is widely deemed handsome but too reverential to the book, and way too long at 164 minutes. (All she has to say about The Horse Whisperer is, "It went on so long." It takes a while before I gather she meant the shooting schedule, not the film itself.) The verdicts on Scott Thomas's performance are mixed; the Los Angeles Times's Kenneth Turan calls her "uninvolving", an accusation rarely tossed her way.
Yet the reviews are irrelevant; having finally reached the plateau of leading actress, Scott Thomas can now bask there awhile. In September she starts shooting Random Hearts, playing a US congresswoman opposite Harrison Ford.
Her leading men's names are the clue to her job security. At 38, she still looks fetching on screen, but old enough to be plausible as love interest for a generation of grizzled, rapidly ageing male Hollywood stars. This year, Redford and Ford; in future, an obvious candidate for on-screen partner to Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood.
She has no doubt that she has stepped over a threshold. "It happened overnight, as soon as I got the Oscar nomination. It was extraordinary, weird, and I was offered The Horse Whisperer right away."
We met in Florence. Scott Thomas has spent the summer in Tuscany indulging her taste for low-budget, cerebral material between Hollywood roles. She is the star of Up at the Villa, adapted from a Somerset Maugham novella, as a capricious widow who enjoys dalliances in 1930s Italy with Sean Penn as an American playboy, James Fox as a kindly older diplomat and Jeremy Davies as a love-struck young Austrian refugee.
"Bit of revenge, this role," she said, in her jolly-hockey-sticks voice. Excuse me? "I meant it facetiously. It's not a case of the guy gets the girl, but the other way round. This girl gets the guys. All three of them."
Certainly many of her characters to date have been thwarted. Hugh Grant has twice rejected her on screen - in Four Weddings and in Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon, in which she also tellingly played a Fiona. "And then," she sighed, "in The English Patient I go and die in a cave."
Given the nature of Hollywood scripts, her future characters will surely enjoy more happy endings. They will also probably be more pallid and bland, which is a pity. Scott Thomas may seem a bit of a Fiona on the surface - her posh voice and scatty conversational patterns conspire to make her sound frankly dim at times - but in her films she has always conveyed the suggestion of an intriguing hinterland beyond the shallows.
It's a dichotomy mirrored in her own life. Her childhood in Dorset was punctuated by tragedy. When she was five her father, a Fleet Air Arm pilot, died in a plane crash. Her mother married another pilot; six years later he too died in similar circumstances. Within days, her chin up, trying to smile through tears, she was put on a train bound for Cheltenham Ladies' College, where she boarded.
"I shouldn't have gone there," she says now. "I just needed to be at home. But everyone thought they were doing the right thing."
One can only imagine how such an experience might affect a young girl. But more traumas lay in wait. After Cheltenham, Scott Thomas spent a year at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, only to be told brusquely that she simply could not act. Dispirited, she headed to Paris to become an au pair; at one point, her weight ballooned to 12 stone.
And then things got better. At an evening acting class she met a young doctor, FranŮois Oliviennes. Her weight stabilised; ironically it is by her cheekbones and elfin frame that she is now known. She and FranŮois married when she was 21; he has become one of France's most eminent infertility specialists. With their children, aged 11 and seven, they live in a swanky apartment near the Jardins de Luxembourg, and a cottage near Villeneuve-sur-Yonne in Burgundy on 1.5 acres of land.
Scott Thomas has lived in Paris ever since; this Anglo-French existence is the other dichotomy in her life. There, neuroses and physical decline are staved off with a regime of psychotherapy and modish Pilates classes. "I'm sometimes tempted to live in London or America," she muses. "My husband could work anywhere now. My life would certainly be easier. But we have to take the children's education into consideration."
Being a Parisienne certainly slowed her career. A glance at her CV reveals she has been in about 35 productions; but for a decade many were obscure French films or forgettable TV series, only occasionally punctuated by notable work - A Handful of Dust, Angels and Insects. "As I don't live in London, I don't bump into people in the business at restaurants or cocktail parties," says Scott Thomas. "Living abroad, I have no ideas of any impact I may have made. It's still extraordinary to me to go to America and strangers say hello."
Yet her isolation also offers advantages; her acting style, she notes, is neither typically English nor American. "I'm a bit of an in-betweenie, I suppose. I'm just Eurotrash." Not quite. Hers is a distinctive screen presence widely admired by film people. Sean Penn, hardly the most gushing of actors, told me he signed up for Up at the Villa on the strength of Scott Thomas's presence alone.
Yet she should beware; Hollywood tends to iron out quirky individuality in actors. Disappointingly, her fledgling major-studio career already seems to have made her more diplomatic. For example, she was once amusingly indiscreet about Prince, the diminutive pop star in whose vain fiasco Under the Cherry Moon she made her film debut. Now she says of the experience: "We had a great time. It was a fantastic lesson in film-making for me. I don't think he was a madman or an egomaniac. He is who he is." Kristin Scott Thomas unchanged? Hardly.
The Horse Whisperer is released on August 28
