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Strictly Entre Nous ...
Sarah Gristwood
Kristin Scott Thomas tells Sarah Gristwood how living in France made her Hollywood's English rose
For a happily married mother of two, Kristin Scott Thomas seems to specialise in adultery - or near offers of it, anyway. She played an unfaithful wife in The English Patient and again in A Handful of Dust, her breakthrough picture. And what about the easily corrupted Lady Anne in Ian McKellen's Richard III?
At least in Robert Redford's screen version of The Horse Whisperer the passion remains unconsummated. Her character is not a reprise of The English Patient's Katharine Clifton, who did "betray her marriage and her own integrity". But, says Scott Thomas, "in a love story there is always some kind of betrayal. If there is no dilemma there is no story."
In The Horse Whisperer she plays Annie, an English-born magazine editor living in Manhattan. There is definitely no connection to America's best-known English magazine editor, Tina Brown, as Scott Thomas felt impelled to phone Brown and make clear. But Annie is another of her "terribly English women", the kind that confirm the actress as the American idea of classy Englishwomen.
With Annie, she plays a woman who "has always been used to being in complete control". Her life is shattered when her teenage daughter loses a leg in a riding accident. By invoking the horse whisperer's help for her daughter she brings about her own salvation. Redford's hero is the mythic cowboy, the man who can handle animals and women, an ideal Scott Thomas dismisses as "ridiculous". But she says it makes a great movie.
British tabloid rumours that Scott Thomas and Redford became over-close during filming are hard to take seriously. It is easier, indeed, to believe the other reported story: that the differences in their styles made working together difficult. Redford told American Vogue that "her English control, which is bred in the bone, sometimes came in conflict with what was required". She admits to problems with showing emotion which parallel those of the character: "Annie has spent years in her therapist's office but she's too busy, it's too complicated to sort someone like her out."
In interview, the 38-year-old actress is wary, mockingly self-dismissive but repelling any intrusion on her privacy. She is aware, however, that parallels could be drawn between the emotionally scarred Annie and her own life. When Scott Thomas was five her father, a naval pilot, died in a flying accident. Six years later, her stepfather was killed in the same way. But grieving was something "that didn't happen" in the context of that time, that world, that family. The emotion she projects on screen today is all the more powerful for being suppressed, but any direct rehashing of the past in her work she regards as "fraud".
Her professional insecurity can be traced back to the Central School of Speech and Drama where, at the end of her first year, she was told in so many words that she had "absolutely no talent. And that if I wanted to play Lady Macbeth, I'd have to join the local amateur dramatic society." Wasn't she devastated? "Well, I left the country." She went to France on New Year's Day 1980. In Paris she took work as an au pair and her employer encouraged her to take evening drama classes. It was there that she met her husband, François Oliviennes, and settled into the ordered, "grown-up" Paris of the haute bourgeoisie.
Her film and theatre career began in France, which has, of course, an honourable tradition of "petites Anglaises". France absorbed her differentness, along with any early mistakes she might have made.
And being an expatriate influenced her career more subtly. She believes her Englishness has been preserved because she has not lived in England for the past 18 years. The cut-glass tones, heavy with irony, are, she says, the purer for being free from the influences of British radio and television. "In terms of work it's a bonus," she says. "There are things you can't see from close up that you can see from some way off. And, of course, it's really nice to be somewhere with your own space, out of the British industry."
She and her husband, one of France's leading fertility specialists, have a life between films that is almost aggressively ordinary - a flat by the Jardin du Luxembourg and the school run. "I need to be home and I need to be living a normal life, not this fabulous super-protected actress existence. I need to be living my life," she says rather edgily.
Stardom is something which "you get very used to, very quickly. I can adapt to most situations and you adapt to that as you would to any other. It's great fun sometimes. It's fun having all the dressing up and pretending to be a film star, anyway." But it's "just as well" that she doesn't get any reaction in the streets - she wouldn't handle it easily.
The English Patient did put her into another bracket. "It's extraordinary how something like that can push an actress into the spotlight, which can sometimes be fairly inappropriate," she says. "But it does give you more possibilities to work." She had auditioned for Redford much earlier, but only heard she had got the part the day of the Oscar ceremony.
She had to fight to get her role in The English Patient, even though no one knew what a big deal it would turn out to be. "I don't think you could ever put your finger on what made it a success," she says. "If you could, everybody would be churning them out. Something like that is filmed in a state of grace and it just flies up and off."
She has two more films on the way. In Up at the Villa, adapted from a Somerset Maugham novella and filmed in Tuscany, she is the English widow loved by three men: not adultery, but another of her 1930s stories. Next is a picture with Harrison Ford: a biggie. Faced with two projects she tends to choose "the bigger and shinier". But she reacts badly to any suggestion that the door to small projects may close permanently.
"I've always had control over my career," she says. "I have always known what I wanted to do, and done what I wanted to. That's what's exciting about this business. You can be doing a short film for a friend, with everyone chipping in, and months later you're doing something which is incredibly over-budgeted and bigtime. You go from one world to the other constantly."
The Horse Whisperer opens on Friday
