The Other Woman
William Middleton
English-born, Paris-based Kristin Scott Thomas has a bit of an image problem. She may have mopped the floor with Andie MacDowell in Four Weddings and a Funeral, giving many the impression that Hugh Grant had gotten it all wrong. But back in England, some people just aren't getting her. Leaving a London restaurant last fall, Notting Hill's terribly-trendy 192, a stranger muttered under his breath, "See you in your next obscure European film."
There's nothing that irks the English like a little success. "I think it's actually a kind of snobbery." Scott-Thomas points out. "There's this feeling that people should stay where they're born, and God forbid that anyone should want to become richer, or more famous, or achieve anything. It's just awful--they hate it."
Yet, everything from her name to her accent has helped label Scott Thomas the arch-English, slightly prudish snob. "I'm not very English, nor aristocratic, and I never pretended to be." she insists. "it's just the way people perceive me, and that's what I think makes some people not like me."
Like that gentleman at 192 who couldn't resist getting his dig in. "I was absolutely horrified," she says of the incident. "What I find so extraordinary about that comment is that it would never have been made if it had been a question of an obscure English movie. It's this idea of people who live in Europe being anti-English. I mean, what am I? A traitor?"
To hear the English press, it would seem so. The Independent entitled its profile of the actress, "Cold Front." "Haughty, tart and terrifying--it's no wonder Kristin Scott Thomas excels at that English speciality, the well bred bitch," the story screamed. And that was just its headline. "It explained how I was a bitch?" the actress asks about the story she hadn't read. "That's good in a way, because everyone loves you when they meet you--they're surprised. They think 'Oh, she's really nice.'"
Kristin Scott Thomas is sitting in a Parisian cafe, her bright eyes blazing. She is intelligent, sure of her opinion, quick with a laugh and, although she has reluctantly changed out of the Prada suit she picked for today's shoot, has a self-assured style not expected from most actresses. At the same time, there is a feeling that she might not be quite as together as she would like everyone to think. The overall impression is the same mix of confidence and vulnerability that made her so seductive on screen in Four Weddings.
And having spent most of her adult like in France, she is, if not a traitor, a dyed-in-the-wool expatriate. "I was in drama school in London, and I was very unhappy so I just left one day," She explains, "I came here to visit friends for two weeks and just stayed. I've been here for 14 years now."
She admits to loving Paris, but while first studying acting in France, she also quickly fell in love with a young French doctor--now her husband and father of their two children. "He was studying medicine and taking theater classes at night for fun--or really more for flirting." she adds.
Her film career began, improbably enough, with he who was then known as Prince's Under the Cherry Moon. After auditioning for only a minor part, she was given the lead role--but wasn't the type to use The Tiny Purple One to launch a career in the states. "I went to America and found that I was moving in a circle that I didn't really feel at home in," she remembers, "it was very show biz, very rock star-land. So I came back to Europe and started again."
Next came a string of film and television work playing exactly what she is not: the angst-ridden English aristocrat. She was an ice-cold adulteress in A Handful of Dust, a bored wife who uses a lesbian affair to avenge her husband in Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon, and the elegantly lonely Fiona in Four Weddings. "Fiona was like the epitome of all these characters I'd been playing. It was terribly sad, that part, but when I read it I knew I wanted to play it, I felt that it was mine."
Scott Thomas had already been paired with Hugh Grant in Bitter Moon, and like almost everyone in the Western world, raves about him. "I love Hugh. I find him incredibly amusing, very clever, sharp, witty and attractive--one of these completely fascinating sort of people. Everybody loves Hugh and yet he's very difficult to get close to-- impossible to get close to, in fact. I think he's probably just very wary of people in the business."
Even during the filming of Four Weddings, there was the feeling this small English movie might turn into a big international hit. "Everyone knew on the set that something was happening," she recalls. "It was like the film was on wings."
Her latest film, released in America last month, is An Unforgettable Summer. It's a small picture about a couple forced from the comfort of a Romanian city into the hardship of a military post in the countryside --a hardship made all too real by weeks of filming on the bleakly beautiful banks of the Danube. Scott Thomas learned enough Romanian in six weeks to speak in the film, along with English and her irritatingly impeccable French.
Some might point out that An Unforgettable Summer is clearly her next obscure Europian film, but she prefers that to working only in, say, England. "It's making films as decreed by the BBC," she says of most British cinema. "Nearly all film makers in England have worked at some time for the BBC. I'm not slagging off directors at the BBC, because there have been some really good ones--Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh, Mike Newell. But there is a general, run-of-the-mill BBC attitude that says, 'When in doubt, turn to page 43 of your guidebook, and find our how to shoot a love scene.'"
She is equally skeptical of the more self-indulgent French cinema, some of which she finds quite silly. "Sometimes you think, 'Why was this guy given a camera--it would have been better if he just had a bit psychoanalysis.'"
But there's always America. "Hollywood isn't really an option," she explains. "My family's here. My home's here. I'm more than willing to go out there if there's a part, but I'm not going to go to just hang around.
"It's not America or bust," she says. "I really would like to work there, but I kind of wait for things to fall on my head. I'm a bit of a fatalist that way. Fortunately, a lot of things do tend to fall on your head."
So Scott Thomas stays in France with her family, her friends, her Left Bank apartment and a normal Parisian life that includes a healthy amount of shopping. "Every change of season, my mouth starts watering, and I have to be careful about what I buy," she says. "I love Prada at the moment. I really like Jil Sander, but I can't afford much of that. Then there's Romeo Gigli, A.P.C., and I do want my gold Patrick Coxes."
As for her career, she takes those roles that come her way--be it a first time film from a French director, a Parisian play or an intriguing English project that left her play against type. Some may be hits, other misses, but Scott Thomas is grounded enough not to care. "I prefer to be here," she says firmly. "I'm doing things that may be less prestigious, in that fewer people see them, but I'm doing what I like to do."
