Multiple Choice
Ted Loos
Multiple Choice - Kristin Scott Thomas is:
a. Uppity and Smart.
b. Scruffy as Hell.
c. A Consummately Gifted Actress.
d. All of the above.
Ted Loos talks to the star of Sydney Pollack's 'Random Hearts' and thinks he has the answer.
Kristin Scott Thomas doesn't need to put on airs. Breeding and good taste are givens, and the look is certainly part of it. A face artfully composed of high cheekbones and big saucer eyes never hurt anybody.
But when you sit down with her, funny stuff happens. Instead of airs, you get breeziness. "Brilliant" is the most frequent word out of her mouth, with "rubbish" coming in a close second. An offhand reference to the Americanism "whatever" can send her into peals of laughter.
After all the aristocratic roles she's played, including her Oscar-nominated turn in The English Patient you'd think she would be oh-so--careful with her words. It turns out that Scott Thomas, mistress of the manor on-screen, has a fully functional silly side. You haven't lived until you've heard the actress do her Inspector Clouseau imitation: "Do you have a rhoooom? A what? A rhooooom!"
The subject comes up because Scott Thomas, a Brit by birth, has lived in Paris for the past 18 years and is married to a Frenchman who "speaks brilliant English but with an incredibly thick Clouseau accent."
In the same sitting, the 39-year-old actress can talk seriously about the strange sensation of seeing herself on the big screen. "I'm never happy with my performance; that's not something I'm good at," she says in a bracing dry-ice tone. "It sounds ungrateful, but it's true."
Scott Thomas constantly switches back and forth between irony and earnestness with maddening ease. Intentional or not, the effect is disarming in the extreme.
It's another version of this tension between high and low that forms the basis of her film career. As with the early Katharine Hepburn, the fun of watching Scott Thomas in her recent big movie roles - The Horse Whisperer, The English Patient and this fall's Random Hearts - comes in seeing an elegant person brought down a peg or two. The haughty type laid low or driven round the bend by passion is a classic film archetype, but Scott Thomas has given it her own spin in her career over the past 15 years.
"She has a kind of archness that's delicious," says her Random Hearts co-star Harrison Ford. "There's a kind of distance - a capacity for seeing things with perspective." Archness is not a preapproved publicity quality, since it goes against the grain of accessibility and youth that rules in movies these days. In Hollywood it's about as common as films that are actually profitable.
As if predicting her objection to this comment, Ford amends his own words. "It takes a degree of precision to pull this off," he adds. "You have to have more than one string in your bow, and she has all of them."
Presented with Ford's thoughts, Scott Thomas is a bit annoyed, possibly because he was so on target. "I'm not quite sure I like the 'archness' bit," she says, but her sly smile indicates that she senses the truth of the assessment -- or at least remains amused by the idea of movie stars talking about each other in print.
As actresses go, she has a fairly well developed consciousness of her own myth and its appeal. "It's just proceeding carefully - not rushing in where fools do," says Scott Thomas. "I do try to bring perspective, and I am a bit slow about reaction, which can get me into trouble sometimes when people take it as coldness. But it's not really."
In the next breath, there is an unusual admission. "But I can be incredibly cruel," she says matter-of-factly. Really? "Oh yeah. The way I've behaved to people, and now looking back on it, I can't believe I said that! Why did I say that to that person when I knew it would hurt? And I just pretend that it doesn't. I've cut people dead. I'm terrible like that, even though I don't mean to be."
Her joking side, it seems, has gotten her into trouble of late. She relates the story of a recent dinner party to which she brought a "teeny-tiny" handbag that could be mistaken for a cell phone.
"I was getting up to go to the ladies' room," she says. "And the guy next I to me said, 'Is that your phone?' [My bag was] just about that size. And I said, (into the bag) 'Yes, bring the car around immediately and call my agent. I want to leave!' The next thing I knew, everyone was up on their feet saying, 'It was so nice of you to come.' It was horrible. I said, 'I'm coming back,' but it cast a pall on the whole evening, and it made me uncomfortable and I felt really bad. I didn't mean to be horrid. I was making a joke. Some people just don't get it when I'm joking."
What people do get is that Scott Thomas, as Random Hearts director Sydney Pollack puts it, is a "consummately gifted actress." Economical gestures and the slightest facial alterations - the strengths of film acting as opposed to the larger movements of the stage - have served her well.
In her new film, she plays a congresswoman who is thrown together with an internal affairs cop, played by Harrison Ford. Pollack calls it "a collision between a barge and a clipper ship."
It doesn't take much guesswork to figure out who the clipper ship is. That kind of typecasting is Scott Thomas' blessing and her curse: Try to imagine her wearing a tank top in a Mike Leigh film. Even in Angels & Insects (1995) - in a rare servant-class part, possibly her best performance - her character was fiercely intelligent and proud, the heroine of the piece who quietly out-thinks everyone around her.
At the suggestion that she might try comedy, using the high-low dynamic for a different effect, Scott Thomas brushes the idea off.
Kristin Scott Thomas: I'm terrible at comedy. I'm just not funny. I mean, I can be fairly amusing in real life. I know that. I could probably be funny onstage, but not in film. I think I just don't trust it enough or something.
Ted Loos: Comedy is weird. Some people think Roberto Benigni is funny.
KST: Oh, God, he's not funny a-tall! I want to strangle him. Slap, slap.
TL: So who is funny?
KST: Billy Crystal's very funny. Woody Allen is very funny.
TL: Are you waiting for the call for the next Woody project?
KST: It won't happen. I have a horrible feeling it won't happen. He declined my services once already . . . [she clenches her fists in mock rage] and gave the part to Helena Bonham Carter! Oh, the Coen brothers are funny. They are the funniest people in the entire world. The Big Lebowski is the funniest film I have ever seen.
TL: Why don't you just call them up and say, "I'd like to work with you?"
KST: I've met them, since I know Fran [Frances McDormand, Fargo star and Joel Coen's wife]. But I've never been able to say . . . I'm incapable of . . . I'm terrified of being caught asking for something. But they are great. Fargo was very horrifying and very funny.
TL: Would you have wanted to play Marge?
KST: Oh, I would have loved to play something like that. But no one will ever ask me to do something like it. Because I'm too much of a ... a leading lady. In the old days they used to cast you as a character actress or a leading lady, and no one will cast me as a character actress, and it's kind of sad really. I mean, I'm English. Every English actress would prefer to be known as a leading lady.
The best evidence of this came in the Oscar season when she was nominated for Best Actress Juliette Binoche, who was on-screen in The English Patient just as much as Scott Thomas, got nominated for Best Supporting Actress and won. "That was very frustrating," says Scott Thomas, since she believes Binoche deserved an award but should have won the bigger prize. Overall, though, it wasn't a bad day at the office for either. "You know, I was nominated for an Academy Award, and that was pretty great. It opens doors that are firmly closed otherwise."
Random Hearts is one of those doors. "It's a great big fat movie movie," says Scott Thomas of the high-gloss studio picture. "It's another world, realy. These are the big guns." Amusingly enough, considering her story about the ruined party, she also works in this smile: "It's like being invited to a great big dinner party. You're on your best behavior." Or not.
Working with 30-year veteran Pollack gave her a new way to approach the actor-director relationship. "He knows exactly what he wants and exactly how to do it, and you'd better do it," she says. "At the beginning, I resisted incredibly, and I was quite unhappy, because I felt everything I suggested was wrong, and I was being used as a puppet. And then I decided I should trust Sydney Pollack. I kind of gave in."
The results, she says, justified her leap of faith. "I had to trust him, that he wouldn't let me slip," she says. "After Sydney, what do you do? It'll be very hard to lose what he's given me." Pressed for what that is exactly, Scott Thomas is in serious mode again. "A kind of trust, and a realization that I don't have to work so hard, try so hard. And just let things happen."
The director put his own faith in the Actress when he cast her for the role, but there was one matter that required verification: the accent. "I thought she would make a nice contrast with Harrison, but I wasn't sure about the American accent," says Pollack. "I called her, and she thought she could do it. So she sent me a tape."
Scott Thomas laughs at the memory of talking into her daughter's old grammar school tape recorder with the big, brightly colored PLAY button. "He said, put something on tape. I'm thinking, what am I going to do? What's something that sounds conversational? Someone had sent me a copy of The New York Times Magazine, and there was an interview with Sharon Stone. So I read that."
Pollack acts in Random Hearts as well, playing the congresswoman's calculating spin doctor. It's actually Pollack's second dark part this year: In Eyes Wide Shut he played a similar éminence grise. "Maybe it's the nicest, sweetest people who play the venal types," says Scott Thomas. "And those who play the victims - me! - are the true victimizers, I don't know."
There she goes again, sending out some intriguing mixed signals. The issue of power - who does what to whom - does come up more than once in conversation with Scott Thomas.
TL: What's your take on nude scenes - love them, hate them?
KST: I've retired from them. [Laughs]
TL: What prompted this decision?
KST: It's not really a decision, I just don't want to do them anymore.
TL: Have they been traumatic?
KST: You're really interested in nude scenes aren't you? [Laughs] It's not really fun, for starters. And I feel that I've done the ultimate love story. I feel that I've done it. I've played that love object [in The English Patient]. Why do it again?
It's not really coyness or anything like that. You know you're going to be judged ---- she's too fat, she's too thin. Of course, I don't care about that now. Whereas before, when I was ready to do them, I did care. It's funny. I feel that I don't need approval from anybody anymore. But there's a tremendous sense of power when you're doing a nude scene.
TL: Why?
KST: Because you're the one who's got the guts to take her clothes off. I'm so much braver than you guys!
TL: Yeah, Ralph Fiennes didn't have to show it all. There's an inequality there.
KST: It was funny, because he was much shyer than I thought. That was another thing - a feeling of being able to beat them all. I mean it's complete exhibitionism. Then afterward you feel miserable.
I tried to think of it in abstract terms. I knew that the film desperately needed that passion, that frankness, that skin-on-skin type thing. I'm really glad that it's there and proud that I did it: I can't help but think of it as an integral part of the movie. But it isn't a comfortable thing to do.
TL: You can always say no.
KST: But I would not go to great lengths [to avoid nude scenes]. If you're going to do it, then you do it. You don't fuss around with body doubles or those awful bathing suits. If you're going to be naked, then be naked, and stop fussing about it.
Scott Thomas was raised in an upper-middle--class family in Dorset, England. "It's hills and farms, and rather wild people," she says. "It's that far away from London. It's difficult to get to. My mother still lives there. I love it - it's very green and very beautiful."
Her father, a pilot for the Royal Navy, was killed in a crash when she was five. It was up to her mother to raise Scott Thomas, and her two brothers and two sisters, on her own. Her education is easy to sum up: "I had a bit of nuns," she says. "I did nuns from 8 to 11 and then from 16 to 18 - the formative years."
A good Catholic education, of course, contributes to the bottled-up passion that Scott Thomas has made use of in the movies. Repression has always been the basis for the sexiest moments on-screen. Remember The English Patient scene in which she walked in the room and belted Ralph Fiennes hard across the face as a prelude to a shag?
In between stints with the nuns, Scott Thomas went to a "very funny Dickensian-style school" called The Cheltenham Ladies' College. "I didn't go to university," she says. "I'm the most undereducated person you could imagine." And yet she is a voracious reader who discourses comfortably on all sorts of books. Her summer reading included W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, Original Bliss by Scottish writer A. L. Kennedy and a couple of plays.
"I'm reading something I love right now, but I cannot remember the title," says Scott Thomas. "That just about sums me up. I can be obsessive reading something and not be able to sleep unless I read my three chapters and every time I have the book sit down and read it. But a week later, I've forgotten the title - but not only the title; I've forgotten what it's about. That's me."
Or rather, one side of her. The performing side was developed, in lieu of university, at drama school in London and Paris. The one in London threw her out because her heart wasn't in becoming a drama teacher, the career aspiration she had mistakenly chosen. "So after one year, I got a couple of odd jobs and was very dissatisfied," she says. I left the following January for France."
After working as an au pair -- a stylish refuge for girls of her ilk -- she enrolled at École Nationale des Arts et Techniques de Théâtre, in Paris, and stayed for three years. "So that's where I started, and met my husband," she says. "Well, I should say, I met this boy who had a big house in the suburbs full of friends, and that was that." At the time, she was 21 and François Olivennes, now a fertility specialist, was 22. They have been together ever since and have two children (a boy and a girl) who go to school near their home on the Left Bank.
Living in Paris has definitely kept her away from some of the film industry machinations. "I don't get Variety or any of the trades," says Scott Thomas. "I'm not saying I'm tending the cabbages and feeding the chickens, but every time I go home - I'm just an ordinary ... Well, I'm not an ordinary person, because I have this thing around my neck. I'm really very far away from Hollywood. Sometimes it's a good thing, sometimes it plays tricks on me."
It's hard to imagine Scott Thomas having an envy attack, since she seems to have conjured up a dream lifestyle. "But I get in a real panic when I hear about these films getting made," she says. "What do you mean? They haven't asked me! I'm very lucky I don't live there. I would be going up for every role, going for acting lessons every five minutes and changing my car every three days. I would be the ultimate Hollywood victim if I lived there. Every single diet, religion - you name it, I would do it."
Food and wine are a major obsession for Scott Thomas and her husband, and she rhapsodizes about dorade en croûte de sel, blancmange and other delicacies. She's not one of those actresses who don't eat. "Oh God, life's too short," she exclaims. "I love to eat; it's one of my favorite hobbies." Cooking and gardening also rank among her major pastimes, especially at the couple's country house in Bourgogne, where she recently drove 25 miles out of her way to find freshly picked gooseberries.
"Acting's my little hobby," she jokes in a fading old lady voice. "It's true, though. François is always telling me that I treat it like a hobby. A very well paid hobby. I think a lot of people think I treat it like a hobby, because I don't really seem to do it very seriously."
It's a surprising thing to say, but ambivalence - the ability to give everything up, that maybe she doesn't need any of it - is part of the actress' charm.
TL: So why act, then?
KST: I haven't a clue. Good question but a terrible answer. I've always wanted to do it. It's an easy way - a very lazy way - of having some kind of satisfaction. It's not like a writer or a painter or a musician - I don't practice for hours a day.
TL: But everyone says it's so hard.
KST: Well, if I say it's not hard, everyone will fall on top of me and say, "Well, well, it isn't, now, is it?"
Oh, I don't know. Sometimes it's hard and sometimes it's easy. Like everything. The thing that's hard about it is leaving bits of yourself all over the place. It's like being chopped up. It can be hard on your soul; it's very, very, very lonely
The fake sobbing that accompanies this last bit shows we've been had once again. People who can't run with the joke are probably not Scott Thomas' kind of people. The attitude is reflected in her views on French cinema: "I find it incredibly dull. There are very few French directors I'd like to world with. Especially now." Leos Carax makes the grade, built the rest, she explains, are a little ... pedestrian, though she has acted in quite a few French movies. "I don't want to make films about kitchens, in that horrible grainy way they photograph everything," she adds. "I don't want to sit there and have the cat walk past a bowl of coffee."
This is, after all, a woman who had her very first movie role in the Artist formerly Known as Prince's glossy directorial debut - and mercifully his swan song - Under the Cherry Moon (1986). The part was, of course, as an insolent heiress who shows up at her debutante party in the buff (though Scott Thomas didn't bare anything in this one). The Artist's job is to teach her how to hang loose and have fun.
"My children watch it and laugh," says Scott Thomas, though she defends Prince's direction and says she had a great time making the film. "I couldn't believe it!" she says of her reaction at the time. " This is work?" When it was released, People called her a "Julie Andrews-like newcomer" whose "eyes sometimes roll as if she's about to faint." The eye roll is indeed a Scott Thomas specialty, and she uses it liberally.
She would have to wait until A Handful of Dust (1988) for a leading role. In the mid-1990s, she had vivid roles opposite Hugh Grant in both Mike Newell's Four Weddings and a Funeral and Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon, as well as a supporting part in Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible. So by the time The English Patient came out in 1996, she had already acted for some formidable directors.
TL: What was the last movie you saw in Paris?
KST: I went to the movies on Sunday night; we went to see Badlands, which I'd never seen. Fabulous. And then you think, why bother to go see anything else? My first introduction to [director Terrence Malick] was The Thin Red Line - absolutely brilliant. I've never seen anything so beautiful in my life. And then I saw Badlands - and I don't think I'll ever go see anybody else's films.
It tells you so much about American actors - they all want to be martin Sheen, who's playing someone who worships James Dean. There's a line that comes down from these actors, and they're all trying to pivot on that line.
TL: So what line are you pivoting on? Who are your icons?
KST: Maggie Smith, Katharine Hepburn . . .
TL: Hepburn was my guess.
KST: She is one of those lives like a James Dean. Everyone wants to be like her, because she was so extraordinary.
TL: She was always being cast as uppity and smart, and then getting cut down a bit. Why do you think you get cast that way so often?
KST: Because people think I'm uppity and smart.
TL: And are you uppity and smart?
KST: I don't know, you tell me. [Laughing] Harrison thinks so.
Irony aside, the actress has a taste for reticence of the old-fashioned kind. "Spencer Tracy - I could fall in love," says Scott Thomas when discussing her favorite men from movies past. "He is the most attractive man ever." Though he isn't conventionally handsome, she calls him "incredibly sexy. There's a quietness - Harrison has that. Gregory Peck, James Mason - those are my kind of men. There's a quietness that you're afraid to disturb. It's not that that's how they act; it's what lies underneath it all. That's the core. It never gets disturbed, because once it does get disturbed, it's not interesting anymore. There's something mysterious about it. And any mystery that gets solved is infinitely less interesting."
After starring opposite Ford's quietness in Random Hearts, Scott Thomas will appear in what she calls "the boy's part" in Up at the Villa, based on the W. Somerset Maugham novella. The film also stars Sean Penn, Jeremy Davies and Anne Bancroft. In this picture, she gets to choose among three men, a part closer to her role in The Horse Whisperer, in which she had protagonist duties and Robert Redford played the backlit love object.
This year Scott Thomas as served as president of the opening ceremonies for the Cannes International Film Festival, but she's also spent time on her longest-running roles of both wife and mother. She sounds like a genuinely affectionate parent, musing about the fact that her son is more French than English - the requisite Clouseau accent - and the great time her kids had on the Montana shoot of The Horse Whisperer.
"One of the other kids said to my daughter, 'You're so lucky, your mother drops you off wearing sneakers,"' says Scott Thomas, who takes her children to school when she's in Paris. "Because I never dress - I'm always scruffy as hell. All the other mothers are all lawyers, so they're in their suits."
She says this moments after confessing a weakness for the designs of Calvin Klein and having just shed the jacket of her Chanel suit. There are bound to be some incongruities in her line of work, a "well paid hobby" in which you pretend to be somebody else and then jet back to Paris to the real world and a real life. But this set of contradictions hangs particularly well on Scott Thomas.
"I always say I'll never work again," she says from Paris, a few days after seeing herself in Random Hearts. "I say that after every film."
Ted Loos writes about culture for The New York Times, Town & Country, Time Out New York and other publications.
