Onward Kristin
Merle Ginsberg
Kristin Scott Thomas admits she's a control freak on the set, she loved kissing Tom Cruise and she has fun dressing up for a big event - when she's the star.
Kristin Scott Thomas has just answered the door to her New York hotel room when she suddenly rips open her shirt. "Look at this!" she shouts. "I've got splotches all over my chest - big red welts. I couldn't sleep after my flight from Paris last night, so I took a pill and now I'm having a bad reaction to it."
It seems Scott Thomas, she of the frosty, haughty - some would even say smug - screen persona, is anxious to demonstrate just how flesh-and-hone real she can be. In town to talk about two new and very disparate movies - Sydney Pollack's romantic fall tear-jerker Random Hearts, with Harrison Ford, and Up at the Villa, an independent film co-starring Sean Penn - she seems to know that her ice-princess image on film can distance people when they meet her. Her efforts can come off as a little silly, but her pitch-perfect British wit does make her more approachable. So after taking a jab at her physical imperfection, she turns to her supposed utter lack of hipness.
"I'm turning into an old, horribly reactionary person," she says. "My daughter, Hannah [age 11], just took a trip to London and came back with a dress over trousers. She said, 'It's very London.' And I said, 'Is it?' Of course, I had no idea this was the new look. The mother who's just lost it - lost the pulse entirely. I feel like a bit of a frump."
That's an exaggeration. If she is a little undone, the effect is very much Holly Golightly after a big night. At 39, she's all cheekbones - in fact, she's practically all bones in skinny white jeans.
"But after every film," she insists, "I have a massive appetite. All I do when I'm done filming is sit around and eat and get fat."
A raised eyebrow leads her to modify that statement. "All right, fat for me," she says. "I used to obsess about my weight, but I'm getting a lot better about it, thank God. I was sure I wasn't getting parts in films as a result of it. I am thin here," she says, pointing to her shoulders and arms, "but I just get fatter and fatter as you go down." At least she can laugh about this delusion. "We just moved houses, and I found some old photographs of myself. I thought I was ugly and fat as a teenager, but what I saw in those photos now was a beautiful girl, slim as a stick, not at all fat - no one could ever imagine her as fat. But I was convinced I was."
The oldest of five, Scott Thomas grew up in Dorset, England, and attended Cheltenham Ladies' College. She escaped from Britain and eternal Sloane Ranger poshness as soon as she was old enough, at the age of 18, hightailing it to Paris as an au pair. There she met her future husband, François Oliviennes, a fertility doctor, had two children (Joseph is eight) and, despite her impeccably crisp English accent and manners, became what she calls "a French person."
"I've now spent longer in France than England," Scott Thomas says, "so actually I'm more French than English. And sometimes that's frightening to think. The French can be so staid. We rarely go out. All these happening people in Paris don't even know I live there."
She admits there are times, such as this year's Cannes Film Festival, where she was mistress of ceremonies, when she loves to get all dressed up in Chanel or Gaultier or Celine or Calvin Klein. But only when she is going to be center stage. "When I'm not the star, I don't want to be there," she sniffs. "I don't want someone else's limelight dusting off on me, because I feel that's rather distasteful. There's something cheesy about it."
That kind of high-mindedness is what has defined her screen identity, from her 1986 debut as the poor little rich girl in Prince's Under the Cherry Moon to her sharp-tongued aristocrat in Mike Newell's Four Weddings and a Funeral, which put her on the map in 1994. The English Patient and an Oscar nomination made her a star two years later, and she followed with Robert Redford's The Horse Whisperer. Somewhere in between, she squeezed in a bit part in Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible'.
"I didn't do it for the paycheck," she says with a laugh. "I would have done it for nothing. I love Brian De Palma. He's potty mad and fantastically interesting. I had done some tests with him once and had such a good time - for Bonfire of the Vanities, to play Tom Hanks' wife. Actually, they wanted me to come to LA to test with Tom Hanks, but I was on vacation with my kids and said I couldn't do it.
"God was on my side, I guess - they didn't wait for me," she adds, referring to the critical and box-office pummeling the movie received.
"But I had such fun on Mission: Impossible," she continues. "I loved working with Tom Cruise; he's a dream. We got to snog - very exciting. I have kissed such exciting men."
Not the least of whom is Harrison Ford. Their teaming was a long time coming. She was first cast opposite Ford a few years ago in a doomed project called Age of Aquarius, which lost its financing at the last minute. The two had never met, but Scott Thomas says, "It was my understanding that he was keen to do a film with me. Then there was another Harrison Ford film I was up for that almost happened - a comedy - but I don't think the director liked me too much." (She doesn't name the film, but she's clearly referring to the Anne Heche role in Ivan Reitman's Six Days, Seven Nights.)
When Scott Thomas finally met Ford at a premiere party, she says, "Harrison was very, very funny, and I liked him. He made a joke; I capped it, and he said, 'No, I'm supposed to be the funny one.' I thought, fine, I know where I stand. Then Sydney Pollack called me about Random Hearts, and it came to fruition."
Ford did indeed want Scott Thomas for a leading lady. "I had an inclination to work with her," he says by phone. "And so did Sydney. She's intelligent and a wonderful actress. The reason it works for this film is that we are an unlikely combination - and the characters have an unlikely relationship. For once, I think the ad line is correct: 'In a perfect world, they never would have met.'"
Ford plays a touch D.C. cop whose whife is killed in a plane crash on her way to Miami - sitting next to a New Hampshire congresswoman's (Scott Thomas) husband, who's also kiled. When Ford and Scott Thomas find out their spouses were having an affair, they team up to put the pieces - and inevitably, themselves - together.
"This role was a huge challenge for two reasons," Scott Thomas explains. "For me to play an American, and then, a Republican - that's a huge stretch of the imagination. And of course I knew nothing about American politics. I sort of knew there's a house in Washington with a bit white dome on it. So what did I do? I bought Politics for Dummies. And I watched Elizabeth Dole, Ann Richards and Pat Schroeder on video."
Another reason the role may have proved difficult - one that Scott Thomas prefers not to discuss - is that her father died in a plane crash when she was five and her stepfather was killed the same way just six years later. Both men were pilots.
Scott Thomas, though, would rather talk about her American accent in the movie. "I'm doing a kind of upper-middle-class East Coast accent - I hope," she says. "I hope it's not appalling. Minnie Driver does it perfectly. But lots of people do it terribly. It's very difficult to do."
So was relinquishing the tight control over her character that she tries to maintain on all her films. "I admit I'm very controlling," she says. "When you've had films that have been successful, you try very hard to keep what you consider your strong points. I tend to be very defensive. Robert Redford tried to soften me up, and he did, to a certain extent. With Sydney, it wasn't working.
"Finally I thought, this is Sydney Pollack; you can trust him," she continues. "For a start, he's completely divine, and you fall in love with him. But he's also a control freak. So I just gave in. I'd go to work with nothing planned, not a clue of what I was going to do - I just let him tell me what he wanted."
"That's very flattering," Pollack says in response. "I do find her striking, interesting and not like anyone. There is that Brahmin elegance. There's something sexy about a woman like Kristin peeling away her defenses. Her performance is not what you're prepared for. She gets more and more attractive as the movie goes on, and I think you fall in love with her."
As for the so-called chemistry necessary to sell a love story, Scott Thomas - a veteran of several successful film pairings - just throws her hands up in the air.
"While we were shooting 'The English Patient'," she remembers, "one of the most important people on the set said, 'This is never work because there is no chemistry between Ralph [Fiennes] and Kristin.'" At this, Scott Thomas actually howls - albeit in a refined way and only for a brief moment.
"Luckily, I didn't hear that until afterward. Anyway, I knew Ralph and I were working well together - there's a buzz that happens, a kind of electrical thing. It doesn't happen very often. But it did happen with Ralph; it happened with Harrison, and it happened with Sean Penn, too."
Believe it or not. Penn is the leading man on her second film out this year, Up at the Villa, which takes Scott Thomas back to her root - a period film based on the Somerset Maugham novella and directed by Philip Haas, who directed her in the quirky Angels & Insects'. She plays a young widow left broke, with no option but to marry for money - until she meets American ex-patriate Penn in Italy. (The cast also includes Anne Bancroft, Derek Jacobi, James Fox and Jeremy Davies.)
"I suppose I make a lot of films about love and loss," she says, laughing. "And I've been paired with a lot of great men. We never thought we'd get Sean Penn. We didn't even ask him until late because we never thought he'd do it, though he was our dream choice."
The director, though, admits Scott Thomas and Penn are an unlikely match. "You expect to see Kristin onscreen with men of her element - Hugh Grant, Ian McKellan," Haas says. "She and Sean are like oil and water, and I think that makes the film more interesting. What they have in common is a certain kind of wit."
It's clear Scott Thomas has enjoyed playing opposite her leading men. She describes Ralph Fiennes, for example, as "gorgeous, great, fabulously enigmatic and mysterious." But when told that many people think the same of her, she just cracks up.
"Who says that about me?" she wants to know. "I cannot even begin to imagine that men would have crushes on me. Perhaps I am the PhD's idea of heaven. I have gotten fan mail from some super-brainy types - and I just managed to scrape through with a high-school educa-tion. I am completely undereducated. It's so weird, the whole idea that people would have ideas about me."
She tells a story of going through the grueling series of lunches, parties and events for Oscar nominees when she was nominated for best actress in 1997. "I kept telling my publicist that I never wanted to do this again," she says. "And she said, 'Kristin, you won't have to. You only have to do it once.' The happy look I wore with my Christian Lacroix to the Oscars that year was really about that it was almost over, and soon I could stay home. I don't really relish selling my wares."
Not that she wouldn't want another nomination.
"It's so weird, isn't it?" she muses. "I suppose all of this attention is what I've always wanted - for people to think I'm far more interesting than I actually am. And it seems to have worked so far. I'm just wondering when the curtain will fall and they'll see me naked - you know what I mean?"
