No random choices for Thomas
She's wanted to act since 'age of zero'
Barry Koltnow
Kristin Scott Thomas, a former resident of London who has lived in Paris the past 20 years, says she understands New York City but doesn't get Los Angeles at all.
"When I come here, I feel like I'm on another planet," the actress explains. "It doesn't feel like a real town. I'm not sure what's going on."
Still, the Oscar-nominated actress admits she enjoys her visits and even finds herself getting caught up in the L.A. scene.
"I'm not immune to it," she says with mock shame. "I was driving down Sunset Boulevard the other day and saw that huge billboard for Random Hearts (she stars with Harrison Ford in the film, which opened last Friday) and my heart raced.
"It's super-exciting. Who wouldn't be excited by their name in lights? I'm not as blase as people think. I can get caught up in all the fame and glory, just like anyone else. When I go to premieres and the flashbulbs are popping, I feel like a little girl at a fancy-dress party.
"But I can't live like that all the time... I am someone who values her family and home life as much as her career."
It is that exact quality that Ford said he recognized as one of Thomas' strengths as an actress.
"She is a real human being," the actor says. "She is a grown-up lady with children and a life and a husband and all kinds of investments in the real world. At the same time, she is a very, very capable actress."
Director Sydney Pollack, who picked Thomas for the role opposite Ford, says he was attracted to her for the opposite reason.
"It was the most unlikely pairing I could think of. Harrison is the Everyman, and she is the aristocrat."
Thomas' early life was marred by tragedy. When she was 5, her father, a pilot in the Royal Navy, was killed in a jet crash. Years later, her stepfather, also a pilot, died in a similar accident.
The actress, 39, said she is not sure how those events affected her life and career aspirations, but she said she knows she has wanted to be an actress since the "age of zero."
She studied in London but felt compelled by peer pressure to stop studying to be an actress and start studying to be an acting teacher.
"So I enrolled in this teaching class, but I was miserable. So miserable, in fact, that I got fired from the school."
Just 19 and clueless as to how she was going to spend the rest of her life, Thomas moved to Paris. For six months, she contemplated her future but eventually enrolled in drama school. She later married a French physician; the couple have two children.
Thomas began on the stage but soon added French and English films to the mix. The first film that American audiences noticed her in was the 1994 surprise hit Four Weddings and a Funeral.
However, the film that established her as a genuine star was The English Patient, for which she was nominated for best actress. She followed that with a role opposite Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer.
Thomas says she is sensing that her cool, icy screen image is starting to work against her.
"It is important for me to show people I can do more diverse roles, because that's how you get to work with the better directors and the better actors and the better scripts. It is a short career when you are perceived as being good at only one thing."
