Soft at the Centre
David Eimer
She's become famous for her reserved and aloof roles, but Kristin Scott Thomas would rather show her more light-hearted side, discovers DAVID EIMER
All actors have a dream role, the one that they fantasise about in between jobs. For Kristin Scott Thomas it's Lady Penelope, Inter- national Rescue's London agent and quite the cutest puppet in Thunderbirds. "I was born to play Lady Penelope," she announces in her most ringing tones. "There's a plot to do it and I just pray they get the script right, because if they do, then I'm there, strings and all."
Thunderbirds Are Go is a long way from The English Patient, but it's no stretch to imagine her as the brisk but sexy Lady Penelope, pushing her chauffeur Parker around with all the assurance of someone who knows that her place in the world is, if not at the top, then very close to it. After all, she remains best known for playing elegant and superior Englishwomen in films such as A Handful of Dust, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bitter Moon.
Given her schooling at Cheltenham Ladies' College, that might seem like typecasting but, just as Scott Thomas lives in Paris with her French husband and two kids rather than doing the school run in Gloucestershire, so the characters she plays tend to be rather more complex than they initially appear to be. "I've always enjoyed playing people who are not what they seem, who on first meeting them you think, 'Oh, they're like that,' and then little by little, as you watch the film, you discover they're somebody else," she says.
Which is maybe why Hollywood doesn't seem to know what to do with her, because, having beaten out the likes of Nicole Kidman and Michelle Pfeiffer for the part of Katharine Clifton, her Oscar nomination for The English Patient was supposed to launch her on a new, dizzy career path. Instead she followed it with The Horse Whisperer, in which she appeared opposite a soft-focus Robert Redford and a nag that got almost as much screen time as she did.
Now she's back with Random Hearts, another glossy, big-budget weepie that sees her playing a congresswoman who discovers her husband was having an affair only after he and his girlfriend die in an air crash. Soon she and Harrison Ford, whose wife was the other woman, are torturing themselves over their respective partners' infidelities and tiptoeing towards a relationship of their own. "There are always a million reasons for making a movie," points out Scott Thomas, who's stretched out on a sofa in an LA hotel suite, "but I found the story fascinating: the fact that two people can react so differently to the same situation and the horrific premise that you discover the betrayal through death. It's just so awful that it's irresistible."
Plane crashes and adultery are two themes that seem to follow her around. In The English Patient she slams into the desert along with her lover Ralph Fiennes, who's flying her husband's plane, while her breakthrough role in 1988's A Handful of Dust saw her playing a bored aristo who drifts into an affair with tragic consequences. And by the time she was 12, both her father and stepfather, who were Royal Navy pilots, had died in flying accidents.
Random Hearts, though, turns on the very different ways in which the characters react to the discovery of their spouses' secret lives. Whereas Ford's policeman wants to know every little detail, Scott Thomas's Kay just tries to forget it. "I think part of that is due to the fact that Kay is a woman and we're far more able, I think, to turn the page and move on. Men tend to be more committed to discovering the reality." She's less sanguine about how she'd deal with similar news. "Oh God. I dread to think of it. I guess I would be into moving on."
She and Ford had planned to work together on a film about relief workers in Sarajevo that never happened. "Harrison's kind of been in the air a long time. We met once at a party in Los Angeles. You know, 'How do you do, so pleased to meet you,' and then I was all jittery because I'd met Harrison Ford and then I forget about him. But he was keen to work with me and you'd have to be mad not to work with him." Why? "Well, because in this area of film-making he is the man. He's the hero with the sensitive core and everybody just goes weak at the knees for that."
It's no surprise that Ford wanted to act opposite her, she's one of the few actresses around who can suggest her mood with a mere glance and she brings an intelligence and elusiveness to her work that often leaves her leading men trailing in her dust. Ford, who's never looked very comfortable in romantic dramas, is no exception. Then there's the fact that, like Robert Redford, he's old enough to be the 39-year-old Scott Thomas's dad. "Now what is this?" she says with a frown. "Harrison doesn't seem to be an older man, or does he?" The answer is "Yes", even if he's now sporting a natty little gold stud in his left ear. Does she like his earring? "No," she almost screams, after doing her best to restrain herself.
More than anything, it's her light-hearted side that is rarely captured on film. While she's played plenty of dry and ironic Brits, she's more playful in person than she appears on screen, prone to poking fun at herself, pulling faces, or putting on an 'Allo, 'Allo accent to mimic her kids' English. But her attempts to win roles in comedies have been a failure: she went up for the female lead in Ford's last film, Six Days Seven Nights, but lost out to Anne Heche. It clearly frustrates her. "I think if I do another really big meaty tragedy I'm going to be in trouble. I want to stop weeping all the time, it's really tiring."
The irony is that before the success of Four Weddings introduced her to Hollywood, she was making almost as many French films as she was English-language ones and getting to play a far wider variety of parts, most notably a schoolteacher in Eric Rochant's Aux Yeux du Monde. "You don't have that middle-class image," she points out, "but on the other hand I haven't been asked to do much in France recently and I'm really disappointed by it."
Her post-English Patient profile put an end to that, but simply by beginning her career in Paris rather than London, Scott Thomas got a head start on her contemporaries. "When I went there it was a huge advantage being an English actress in France because you're immediately different. If I'd started off in England, I'm sure it wouldn't have worked as well. I wouldn't have been as successful because people wouldn't have taken any notice of me, I'd have been just like everybody else," she claims. "But it wasn't a smart move, it wasn't a huge plan, it was just a sort of mistake. When I went, I went for two weeks and I just stayed because I liked it."
When she moved to Paris in 1980 it was to work as an au pair. Prior to that, she'd been an unsuccessful temp - "I was constantly getting sent home because I was pathetic" - and had failed to get onto the drama course at the Central School of Speech and Drama. It was all the motivation she needed.
"When it's everything you've always ever wanted, but haven't really dared tell anyone, and you drum up the courage to admit it and somebody tells you, 'Forget it, waste of time, who do you think you are?', it's just so devastating. But I haven't been spending all these years getting revenge. It's a drive, a motor, but it's one you don't really want to admit to."
Then there was the insecurity she claims she felt while living in England. "It was really to get away from not being right, not being one of the cool people," she says of leaving London. Who were they? "All the people I wasn't.
The people I wanted to be and wasn't, the people who I wished I could be. When I went to Paris, I didn't have them around me so I didn't have the frustration. And now when I go back and look back, it just doesn't impress me anymore."
France seems to have worked an instant cure, although Scott Thomas has also taken the un-English route of therapy. But in swift succession, she won a place at the Ecole Nationale des Arts et Techniques de Theatre, met her future husband, Francois Olivennes, then a medical student and now one of France's leading fertility specialists, and began to appear in French theatre. Her introduction to the movies came in 1986, when she was hired to play opposite Prince in Under the Cherry Moon. "It was a scream, it was really, really funny," she recalls. "I was slightly gobsmacked and at the same time I was thinking, 'How can these people be taking this seriously?' "
That would remain a problem for her throughout her early career and, even now, she's surprisingly ill at ease when talking about her work or herself. At least she's no longer ashamed of her job, which was the case for a long time. "I've come around. I think it helps having films that are seen by a lot of people, because it gets quite desper- ate when you pour your heart and all your energy into something that doesn't get seen."
Paris will remain her home for the foresee- able future. "My everyday life isn't disturbed for a start. I've just moved apartments and I've seen quite a lot of people wandering around my street giggling when they see me, but apart from that I haven't had any mishaps." Whether she'll be given the chance to demonstrate that she's capable of playing more than just tightly wound, upper-middle-class women is up in the air. Scott Thomas, though, just wants another job. "I kind of decided I wasn't going to do anything for a year and now I'm beginning to feel I'd like to start working on a role. Not filming, just thinking. You know, 'What colour hair am I going to have?' All the important questions in life."
