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Scott Report
Susie Forbes
Describing Kristin Scott Thomas as a woman with a split personality may make her sound sinister; but she seems to hold within her two such clearly defined halves that your impression on meeting her is almost that of encountering a pair of identical twins. The two--Kristin Scott Thomas the actress and Kristin Scott Thomas the woman--may look the same but they each have a distint personality.
It is Kristin Scott Thomas the woman who is sitting opposite me at Cafe Select in Paris, negotiating her way around the no-smoking rules in immaculate and suitably grumpy French. She has lived in the city for 16 years--having fled London to work here as an au pair after she failed to get a place at drama school--and we are only a short walk away from the Left Bank apartment she shares with her husband, obstetrician François Olivennes, and her children, Hannah, age seven, and Joseph, five. Immediately recognisable from her films--though her usually bobbed, jet-black hair is currently pigtailed and boasts the awful rust tones of the lapsed peroxide blonde--Scott Thomas nevertheless shows no sign of having classic actorly qualities. There are no obvious displays of wealth--she is wearing a cardigan decorated with the leftovers of her children's breakfast, a stripy T-shirt and old ripped Levi's over real-woman hips--and no theatrical hand movements or clever mimicry to illustrate a point. There is something completely ordinary about her which, in contrast to her stark, fragile beauty, and her status as the middle-class lust icon, is rather unexpected. She does offer the odd glimpse of Fiona's chilly irony in Four Weddings and a Funeral--she says words like "fantistic" and "lovely" a lot--though this is probably more to do with her upbringing (she is the daughter of a naval officer, brought up in Dorset and educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College) than any mudding of her real and screen personas.
"I find it very difficult to be two different characters at the same time--actress and mother," she says by way of explanation, and confides that she feels uncomfortable having her family visit her on set when she's working. "People assume that she's the same person on screen that she is in real life," says Duncan Kenworthy, an old friend and the producer of Four Weddings, "but there's a completely different side to her. I mean, she has two kids and is married to this incredibly cuddly French guy... she's really not the ice goddess that people think."
Ice? Maybe not. But goddess, definitely. After all who could forget the collective groan from appalled audiences at the moment when Hugh Grant decided to choose cheesy Andie MacDowell over the painfully lovely yet thwarted Kristin in Four Weddings. "I consider Kristin's performance to be the best of the film," says Kenworthy. "I know that it's invidious to say that when you're got so many great actors, but she way utterly convincing in what was an essentially unshowy part."
Kenworthy is not the only person to be suffering from the Kristin Scott Thomas effect. Talking to other people who have worked with her you get the sense that they feel that they have been touched by something extraordinary. "When you watch her perform," explains Anthony Minghella, who directed Kristin in The English Patient--the forthcoming movie adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's Booker prize-winning novel--"you realise that you are witnessing a hot-line to her inner being. There's this fabulous transparency to her even when she's totally still." His sentiments are echoed by Scott Thomas's co-star Ralph Fiennes who, despite having worked with a multitude of big-name actresses in his short but high-profile career, is apparently walking around babbling to everyone he meets about how exceptional Kristin's performance is.
The English Patient--which Scott Thomas described as "kind of a detective love story"--put her in the enviable position of having to spend 11 weeks on location in Tunisia with Ralph Fiennes playing her lover and Pride and Prejudice heart-throb Colin Firth her husband. "We all invested so much in this film somehow," says Scott Thomas, "and the material was so exciting, that I've been having quite bad withdrawal symptoms. Do you know they actually have Darcy fan clubs now?" she continues, inconsequentially. "They take you round the house where Pride and Prejudice was filmed with a guide saying things like 'And this is where Colin Firth came out of the lake in his wet shirt.'"
This habit of suddenly lightening the tone of the conversation when she's talking about the work is typical of Kristin Scott Thomas. She will tell you funny stories about making this summer's action blockbuster Mission Impossible with Tom Cruise in Prague ("He is by no means a goody two-shoes. He would keep bars open until seven in the morning playing pool"), and she will even let you in on the secrets of her on-set existence ("a Diptych scented candle cheers up any hotel room"), but there seems a reluctance, now that she is back home playing the role of wife and mother, to reacquaint herself too closely with her roles. Part of this, she explains, has to do with the sort of parts that she plays: women who are unsettling to revisit over and over again.
"The roles do affect me," she says, "especially in a film like Angels and Insects where my character was always fighting to get the man on to her side. It was only at the end that they click and something happens between them. Before then it's me giving, giving, giving and trying to persuade him to come into my camp. I love it, but it's kind of depressing after a while." Angels and Insects--witnessed Kristin Scott Thomas in her first truly unglamorous role: a dull, shadowy moth to Patsy Kensit's exotic butterfly. "In a way it was liberating not having to think about looking beautiful," she says, "though I did have the odd 'I want a pretty dress' moment when I saw all the other girls turning up in their beautiful frock and their hair done up in soft curls." Inspired by the script which describes Matty as having "dark eyes", Scott Thomas went all out to cultivate the sallow, mousy looks (think Holly Hunter in The Piano) that made the character so convincing. "The biggest shock was afterwards, when people kept coming up to me and saying, 'God, you looked so ugly in the film.' I suddenly realised how vain I am, how much I'd taken for granted those dumb description of me like 'beautiful actress Kristin Scott Thomas'. Suddenly I was scanning the press and thinking, 'Hang on, where's the bit about me being beautiful?'"
This is as close as the 37-year-old Scott Thomas has come to a midlife crisis. For the first time she was feeling old, fretting about her looks and worrying about her 'best side' for camera angles. She even admits that there are times when she feels like 'never making another movie again', and one senses that the playing of a succession of detached, brittle heroines - the manipulative Brenda in A Handful of Dust, the half-thawed Fiona in Bitter Moon, the glacial Fiona in Four Weddings and now Matty in Angels and Insects - is beginning to drain her energies. In a telling moment, Anthony Minghella reveals how much Kristin needed a movie like The English Patient - where she plays her first passionate blonde after a row of dark sophisticates - to keep her career blues at bay. "She needs this moment in the sun,' he says, "to reassure herself that she really is a wonderful, exuberant actress."
This year will also see Scott Thomas playing a number of other roles against type, among them an amusing caricature of the glamorous Hitchcockian heroine in Robert Lepage's film debut The Confessional and the Immortal Gatekeeper in Gulliver's Travels, directed by Charles Sturridge. In the forthcoming movie adaptation of Richard III, a witty, melodramatic, if somewhat camp production that transports the fifteenth-century megalomaniac king to the Thirties, Scott Thomas appears in her first Shakespeare role as the bitter, drug-abusing Lady Anne. "Hers is not acting that pushes itself at you; she reveals herself very discreetly," says Sir Ian McKellen, who stars opposite Scott Thomas in the film, and also adapted the play for the screen. " Kristin is prepared to reach deep inside in a way that can be uncomfortable to watch because you sense that she's drawing on something so terribly private. I should think that it costs her a great deal to be an actress. There's nothing easy about it."
If there is a change of direction afoot uou can be sure that it is entirely of Scott Thomas's making. She is famous of fighting tooth and nail for the roles that she feels strongly about, a reputation that again seems at odds with the mild-mannered woman sitting opposite me. "We weren't going to meet Kristin about Four Weddings," says Duncan Kenworthy, "because we thought she was too big a star for such a small part, but in the end she lobbied incredibly hard for it."
"I wish I were fuelled only by ambition," Scott Thomas remarks. "Life would be so much simpler." In fact, she's thinking about having another baby. "I'm finding it difficult to decide," she says with an exasperated smile. "I've only just got my own life going; though in a way that's because of the children. They've given me that extra confidence. Having kids makes you feel so much more useful somehow." As the interview draws to an end, Kristin begins to talk animatedly about her palns for the rest of the day, revealing yet another new side to her - the shopaholic. On Gucci: "I love those high, shiny shoes that look like sweeties." On Prada: "You have to be really masochistic to wear some of their new cleaning-lady stuff - unless you're 6ft 4in and 12 years old." On Hermes: "You know, sometimes I love being famous. I went into Hermes the other day and everyone was giving me the star treatment. Heaven!" See? I told you she was just an ordinary woman.
