Men don't fall in love with me
Cassandra Jardine
Kristin Scott Thomas talks to Cassandra Jardine about her co-stars, her husband and the influence of her mother
'HAVE you not noticed, no one here has any respect for pavements?" says Kristin Scott Thomas in her cut-glass voice. "It's so unpleasant, it is unbelievable. This is dog shit city."
If you shut your eyes and imagine you are not in Paris, you could be listening to a certain type of easily shockable, upper-middle class English woman who is scarcely found these days outside the smarter market towns. Very much the kind of woman, in fact, that Scott Thomas has played in a string of films, including Four Weddings and a Funeral and The English Patient.
It would, however, be folly not to keep your eyes open when sitting opposite her, for her delicate face is at least as interesting to watch off screen as on. Essentially, she shifts between two poses. One - what I come to consider as her anti-dog shit mode - is full on, emphatic, confident, humorous and surprisingly raunchy. In this mode, her grey, billiard-ball eyes stare straight at you and her wide mouth lifts at the sides like a Viking long-boat.
Subjects that bring on this look include sex scenes, the horrors of the American movie business - and an offer to show me her bank balance, so that I can check if she really is "saving up", as she claims, to buy a flat here in Paris.
If thought is required, she shifts to profile and looks into the middle distance. Then it's the delicately equine nose you notice and the cheekbones, so prominent you could do your ironing on them. Musing, her eye-lids go into Garbo mode, her speech is more halting, trailing off into "maybe. . ."
This look is brought on by thoughts of adolescent "misery", film roles she wishes she had accepted and the dangers to mental health of being an actress.
When she first glides into the Montmartre café, she's in brisk DS mode. Off come the sunglasses and a heavy black coat. Ordering an orange juice, she starts to chat about her children's hamster - "Ugh, I can't bear to touch it. I want a new pet. I love cats, really fat ones, but I'm thinking of getting a dog. But don't get me started on dog shit, I always seem to be talking about that." The light and jolly tone is more London SW3 than Paris Left Bank. And it goes with the dressed-down star's mufti - a baggy shirt belonging to her gynaecologist husband, François Oliviennes, over unremarkable beige trousers with a lumpy scarf.
"I've had people gasp in horror at the way I dress," she says. "Sometimes, my children [Hannah, 12, and Joseph, nine] send me home to get changed."
The early-Eighties Sloane look may be an attempt to appeal to a British visitor since, whenever she sees French journalists, I read, she appears in a chic kilt looking la vrai Parisienne. The French love her for having adopted their country at the age of 19 - but, of course, we Brits hope she hankers for the Dorset of her youth.
Sadly not. She snubs the old country like a grumpy teenager, saying, "Everybody in England is always trying to keep up some pretence of being richer or smarter or grander than they are. Basically, everybody wants to be the Queen. Or wanted to be. I don't really know England now; I don't go back often."
Except, curiously, in film roles. It is 12 years since she first played the repressed, upper-class Englishwoman in A Handful of Dust. "At the time, I had been living in France for seven years, it was like playing a foreigner," she says. Apart from a few forays into roles as crisp East Coast Americans of a similar ilk in The Horse Whisperer and Random Hearts, she has continued to play brittle Brits, elegant but frigid.
Usually, the storyline relates how, after a tragedy, a man comes into her life, batters down her defences and kisses the frozen princess. At such moments, she stops biting her lower lip, drops her pretence of control, lowers her eyelids to half-droop and lets herself be swept off her feet, whispering "I love you".
Her latest film, Up at the Villa, is a classic of the genre. It is an adaptation of a Somerset Maugham novella set near Florence in 1938. Scott Thomas plays Mary Panton, a young but penniless widow, poised to marry an older man whom she doesn't love, played by James Fox (who else?). Swishing around some mouth-watering locations in frothy dresses, she encounters a more dashing prospect, played by Sean Penn, and complicates matters by offering a night of passion to a pathetic Austrian refugee (Jeremy Davies).
The film is a trifle slow-moving and Sean Penn seems uneasy in the Cary Grant role, but Scott Thomas is in her element. It is, she says, "an absolutely perfect, perfect" part for her - by which she seems to mean more than the obvious attraction of dominating the screen for a full two hours.
It is irresistible to speculate how close this kind of woman is to Scott Thomas herself. Does she, for example, find herself bored by praise for her beauty, like Mary Panton, and long to be considered "sensible"?
She looks amazed. "It is always nice to be appreciated for that," she says, waving her hand around her face. As a child, she explains, her blonde younger sister, Serena, was more admired: "I didn't just think she was better looking, I thought everybody in the whole world was. I hated it when adults would say how beautiful I was when I knew that, among my peers, I wasn't rated.
"As for being sensible - I don't like hearing that at all," she says. Besides, she tells me that the characters are not nearly as frigid as they appear. "Mary is looking for a good. . . As for Katharine in The English Patient, she was shagging everyone." Gosh. Perhaps she needs to fantasise about their wildness as an antidote to her daily life, which sounds extremely sensible. She turns down work in order to make time for a home life - "you know, taking the children to school, giving dinner parties, seeing people I haven't seen for five years. Normal, good things" - and keeps August sacred for the grandes vacances.
All right then, maybe her connection with Mary lies in an observation by the Sean Penn character that she thinks too much and should be more spontaneous? "I am quite like that. It takes me for ever to know what I am going to do."
Sometimes, that may mean she makes a strange decision, like turning down the role played by Julianne Moore in The End of the Affair. "What? How did you know about that?" she says, her voice dropping an octave. "I turned it down because I didn't want to do the same thing as in The English Patient. . . Ralph Fiennes wasn't in it then. . . Look, I don't want to talk about this . . . I can't go and see the film. OK."
Since none of these parallels seems to get to the nub of her enthusiasm for Mary Panton, what is it about the character that was so "absolutely perfect, perfect"?
"It's not really anything she says or does, it's just her. I love her. I feel she's somebody I know, she could be my sister," she says. Or perhaps her mother, I suggest.
The "battery" of her career, she has said, lies in sorrow. When she was five, her father, a naval pilot, was killed in an air crash; six years later, her step-father died the same way. Emotion was repressed at home, she has often said - is it too psychobabbly to suggest that she might be trying to find out through acting how her mother felt?
Scott Thomas is familiar with such talk, having married into a family of Jewish psychiatrists; until she decided to rent while flat-hunting, she even had her psychoanalyst mother-in-law living in the same block. This particular theory is new to her, but she doesn't reject it. In fact, she seizes upon it with interest. "It is true that I felt the part in The English Patient [which involves two plane crashes] belonged to me and no one, no one else was allowed to have it because I knew how she felt.
"And I have put a lot of my mother into Up at the Villa - that feeling she has of wanting to be loved by everybody. My mother was very young when she lost her second husband. When I was 18, she was 40."
Eighteen was the age at which Kristin decided she wanted to act. The decision came at the end of a miserable time at boarding school. "All I remember of Cheltenham is the dreary sight of fallen leaves on the ground and hockey. . . yuk. It was a place where they only seemed to care about academic achievement," she says.
"I wanted to be at home, I wanted to be anywhere else. I would write to my mother asking to come home, but she was too preoccupied with making ends meet and looking after the younger children [there are four others]. After a while, I suppose I realised that it was no use, so I just got on with it."
Being the eldest child made her prudent and manipulative, she believes, but the salient characteristic of her late teens was acute shyness. She wanted to escape from herself into acting, but at drama school she was not encouraged.
"People never told me what I could do, only what I couldn't. I didn't want to teach drama - if you want to act, nothing else will do - so I tried to creep on to the acting course. I was spotted and sacked," she says.
"After that, I felt I had to leave England. The only way not to be permanently bitter and jealous of everybody else was to move. I was miserable, I put on masses of weight. I found it difficult just living. . ."
In France, it was a different story and her whole manner lightens as she talks of this liberation. Englishness became her "calling card", it got her on to a prestigious acting course by the "back door", and intrigued people. "I had a teacher who let me feel I could be who I wanted to be."
Then along came François, a jovial trainee doctor who took up acting to meet women: "I wouldn't say he waved a baguette magique over my life, but he made me calmer. My friends would laugh to hear me say this because they see me as disorganised and perpetually in a panic, but I'm no longer in a panic internally. I certainly wouldn't go back to being any age before 30."
The current source of anxiety is her career. Becoming successful relatively late has allowed her to establish a stable home life; but making the transition from character actor to star is terrifying: "As you get more successful, you have more responsibility. You can't afford to get things wrong."
Hollywood wants more than furrowed brows and telling inclines of the head: it wants raw passion. For Robert Redford's The Horse Whisperer, she spent six lonely months in Montana being told to emote.
"I only saw Redford twice socially. In America, it's such a mean, tough business that big movie stars come off set and get straight on the phone to their business partners."
In Random Hearts, with Harrison Ford, she peeled away more layers of reserve, but it wasn't enough. One reviewer compared the film to The Horse Whisperer, "as an overlong, underpowered gasp of the Hollywood hero past his prime".
Her mistake may have been signing up with older men whom she had to pretend to fancy. "It is strange to go around telling so many men, 'I love you'," she agrees. "You have to believe everything you say or no one else will believe it. It can be hard if there is zero connection.
"You need some chemistry, as people say there was in The English Patient. . ." she says, looking at me, somewhat unnecessarily, for corroboration. "But it can be a professional crush. Take me and Hugh Grant in Four Weddings - I was very attached to him as he was so hung up; I spent hours listening to him moan. When I had to say 'I love you', it all came out in a whoosh."
Currently, she is absorbed by what to do next. She has had it with big movie stars, she doesn't want to be away from home for too long. But it has been a year since she last acted and she feels the need she felt as a schoolgirl to have a break from reality. There is one possibility later this year, but it is not easy to find good parts at 40 and she cannot play younger roles as her delicate skin shows wear. Still, she says she will not resort to surgery.
"I am too much of a coward to have myself plumped up. I once sacked an agent who told me to have my eyes done. I expect I will end up doing it because everybody does. Anyway, it's not as if I'm a sex bomb. Men don't fall in love with me, or only young ones - I have had to tell some young actors to calm down."
I'm sure she does so sweetly, without the withering coldness she is sometimes said to show to those who cross her, hurt her or fail to engage her interest. It is fun being desired and even more fun playing women who are rather "wilder" than the controlled English nature she is trying to escape.
"I don't have this Anglo-Saxon problem with nude scenes," she says. "Actually, there's a sense of power when you are stark naked and everyone else is cowering.
"It's nothing to do with sex or with wanting people to think you are attractive. It's having the balls to do it."
Up at the Villa opens on April 14 nationwide
