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Kristin Almighty
Geordie Greig
Robert Redford, Harrison Ford, Ralph Fiennes, Sean Penn -- only the best leading men will do for Kristin Scott Thomas. She is, after all, a superstar. But what does she think of herself?
As we're driven through the 18th-century streets of Spitalfields in London's East End, Kristin Scott Thomas sighs with nostalgia for a brief moment, for the country she abandoned 23 years ago, when she was just 18 years old. `God, I forget that London is such a beautiful city.' As her black chauffeur-driven Mercedes cruises past the Tower of London, she peers through the window like an excited tourist. `I must come back here with the children,' she says, relishing her short visit to her native land. It helps, of course, that she is making a triumphant return, feted as one of the great stars of British cinema.
This is the woman who almost snared Hugh Grant (Four Weddings and a Funeral), died in the arms of Tom Cruise (Mission: Impossible) and was nominated for an Oscar for her desert-set dalliance with Ralph Fiennes (The English Patient). With Harrison Ford and Robert Redford as her latest co-stars, Kristin has joined the very top rank of Hollywood leading ladies. She now pockets up to £2 million a movie, which befits her status as a full-blown star.
Yet, back in 1979 when she fled to Paris, Kristin Scott Thomas seemed a most unlikely candidate for screen deity. She was a fat, angry and confused teenager whose upbringing in deepest Dorset was a conventional one. `I was about 12 stone and not looking good.' Her career prospects were hideously bad. She worked in Paris as an au pair, a waitress and then, for just nine days -- until she was fired -- as a secretary. Her confidence had already hit rock bottom after she failed to get on to a drama course in England. A tutor at the Central School of Speech and Drama (who later gave Margaret Thatcher voice-coaching) forbade her to change from her teaching course, saying that she would never make a living on the screen or stage. `It just seemed an unbearably cruel thing to say. I can still hear her voice ringing in my head: "If you want to play Lady Macbeth you must join an amateur dramatic society,"' Kristin recalls.
Well, that was then. The metamorphosis of Kristin Scott Thomas is complete, as she is now indisputably one of the most beguiling film actresses of her generation. Dressed simply in beige cotton trousers, a white shirt and wool cardigan, she is Parisian chic incarnate. Wearing almost no make-up, she occasionally pushes back her shoulder-length hair from her face to reveal her exquisitely chiselled features. As we sit down to lunch at RSJ -- conveniently close to Waterloo for the Eurostar back to Paris she unsettles our waiter. `I always ask for things not on the menu,' she warns half-mischievously, before deciding on a rocket and potato salad followed by roast guinea fowl. No wine, just still mineral water, and then for an hour and half she is extraordinarily good company. One minute she is soulful: `Sometimes I wish I was doing a useful job.' (Her husband actually creates life as an IVF specialist.) Often funny at her own expense (`God no, I could never live in Hollywood. I do not trust myself. I am so easily swayed, I'd be the first to be victim to plastic surgery. I would be doing 24-hour yoga courses'), she is always frank: `Look, my father died when I was very young. It was sad but, hell, there are far worse tragedies that have happened to other people.' And often endearing: `Oh, I know everyone says I have this perfect life with the perfect career and the perfect husband and the wonderful kids. And it is true. But I just also sometimes wish my life was not so frantic and I was less overwhelmed by things.' Only for one tiny moment do I see the glacial queen the British press have dubbed her as. `That's off limits,' she states simply when the questioning gets just a bit too personal.
Kristin has never been easy to define, one minute appearing opposite superstars in Hollywood blockbusters, the next learning Romanian to take a part in an art-house movie. Her first break into film was odd: Prince spotted her across a crowded restaurant and put her in his embarrassingly bad Under the Cherry Moon in 1985. Even her nationality is confused at times. As we drive along the Thames, she spots the London Eye, still shamingly static, and promptly fails the Norman Tebbit patriotism test. `Our wheel in Paris had none of those problems,' she says. When I raise my eyebrows at the word `our', she laughs. But she has lived more than half her life in France. Her husband is French, her children speak French and, though by day she is an international film star, at home she is Mme Francois Olivennes, French housewife and devoted mother. `I never had the greatest of success with English men. It was only when I went to France that it was all wonderfully different,' she says.
In Britain she is perceived as a peculiarly English actress -- particularly after Four Weddings and The English Patient, with Kristin playing one ice-cool English character after another. Britain's answer to Grace Kelly is how the tabloids, somewhat misleadingly, presented her. What she is not is an easy-fit for upper class costume drama. She is too spiky, awkwardly intelligent and unpredictable. Easy assumptions and definitions irritate her. `For goodness sake, I left England to escape the strangulatingly constrictive definitions of the British class system,' she says wearily. Kristin pronounces the C word with mock horror. `I couldn't cope with the code in England, where the way you speak makes people assume you are a certain type.' Of course, on the surface she was a type: a classic upper-middle-class English schoolgirl, educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College, equipped with a cut-glass accent. The truth is a little more complex. It was no easy, privileged childhood: her twice-widowed mother struggled to pay school fees. `She had to beg and scrounge to pay them.' And even though she is grateful and admires her mother, Kristin scorns the boarding-school system and was determined, to leave Britain. `People say I was brave to leave England. I wasn't. I couldn't cope with life in London.'
Her solution was to leave for Paris, in the middle of her drama teaching, and for a few months she went wild there. `I felt everything that was going to happen would happen at night-time and that clubs were the places where I would be most happy. Amazingly, I avoided drugs. I have seen many of my friends fall to pieces, but fortunately I have always been terrified of being out of control.' Yet complexity attracts her and has defined her life, ever since she had to cope, aged only five, with her father's death in a naval air crash, followed six years later by her stepfather's death in similar circumstances. Such tragedies, inevitably, leave a stain. She retains an inscrutable quality behind those glaucous blue eyes. `She is a complex, strange creature,' says Anthony Minghella, director of The English Patient. `To be honest, I don't know Kristin any better today than when I first met her two years ago.'
One certainty for her was that she would be an entertainer. From her early childhood, she wanted to perform. `My sister and I would go down to the village shop in disguise, each pretending to be someone else. It was all about escape, and also about being a bit of a con artist -- just how far can you take it all? It is a game, but one with serious consequences.'
Living in France -- away from Hollywood -- has kept her feet firmly on the ground. `You look at the very, very famous people in film, and I mean really famous ones, and see how they are simply oblivious to what is really going on, as you hear them defending themselves from every judgement.' Like who? She grins: `You don't think I am going to mention names, do you?'
Refreshingly unspoilt was Sean Penn, who plays a rakish American playboy in Kristin's new film, Up at the Villa. `He was quite magnificent. He is such an extraordinary actor rather than just a movie star. He gives the sense that he could do anything.' Up at the Villa is a nail-bitingly exciting political thriller set in Thirties Florence (it was filmed mostly at Lord Lambton's Tuscan villa, Cetinale) where the blackshirt politics of Italy threaten the indolent existence of the expatriate community. `This isn't people swarming around in Renaissance villas and pretty frocks. It's much sicker than that. What I loved about it is that it is so dark.'
Kristin has what she calls `the boy's part' she is the centre of attention, with three men in love with her simultaneously. Kristin puts in a superb performance as Mary Panton, an impoverished, beautiful English widow in this adaptation of W Somerset Maugham's story about how one night of casual sex spirals into tragedy, blackmail and redemptive love.
Kristin likes edgy roles, despite a personal fear of physical danger (she hates, for instance, being driven fast). She is also prepared to fight for those roles and fought like a tiger to get the role of Katharine Clifton in The English Patient. `I wasn't going to wake up and find Gwyneth Paltrow had taken the role.' This time, the director, Philip Haas, had her in mind when he wrote the script. But as she nudges past 40 she is aware that there are fewer interesting roles. `Lots of roles for girls, but for women -- well, it gets difficult. You have to be able to accept your place. I am not going to play young girls having their first love affair any more.' Performing is what she thrives on. `I love being in front of the camera. I remember recognising it when I was doing the test for the The English Patient: that magical chemistry. When the camera is on, I feel ping, yes, it is all happening.'
But Kristin is not precious, unlike her co-star Jeremy Davies (the corporal in Saving Private Ryan), who plays the young Austrian refugee whom she sleeps with for just one night. She explains: `He was great but so difficult to work with; he would not trust his instincts. It was like working with some delicate butterfly. You had to be careful not to take the dust off his wings. Of course, he is now Mr Hot Actor.'
She is down-to-earth and funny about sex on film. `Ralph Fiennes is a great snogger,' she once confessed to The Daily Telegraph, and was even lured into a discussion of why her nipples were erect in one sex scene, in actressy faux-ignorance mode: `Oh my God! Were they? It must have been really chilly that day.' But today she speaks of the embarrassment factor. `Nothing makes you more vulnerable than taking all your clothes off in front of strangers. It is why I always ask for tons of body makeup, to make a further skin. It is an unpeeling of all layers and inhibitions and is something one normally only does with one's lover.' Has she thought of body substitutes, I ask. It had crossed her mind, until the director told her that her bottom was far nicer than the double's. `Pathetic how one is so convinced by the least praise. Of course, I went ahead.'
Kristin understands both the adulation and the pitfalls that come with fame. `I had to take the underground the other day and I suddenly felt so ill at ease. "What is she doing here?" I could feel them thinking.' I started to twiddle my hair all over my face and in the end I just made myself look completely mad," she says sheepishly. Her children -- Hannah, aged 10, and Joseph, eight -- are always her toughest critics and refuse to let her out of the house looking less than chic, wearing a warm winter hat, for example. `But then it is difficult to find a proper woolly hat that does not look a bit stupid,' she says. `I have got to the point where people will gasp when they see me if I am not looking good. My children often try to save me. "No Mummy, you can't wear that coat. You look too awful."' As she leaves to disappear into the crowd at Waterloo, her full-length blue coat swinging elegantly behind her, several heads turn. Hannah and Joseph would be proud.
