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Sitting Pretty
Bob Spitz
She may be the epitome of British cool onscreen, but Kristin Scott Thomas thinks of herself as just your average Parisian housewife. Albeit one who's kissed Ralph Fiennes, Harrison Ford, and (never again!) Robert Redford.
On a gorgeous, warm spring day, Kristin Scott Thomas begins reminiscing about costars when the climate suddenly turns cool. "It's all about chemistry," she says rather abruptly, with a tact verging on restraint. "The chemistry is so important." Chemistry. Quite. It brings to my mind a grade-school experiment in which blotter paper is splashed with a strong, dark-blue dye, which, moments later, disappears after being varnished with another clear substance. Here's a version you can try safely at home: Watch Scott Thomas appear on the screen opposite an aging male heartthrob; he turns pale, then fades. This happened in 1998, with The Horse Whisperer, that fuzzy-headed tearjerker, and again in last year's, bloodless Random Hearts. Call it the Redford Effect, or the Ford Factor. In both cases, the chemistry fizzled. Scott Thomas shakes her head and sighs in exasperation when asked to explain it. "It's impossible--there are simply too many elements involved."
Chemistry, elements--casting movies is weird science. One only has to reach back five years to make an airtight case. At the time, director Anthony Minghella was casting The English Patient when he tried a little experiment of his own. The studio had insisted on a star "like Demi Moore" for the prime role of Katharine Clifton, the doomed, adulterous wife who falls in love with Ralph Fiennes's Count Almásy--"It may not be good for the movie," she says they told him, "but it'll be good for us." Still, Minghella was holding out for a relative unknown. He had tested Scott Thomas early on in the process and knew he had his leading lady. Once again, a chemical reaction took place whose outcome produced overnight stardom for the then thirty-five-year-old actress. This wasn't some wisecracking cutie keeping a runaway bus above the speed limit. On the contrary, Scott Thomas radiates intelligence, versatility, extraordinary presence; she is at once a resourceful and gifted actress in the vicinity of exclusive Streepville.
"Maybe that's why no one is hiring me right now," she says, tossing off a stagy, comical shrug. Write that off to jitters. It is weeks before the release of her latest picture, Up at the Villa, which opens this month but has been finished for nearly two years. We are sitting in a secluded corner of a smoky Parisian café in Montparnasse, several blocks from her home. A sniffy waiter has brought over two bottles of mineral water that he regards almost as dimly as he regards us. "Don't worry," she says with indifference. "They know me in here. I'm just a girl from the neighborhood." The line sounds so utterly absurd--as if Marilyn Monroe might have delivered it--and yet apparently precise. No one is looking at her, furtively or otherwise. Perhaps it's her petit bourgeois getup. Scott Thomas is dressed very simply, in a boxy, pale-green sweater over navy-blue pants and a pair of scuffed, orange velvet sneakers that take the gloss off her image. Wearing very little makeup, she looks slight and a bit beaky, in that English '60s bird way. Not even her sky-high cheekbones or swan neck draw a curious eye.
All of this conspires to heighten her mood. Jitters again. Scott Thomas is feeling a bit insecure at the moment. "I haven't worked in over a year," she says, using her hazel-green eyes to punctuate alarm. This confession sounds hollow, if a bit overwrought. "No, it's true," she insists. "After Random Hearts, I decided I wasn't going to work for a while. I felt like I'd done too much." This, too, sounds disingenuous coming from an actress who has always stressed how much she loves being on a set, in front of a camera--acting. "Yes, and then I discovered that I actually quite liked being at home. I moved, traveled, enjoyed taking my kids to school, going to the supermarket, cooking, not living out of a suitcase and having permanent jet lag--being a normal person."
To that extent, Scott Thomas and her husband, noted French fertility specialist Dr. François Olivennes, and their children, Hannah, twelve, and Joseph, nine, hopscotch between their Paris flat and a cottage near Cognac, in the south of France. She has lived here since 1980--fleeing her native England after an acting teacher at London's Central School of Speech and Drama advised her to forget the profession, to reinvent herself abroad, which meant learning a new language and essentially creating a new life. "I just knew I had to wipe the slate clean and start again," she says.
Maybe so, but it wasn't as easy as it sounded. Scott Thomas credits Olivennes for rescuing her from the paralyzing insecurity that threatened to scuttle her career. They met, she explains, when she was just twenty-one and bumping around Paris, not so much auditioning as surviving. "I was pretty miserable," she recalls, "terrified of everybody and everything. I couldn't dial a number for the casting director, I was so scared. But François was there for me. And even now, when I am lacking in ambition, he kicks me in the ass and pushes me along."
Physically, Olivennes is the antithesis of her costars. "I know," she concedes with a small, inward smile. "But he's just extraordinary. He's very fulfilled by his work. I haven't met anyone who comes near him, really."
In France, they lead what she calls "a very quiet, very Parisian life." She can play the doctor's wife when necessary but dreads official functions where François's colleagues, however unintentionally, ogle the movie star on his arm. Conversely, she dreads his accompanying her to one of her premieres, especially when a script plunks her snugly in the arms of a gorgeous costar. "If I'm doing a steamy scene, I keep telling myself, he's a gynecologist--he looks at women's naked bottoms all day. I may happen to be groping someone in a car, but he's going, 'Les in stirrups, madam.'"
In her most high-profile films, Scott Thomas has played two entirely different kinds of women who are thinly disguised variations of herself, and she ping-pongs between each with alarming practicality. Her roles in movies such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and The English Patient reveal a selfless, wounded soul whose pride and solicitousness mask the depth of her needs. Each is serviced by a nucleus of denial, and when that starts to split apart, as it invariable does, a flush ghosts up around her like summer steam.
"She is completely skinless on film," says Minghella, who ordinarily show plenty of skin onscreen. "Watching her, you feel there is absolutely no armor whatsoever, that she's raw in every moment. Even when the character has gloss, you're allowed to see the tension between the presentation and the reality at all times."
Her flip side is less heart-stirring, less confessional, though every bit as fascinating to watch. In The Horse Whisperer and Random Hearts, Scott Thomas flaunts a hard outer shell that promises to crack as events collide against it. These women--one a no-nonsense editor, the other a politician--would teeter on cliché, were it not for the dignity and the density with which she imbues them. It would be so easy to play them as ball-busters. But Scott Thomas does something more interesting. Wound tighter than a guitar string, she makes them human--hung up, lonely, even a little libidinous. This is a concession to her image because, as Scott Thomas herself believes, audiences perceive her as being cold and proper, so veddy English. "The immediate impression I give can be very frightening," she says. "People always tell me how scary I appear."
Maybe it's simply the posh accent. "It helps me get away with a lot on American sets," she admits. Scott Thomas isn't apologizing. She's explaining how, after a long and very quiet apprenticeship in small films, the perks that come with stardom are not unappreciated. Stardom agrees with her, she says. It brings power and freedom, though not, as one might suspect, in a purely financial sense. Her decision to make a small art film like Up at the Villa when her career was at its hottest was a way of asserting her independence. She says she chose the project to keep her distance from the studio blockbusters that threatened to overwhelm her after The English Patient and The Horse Whisperer.
"It's important that I keep mixing the small films with the big ones," she says. Small, to Scott Thomas, is a euphemism for serious--meaty, well-written stories with little chance of commercial success. Throughout her career, they have fed her desire to act, and range from the ridiculous (1986's Under the Cherry Moon, in which she made her screen debut opposite Prince; Bitter Moon in 1992, with Hugh Grant and directed by Roman Polanski) to the sublime (A Handful of Dust in 1988; Angels and Insects in 1995). The space in between is filled with a dozen serious French films that rarely even crossed the ocean but have given her an invaluable reservoir of experience. "Small movies mean more responsibility for me as an actress, especially in Up at the Villa, where I'm in every scene in the movie."
Based on a little-known Somerset Maugham novella about Tuscany's moneyed Anglo-American expat community on the eve of World War II, the film is a tour de force for Scott Thomas, whose newly widowed character is a magnet for a coterie of single and married men-in-heat, who are drawn to her like flies. "It's such a deliciously dark, perverse theme," she explains, "and it gave me the opportunity to work with all different kinds of actors." She describes each costar with great alacrity, adding parenthetically, "and then, of course, there is Sean."
Sean is the fearsome Mr. Penn, who Scott Thomas says is "completely convincing" in the role of a dashing skirt-chaser who turns her prim life upside-down following an offer of marriage. "He's got this huge reputation that had us all slightly nervous. I remember when he arrived on the set, it was like: The eagle has landed!" She reports, with some relief, that Penn not only behaved like a tweetybird but ranks "up there" with Ralph Fiennes as a world-class kisser. This coming after two pitiful encounters, first with starchy Harrison Ford, who kissed her as one might a maiden aunt, and Robert Redford, perhaps "the worst of all, with a mouth..." She curls her thumb and forefinger into a tiny snail's foot and scrunches up her face.
Be that as it may, kissing isn't a factor when it comes to evaluating new projects. Kristin says she is not at all interested in being a sex symbol or romantic stereotype, not at her age--"forty," she huffs, fretting a milestone looming at the end of this month. "On the other hand, I don't intend to play some teenager's mother or a frumpy housewife. Not yet! I feel like I deserve a couple more seductions under my belt."
What concerns her right now are plane crashes. After The English Patient (in it, she dies following a crash) and Random Hearts (in which her husband is killed in one), the subject has run its course, as far as she's concerned. One can easily appreciate her discomfort. It is almost too coincidental--as well as a bit grotesque--that her father, a Royal Navy pilot, was killed in a jet when she was five; years later, incredibly, her stepfather, also a naval pilot, died in a plane crash. When asked if this is something she's trying to work through on film, Scott Thomas just groans. "It was never a conscious thing," she says.
Despite the unlikelihood of that, she has no memory of her father and says that, oddly, her mother told her nothing about him. She becomes rattled, however, when asked to describe how she imagines him. She flutters her hands to buy a moment of composure. Finally, eyes shining, she stammers: "Devastatingly handsome, twenty five years old. He drives fast, drinks well." An awkward smile acknowledges the absurdity--and the regret.
Scott Thomas seems somewhat more comfortable discussing her younger sister, Serena, a former model whose own modest acting career has blossomed in a series of luxuriously revealing roles. "My sister is a very saucy number," she says, with a note that suggests some professional embarrassment. One supposes it might be the same way that Bill Clinton mentions his brother, Roger. "She has a very nice body of work. I mean, her bottom is revealed in the first five minutes of the last James Bond movie!"
Regrettable, Kristin notes, she has "lost contact" with Serena, who now lives in Los Angeles with her husband, a lawyer, and drives both "a BMW and one of those cute little convertible Mercedes that cost something like eight million pounds." This observation, heavy with irony, is less competitive than a knock on L.A., which she considers "too terrifying" a place to live. Then again, maybe it's simple car envy. Later, when Scott Thomas slips into her "prized possession," a black VW Golf, the reference to Serena's pricey Mercedes recurs.
"I refuse to pay that for a car!" She insists. The outburst is purely reflexive, but it triggers more irresistible questions about the Scott Thomas family dynamic. Is there a deeper secret to the sisters' success? Do they marry doctors and lawyers in exchange for the freedom to act? A wolfish smile spreads across her face. Shaking her head no, she cackles, "Our secret is Jews! We marry Jews!"
It seems unlikely that Scott Thomas would chalk it all up to that, not at this point, after so much hard work and emotional investment in a career that seems--finally--rooted in rock-solid ground. She's brought too much of herself to the table. It's taken her too long a time, fighting through elaborate anxieties, to be able to finally say, "I'm more or less bankable; I've got all these things going for me." The year off helped to put things in perspective. The work, as always, was important, rewarding, but there was so much more: the kids, her husband, their life in France, "being a normal person," as she puts it. It's a matter of keeping everything in harmony, arranging priorities. Maintaining balance. Chemistry.
