'I'm Very Grateful for Adultery'
Marianne Gray
Classic beauty Kristin Scott Thomas was told she couldn't act -- now the cool actress is hot property in Hollywood!
The very English actress learnt her craft in France, ] married a Frenchman and is having a long-running love affair...
Kristin Scoft Thomas is a classic, cool British actress. And she's cornered the market for screen heroines with buftoned-down emotions and charming manners, who tend to commit themselves to doomed adulterous affairs in the nicest possible way.
"I'm very grateful for adultery," says Kristin. "Even my mother is a fan of my screen adultery. After all, I saucepan in a Disney parade!"
And her adultery in her new movie, Gosford Park, is no exception except that this time, as old-money snob Lady Sylvia McCordle, she commits adultery in a cuccumber facemask. It goes without sayng that she's brilliant at it.
Gosford Park, directed by Robert Altman, is a murder mystery set in an English country house over a weekend in the 1930s. The film also stars Richard E. Grant, Emily Watson, Helen Mirren and American actor Ryan Phillippe.
Kristin was born in Dorset in England, but has lived in the heart of Pads for more than 20 years. "My French life started when I was doing a drama teaching course at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, and not enjoying it because I wanted to be an actress and they said I'd never make it," she recalls. "My teachers took me into the office and said, in lowered voices, that I should stick to teaching. I was devastated. I fled to Paris on New Year's day, 1980, and became an au pair to a family involved in the opera. At their encouragement, I auditioned for drama school and, amazinglywas chosen. I fobbed them off with a few Shakespeare pieces in English, which somehow impressed them.
"People said I was brave to leave London, but I wasn't. I couldn't cope with life in London. I was hanging out with what parents might call unwholesome people and got quite fat and spotty. "I made my acting debut on stage in French. Somehow, it was a great big fluke and suddenly I was an actress," she shrugs. "I must say, I still wake up most mornings and think, 'Oh, somebody's going to find out soon!"'
For some time she was considered a French actress, then English. Then she became Hollywood's English Rose after Random Hearts, The Horse Whisperer and dying in Tom Cruise's arms in Mission: Impossible. In her latest film, Life as a House, Kristin, 41, plays Kevin Kline's ex-wife.
"But, of course, I love to work in France and get home at night. Home is still Paris." Kristin is married to French doctor François Olivennes, who started off as a fellow drama student in her class and is now a constultant in in-vitro feritlisation (IVF). They have three children: daughter Hannah, 13, and sons, Joseph, 10, and one-year-old George. "I've a long-running love affair with France, and I live what I think is a fairytale life.
"We have a beautiful flat on the Rive Gauche and a run-down old cider farmhouse in Burgundy. It's an hour-and-a-half south of Paris and when I have time, I'm there, wrestling with the garden."
If all this sounds too idyllic, Kristin has had her share of tragedy. Her father, a Royal Navy pilot, died in a flying accident when she was five. Then her stepfather, also a pilot, was killed in a flying accident six years later. So it couldn't have been easy making The English Patient, playing Katerine Clifton whose life was changed by a plane tragedy.
"It freaked me out," she said at the time. "But it was a wonderful script. It's rare to come across a part like that."
It got her on the Academy Awards shortlist for Best Actress and put her name on Hollywood's most-wanted list.
"I have nothing against Hollywood, but I could never live there. I don't trust myself, I'm so easily swayed. I'd be the first to be victim to plastic surgery. I'd be doing 24-hour yoga classes.
"Now is the time to give me another subject for films, other than adultery, like murder or bank robbery. I would really like to do a contemporary comedy or satire, but don't know whether I could. The nearest I've got to comedy was the film of Alan Ayckbourn's play, The Revengers' Comedies, but I was the straight guy. Even in Four Weddings and a Funeral, I got the tragic role. I'm terrible at comedy. I'm always the tragic bit. I seem to wear tragedy very well, darling!"
'Now is the time to give me another subject ... like murder'
Story Mananne Gray -- Gosford Park opens in Australia on March 7.
