Insensitive, Moi?
Jan Moir
She's repeatedly cast as the upper-class English ice maiden: yet she has a fiery temper, loves her chips and calls Madonna her hero. Make assumptions about Kristin Scott Thomas at your peril, say Jan Moir.
Kristin Scott Thomas lives in a fancy apartment off the Boulevard St Michel in the Latin Quarter of Paris. For lunch on this sunny, wintry day, she has booked a window table at a favourite restaurant just around the corner from her home. It is a roaring, bustling place, full of people sawing at bloody steaks, drinking red wine, gossiping and smoking Gitanes with noisy Gallic relish.
Sitting in the window and waiting for her to appear, I can't escape the feeling that she is out there somewhere, watching unseen to check that I arrive before she does. It is not too fanciful a notion, for Scott Thomas readily admits she is that kind of woman; uptight yet controlling at the same time. At one point in the afternoon, she will tell me:'I hate being disappoint. Disappointment is the thing I dread most in life. I would do anything to stop myself being disappointed because I am terrified of not getting what I hoped to get. Or of somebody not doing what they are supposed to be doing.'
She will also say:'Of course I am horrible. I am bitch about people behind their backs and I can callous, insensitive and brutal. Oh, yes. I try to be good but I am very wicked indeed.'
Gulp. Anyway, here she is now, making a low-key entrance with a navy pixie hat pulled low over her forehead and a long, padded coat over her black cashmere polo neck, Earl jeans, socks and slip-on rubber shoes which she refers to as her 'orthopaedic clogs, the most comfortable things in the world.'
Does comfort always come first for her?
'No, I am prepared to suffer to look good,' she says crisply, stuffing the hat into pocket. 'When I am going out as a film star or a famous person it is different, but generally, I am a disaster area. You are right, I should have changed before lunch but I could'nt be bothered. Sorry! But in this geographical area, within one kilometre of my house, I don't feel like a famous person and I think I am allowed to be scruffy.
This seems rather a combative reply to such an offhand inquiry, but perhaps this is just one of Kristin's forthright little ways. She does wear Chanel and Celine for grand occasions, but genarally can't be bothered with fashion and is quite happy to kick about in items purloined from film sets. She 'practically lives' in a pair of boots first seen onscreen in The English Patient, and today's coat was an on-set warmer from the costume department of her most recent film, Robert Altman's Gosford Park.
'I don't mind spending money on something beautiful, but I have a sister who is amazingly glamorous. She can throw on any old piece of junk and look fabulous. I am so jealous! No. Wipe out jealous. Put envious instead,' she commends.
Within seconds of being seated, Scott Thomas takes control in a manner which suggests that she often asserts a superiority which come naturally. She assumes, for example, that she's much older than me and I don't know what an onglet is.
'Do not worry about the provenance of the beef here. Their butcher is our butcher,' she trills, in full Edwardian matriarch style. So we order steaks, a green salad, a bottle of water, and she looks a little put out when my entorecôte arrives with pommes frites while hers is served with mashed potatoes. However she recovers well from this minor disappointment.
'Not fair,' she cries, although she eats every scrap. I'm glad, because she looks pale and hungry. At the moments, she fantasises about going to a spa where 'people will bring me juice and hot towels,' but has no windows of opportunity for such a treat.
'People think that if you are a glamorous film star like moi, that is what you do all the time, but right now it is impossible, even though I crave it,' she sighs.
Howerver, as the mother of three children -- 14-year-old Hannah, Joseph, 11, and George, who will be two in August -- Scott Thomas is used to being tired and feeling harassed. On top of this, she is appearing on stage every evening in a Racine play on tour in the Parisian suburbs. Somehow, she squashes school and nursery runs into this routine and each evening, when the curtain goes up, she thinks: 'How did I manage to get here again? And will tonight be the night the sirens wail and they come to take me away?' On a less dramatic note, she adds: 'I admire any woman who has children and a career at the same time. I don't know how we all do it, I really don't.'
She has also spent the morning scouring Paris for just the right bathtub for the barn she and her obsterician husband, Francois Oliviennes, are converting into an extension of their second home in the French countryside. 'Oh, look, there he is,' she shouts, putting down her glass and waving across the street. 'Do you see that man over there, see the top of his bald head between the cars? That's him. That's Francois. Let's wave.'
The couple married in Paris in 1988, not long after Scott Thomas moved from London and they met at acting classes. Francois correctly speculated that the classes would provide him with a good opportunity to meet and date pretty girls. Kristin was trying to rescue her career after being told by her London tutors that she had no talent. Even her husband wasn't too sure of her future on the boards.
'He forgot about his own acting ambitions because he had so little faith in my career that he thought, someone better get out there and be the breadwinner,' she says.
Did she have faith in herself?
'Yes, I always thought I would somehow succeed. I sensed that I would get work and that I would be good,' she says simply.
Her portly husband, looking the very picture of the bourgeois Parisien in his blue shirt and thick, tweedy jacket, give a jaunty wave, tucks a bundle of house plans under his arm and climbs into his dark blue estate car, off to attend a meeting with their architect. Recently made professor of gynaecology in the hospital where he works, Oliviennes seems a delightfully rumpled and dimpled man, with a gentle kindly smile.
'He is a kind man, a very kind man. The perfect doctor,' says his wife. 'He helps people to have babies, which is a fabulous job. It is also quite tough, because it does not work as much as people expect it to work. Lots of women wait too long to have children. They are told they can have it all, they get these fabulous jobs, they work like hell and then they want kids. Because you do, it is natural. But then they can't. They still look like they did when they were 25, but they are not 25 on the inside.'
But you had a baby when you were 40...
'Yes, I have just had one, but it is different when you already have two children. I had the others before I was 30 but I was longing to become a mother again. It was film after film after film, so I stopped and took a year off because I was desperate for another baby,' she says. 'If you want babies and a family life, you have to refocus. If you are spending more of your life away from home than at home, then something is wrong. And I just love being pregnant because you feel so important. Look at me! I'm having a baby, hurrah! It was more tiring this time, but I just love, love, love it.'
Feeling that she has reached her own age limit and baby quota, she rules out having any more children but expresses regret at how quickly her lastborn is growing up. 'He is nearly two now, not so tiny any more. Five minutes ago, he really was so very tiny. It goes by so fast.' she says, and for a fleeting moment she almost looks vulnerable.
It's not the side she usually presents to the world. Let us hope that all the plumber's merchants in Paris were on red alert this morning when she was hunting for a bath, for Scott Thomas -- this will come as no surprise -- cannot abide bad service. 'If I go into a shop and the person who is supposed to be helping me with my purchases is not helping, I get really angry because she is not doing her job! Oh, here I go! Can you see where I am going?'
Kristin, I think I can...
'You know when you get overbooked on a flight? Well, I always get on that plane. I am not left behind. Never Because I am not afraid to shout and scream and have people stare at me, so long as I get what I want: my seat. My children are horriied and then I have a well of shame and embarrassment, but I will fight tooth and nail to be able to do what I planned to do.' Has she spent a lifetime apologising to others? She seizes upon this question.
'Do I? I'm just wondering, do I apologise a lot? Yeee-es. I think I do. But if I get very angry with someone it is usually for a good reason,' she says, using the kind of self-justification a low-level psychopath would be proud of. 'Okay,' she concedes. 'instead of being kind and patient I sometimes go, araaaugh! In the most dreadful manner.'
After explaining her horror of being disappointed, she tells a tale of how someone she recently worked with came to her in tear one day. My dear, why on earth are you crying so? Wondered Kristin. Because I cannot work with you any longer, the maiden sobbed and howled.
Who was it? Scott Thomas puts a finger to her lips and shakes her head, a clear indication that it was another actress -- and not an anonymous member of her domestic staff -- whom she had upset so badly.
'It is awful when I hurt someone. Awful. I had said something really callous because I was completely concentrating on my own problem and was so insensitive to someone who was working with me. And she came to me and said, "I can't work with you any more". In tears! And I said, "Why?" I forget that some people aren't as tough-skinned as I am. I hadn't twigged that I had been so brutal. And when she told me, it was horrible. I just seem to ruffle people.'
To be honest, she does not seem in the least contrite -- another reason why it is so bracing to be in her company. In a world where we are sometimes suffocated by soft blandishments and politeness, here is a woman who genuinely does not give a damn whether you like her or not. Her father and her stepfather were navy pilots, and were both killed in remarkably similar accidents when their planes crashed into the Channel. Perhaps this, and her schooling at Cheltenham Ladies' College, has added to her flinty self-sufficiency. Yet, while alternating between being as brittle and fluttery as a singed bufferfly or being bossy and rather grand, she is also intelligent and outspoken, with opinions on everything from childcare to fashion to the nature of fame.
'When I go back to England,' she begins, 'I'm never sure who blonde in the corner is who everyone is talking about, then I find out that she is a weathergirl or something.' And what does she think of that? 'I am in awe of anyone who has got so much control over their life that they decide what they want to do and find a way,' she says, supportively. She adds: 'My hero is Madonna; she is really fantastic, an amazing woman. Madonna has managed to do all these diffrent things in her life, but always be inventive and remain her own boss. Fabulous. I admire her so much.'
Scott Thomas herself did not so much have a set of goals in her own career as a 'zig-zag path' that she wanted to follow. Apart from anything else, she certainly has all the corporeal requirements of the modern screen actress: teeth like polished opals, cheekbones which cast shadows all by themselves and those great pools of eyes, lapped today by shadows, which helpfully hint at fathomless emotions lurking beyond. 'I think I am a good actress,' she says. 'But I am not an astoundingly knockout actress. I didn't ever imagine in my wildest dreams that I would be doing the kind of things that I have done. I have no idea how it happened. You know, I really don't know why people hire me.'
A little disingenous, perhaps, because everyone else seems to understand the secret of her success. If directors need a beautiful actresss to convey the subtle nuances and sexual undercurrents of a glamorous, studiously languorous upper-class Englishwoman, then Kristin Scott Thomas's number is the first one they call. It is a role she has reprised to great effort in films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral, A Handful of Dust and The English Patient. In American blockbusters -- alonside Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer and Harrison Ford in Random Hearts -- she more or less plays a modern, transatlantic version of the same character. This is not to say she is without range, but playing wearily ironic period aristocrats is what she does best. In the upstair/downstairs drama of Gosford Park, she shimmers icily amongst an all-star British cast -- Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, Stephen Fry, Derek Jacobi, Emily Watson, Michael Gambon, Richard E Grant -- as Lady Sylvia, a rich and callous aristocrat who's 'bored to sobs' by her husband. Although Scott Thomas enthuses that the hideous Sylvia was fun to play, she does admit for the first time that she herself is bored to sobs -- sick of being typecast in this kind of role.
'Oh yes yes yes yes, I am. I would have loved one of the servants' roles, perhaps Emily Watson's one.' She seems to pull herself together after this admission. 'Yes, I would have liked another part, but they offered me that one. And if the glove fits, wear it. But that is the last time I will play a role like that. I often say that, but this time, it really is. I don't know what I can do with that character any more -- yet another upperclass, period woman.'
But audiences love it...
'That is the whole thing,' she sighs. 'When you go to see Tom Cruise being gorgeous and getting girls, that is what everyone wants. And they want it from me, too. But I can't do it any more.'
Finally, she throws on her coat, pulls down her bobble hat and prepares to get back out there and on with the bustle of her life. She has to pick up her small son from his nursery. She still has to find that bath. Somehow, she must squeeze in a quick nap otherwise, yes, she will surely collapse before going on stage tonight.
And at some quiet point during the rest of this busy, busy day, I imagine her clenching her white fists, stamping her tiny foot and giving in to that glittering shaft of disappointment which has been bothering her all afternoon: mashed potatoes! It's just not fair.
Gosford park opens at cinemas at February 1st (see our review on page 114). Jan Moir travelled to Paris with Eurostar. Call 08705 186186 or log on to euristar.com for reservations. Fares to Paris from 60 pounds for a weekend day return.
