Kristin Scott Thomas lives in a large apartment, on a big boulevard, in the tres chic Fifth arrondisement of Paris. When we meet she has just come home from a Stella McCartney fashion parade, and yet she is far from the grande dame one expects from her screen roles. Her hair is tousled and she is simple dressed in black slacks, white jersey top and black ribbed cardigan. Settling into a rather homely white fabric lounge, she pulls a small cushion to her chest, hugging it as she might one of her three children.

 

Her husband, Francois Oliviennes, is one of the leading obstetricians in France. He is at work now. Her children are at school. She is relaxing into the respite when her maid reminds her of a upcoming Jewish holiday that causes her to jump up.

 

"He's not really practising," she explains when the kerfuffle is sorted, "but I like to keep abreast of all the high days and holidays." Her children - Hannah, 14, Joseph, 11, and toddler George - do not attend the synagogue. "It's more traditional than religious, " she explains.

 

Although her apartment is more luxurious than most, it nonetheless has a distinct ambience that says "family home". It is a place the quentessense of Englishness, who has lived in France since the age of 18, is reluctant to leave. "This is our stomping ground," she says. "We just love it here. We couldn't live anywhere else, really. You can walk to Odeon where they have all the cinemas. You can walk to Saint-Germain-des-Pres where there are nice shops. It's not very far to a good cafe. The Luxembourg Gardens are nearby. And there's an organic farmers' market down the street. Everything's here."

 

Given her profile as an English rose, one would expect Scott Thomas to work often in her native land, yet it took American Robert Altman to give her a go across the channel. Scott Thomas jumped at the director's offer to play Lady Sylvia in Gosford Park, and she has emerged as one of the film's most amusing characters. Ironically, her casting amidst an ensemble of Britain's finest helped to attract the necessary finances. "It sort of puts you in an odd position, because you know you're one of the ones raising the money to make the film," she says, "yet you're sitting there in make-up in awe of the people who are left and right of you."

 

What enabled Scott Thomas to become a Hollywood star appearing alongside the likes of Robert Redford and Harrison Ford was her Oscar nomination for The English Patient. "Suddenly, doors were flying open, everybody wants you," the Dorset-born actress says."It's extraordinary. Overnight it puts you in a different category. It's difficult because you get to this place where you're being offered these plum roles in Hollywood and you think, 'Ok, so what do I do after this? Another plum role in Hollywood?'"

 

"No, I wanted to get back to doing the things I was doing before. To be frank, the Robert Altman film was heaven. Doing Life as a House (her latest movie) was great too, because I was working with such wonderful people." She pauses. "God, that sounds like a line from a play."

 

Taking the piss out of herself hardly gels with the super sophisticated image. After all, this is the same Scott Thomas who has been known to grant interviews on a chaise longue - hell, she might as well start nibbling grapes and languidly fan herself. In England, she is perceived as taking herself seriously; the "ice queen" label is stuck so fast even she has given up trying to curb that she feels unable to curb the negative tide of press opinion.

 

"I think they do it to everybody who is successful, especially if you're successful outside of England - they don't like that. It's a pity because I really love going to England to work, and I'd love to work more there. But you think, 'Ooh, is it worth it? I could just carry on making films here' - and I've been offered another play."

 

Last February she completed an eight-month stint in France as the lead in Racine's Berenice. Recently she recently appeared alongside Daniel Auteuil in the French film, Petites Coupures, where she plays a slightly dishevelled woman who semi-seduces Auteuil into killing her husband.

 

"I usually get sent scripts with intelligent women having midlife crises because their children are growing up and leaving home, which is kind of dull," she says. "But not here. Here I'm being offered different things, which is great."

 

Another project she is angling for is an American film being shot in Paris. There is also the production company she is currently setting up with Paris-based American producer Eleanor Coleman so they can develop their own movies and maintain some control over what happens to them.

 

Scott Thomas is annoyed, for instance, at how Life as a House was dumped into French cinemas and is now struggling for release in the UK beyond London. (Thankfully for local fans, representatives from Village Roadshow are planning a wide release in Australia.) It hardly spoils Life as a House to reveal that Kevin Kline plays a man with cancer, because as Scott Thomas insists, the film is about much more than death. "I'd heard from somebody who'd been invited to one of the screenings that it was being released, and nobody had told me. There was no premiere, and none of my family had seen the film: they were complaining because they had to wait for me to get the free tickets."

 

"My friends were told it was a dark film about death, so they didn't go. It's not a dark film about death," she asserts. "It' a wonderful film about life, which involves dying - we all do it. It's such a gloriously sunny film. It seems extraordinary that they could have marketed it like that. The poster was terrible. It breaks my heart, because we put all this work into it and some guy behind a desk says, 'arghhhhh!'"

 

In Life as a House Scott Thomas plays Robin, and upmarked housewife who has a punk, pierced, drug-taking son (Hayden Christensen) from her first marriage to George (Kline). In what time he has left, George decides to rebuild his seaside southern California house, partly as an excuse to bond with his son, who comes to live with him for the summer. If nothing else, the film is a must-see for the poignant scenes between Scott Thomas and Kline, an actor who shares her professionalism and ability to act with tiny nuances.

 

"Kevin Kline is a dream. He's funny, he's smart, he takes it all with a pinch of salt," Scott Thomas says. "He's very stable: he's not going to do a wobbly on you; he's not going to have a tantrum in his trailer. Lovely man."

 

When talk turns to raising her family, Scott Thomas sighs in relief that they aren't yet old enough for trouble. "I don't know what I'm doing," she confesses. "I don't think any parent knows what they're doing. You're just doing it. Certainly, as we were making this film I was going 'Oh. My. God!!'" The words are spoken loudly and she draws each one out. "There was a slight exorcism, so a bit of practise here. That's why I like doing films, because it gives you a little bit of a taste without too much of it."

 

Scott Thomas did not grow up in a typical nuclear family, and learned to take initiative early. Her father, a pilot in the Royal Navy, died in an air accident when she was six years old. Her stepfather died the same way when she was 12. She left her home in Dorset as a youth, attended the posh Cheltenham Ladies College then enrolled in teacher studies at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London before switching to drama studies. Abandoning that, too, she went to France at 18 and worked as an au pair, later enrolling in acting studies at l'Ecole Nationale des Arts et Techniques de Theatre.

 

Her first movie, Under the Cherry Moon (1986), was a much-ridiculed vanity vehicle for rock star Prince. "I had a wonderful time doing that," she recals with a smile. "It was a bit of a silly role and I knew it was fluff, but I also knew it was my first chance. I thought, 'This is a really great way of learning to do my job.' I was working with some fantastic people - for the crew he had the creme de la creme."

 

Two years later she won the London Evening Standard's best newomer award for her portrayal of a cool, upper-class wife in A Handful of Dust, opposite James Wilby (who also appears in Gosford Park). She was outstanding as Hugh Grant's vengeful wife in the 1992 flick Bitter Moon, directed by the Paris-based Roman Polanski, but her international break came when she upstaged Andie McDowell as Grant's sardonic friend Fiona in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Soon after she spat in Ian McKellen's face as Lady Anne in Richard III. Scott Thomas admits to enjoying such character parts.

 

"I did a whole string of them: these really small things that take three to five weeks where you just dive in and you come out at the end and it's over," she says. "You learn this completely different thing, but you don't have to carry the whole film on your shoulders. I was saying no to big parts because I didn't find any of them interesting."

 

Lead roles came in An Unforgettable Summer, a Romanian/French film that had a long run in Paris but which, she moans, "the rest of the world didn't really get to see", and as Matty in Angels and Insects.

 

Discernment and determination united in landing Scott Thomas's biggest cinematic coup: the lead role in The English Patient. Initially, she had written to director Anthony Minghella explaining her burning desire to play the lead. "I did the role that everyone said was ..." she hesitates and takes a breath, "just far too dark and dingy. When I read  the book in the first place, I knew it would be a fabulous film; and I don't know what it was, bit it was obvious to me that I had to play Katherine." It was obvious to Minghella, too, who insisted on casting her over Hollywood-preferred Demi Moore. "It was wonderful doing something I felt so strongly about," she adds.

 

During filming, Scott Thomas adopted a wild, windswept look as she cocooned herself in Katharine's surroundings. "I was really, really seriously into it," she explains. "But now I feel a bit ashamed, because it was a cheat's desert, really. You've got people with backup trucks and generators all over the place, and portaloos. It's not real; it's just pretend. But I loved it, I really did - and I was the only one who did. Everyone complained like mad." What about her co-star, Ralph Fiennes? "I don't think he liked it much."

 

Scott Thomas is not about to give up Parisian life for movie stardom, though the price is a sometime gypsy existence, complete with her children on set. "Yes, LA is too far away," she reflects. "If I wanted to be Michelle Pfeiffer I'd do it, but I don't. She's there and she's fantastic and she's doing her own stuff and chacun son truc ["each to their own"], you know. I'm kind of flipping backwards and forwards. Sure, I'd be upset if offers were drying up from America, but they aren't."

 

Scott Thomas is into longevity, and with a sophisticated image that renders her fairly ageless in roles, at 42 she can well afford to be optimistic. "I may be tempting the devil here, but I have a feeling that I'm going to go on for quite a while. But not as a seductress: not as a sex symbol or anything like that. I suppose the nearest I got to that was The English Patient where everybody was swooning. I have an incredible confidence about what lies in store. I'm putting my head on the block here, but I might as well tell you."

 

What about something like the lead in De Palma's Femme Fatale, which was recently filmed in Paris? "He didn't want me," she quips. "She had to be 19, sex on legs or something. I don't quite fit the description. I'll get the roles that are given to my age group, and when I'm 50, I'll be playing women of 50, and when I'm 60, I'll be playing women of 60. Obviously the roles will be getting fewer and fewer, because there are very few roles for women of 60, whereas roles for men of 60 are still there," she observes with a click of her fingers. "Except they don't call them 60, they call them 50."

 

So what of her famous leading men: Redford in The Horse Whisperer and Ford in Random Hearts? Aren't they a little long in the tooth? "Well, that's the difference between a real man and a film star," she says. "Film stars, especially the main ones, have this sort of magic aura about them. They just remain who they are. Robert Redford at 35 and Robert Redford at 60 is still Robert Redford."

 

Such matters are hardly the sort that preoccupy Scott Thomas. She has chosen a life for herself in France, though she makes sure her children speak both French and English. "I've always tried to have people who are working for me who are English-speaking, so the children stay bilingual, which makes it more complicated," she says. "Francois speaks to them in French and I speak to them in English."

 

As a native Frenchman, Oilviennes' English has "much improved since he met me," she says with mock arrogance, every inch the Lady of the Manor. One can only imagine the potential for ironic hauteur when she is in the couple's 19th-century country house outside Paris.

 

"We spend most weekends there, but it's all upside down at the moment because our builders are working on it." There are stables, and horses, the works, she says. It sounds like a place where Scott Thomas lets her hair down. She may not have a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, but who's to say she isn't exactly where she wants to be.