Three sisters, no funeral
Bryan Appleyard
Kristin Scott Thomas has made a triumphant West End debut. That may not be a surprise, but what is, finds Bryan Appleyard, is that she's happily ordinary, not icily aloof.
Giorgio Armani's quasi-fascist eagle leads me up the gloomy staircases of the Playhouse Theatre. We try the dress circle, but it's too dark, and we end up in one of the bars. Eating an apple, Kristin Scott Thomas sits on the bird.
"You look French to me," I say. "That's because I wear French clothes." The little pink cardigan and the floral blouse are, indeed, very French. But... "Those are Italian," I gesture at the jeans. "How do you know that? Oh, Armani, because it says it on my backside!" The nationality or, rather, internationality of her looks is important. She's played several Fionas, all upper-middle-class English girls, and she is routinely said to have a very English appearance. But she's also played French and American, and in three hours, after takeaway sushi, she'll be Russian in Chekhov's Three Sisters. I'll have to be quick, she gets stage fright. "About an hour before, I get very quiet, and if anybody talks to me, I bite off their heads." High cheekbones, perfectly slim, large mouth, soulful eyes: she is, in fact, simply beautiful in a way that any nation might want to claim for itself. Timeless is the word. And in some strange way, though she's only in her early forties, she does seem to have been around for ever. Was there ever a world without KST? "It's because I did a lot of telly. I was known before I was famous."
She was raised in Dorset by a devout Roman Catholic pilot father and a mother, Deborah, who had always wanted to be an actress. There were five children in the family; she was the oldest. Perhaps because of Deborah, she can't remember a time when she didn't want to be an actress. She recalls playing cowboys and Indians, and falling down dead. Under the influence of her father, she spread out her arms, as if crucified, and then, under the influence of her mother, she reconsidered the pose. "I thought: 'This isn't right. If I was shot, I'd be all crumpled up.' I remember that being an absolute illumination. I wanted to sort it out and find out why people do things. If I'd been clever, I'd have been a sociologist or something, but I wasn't, so I became an actress."
She used to watch a lot of television and went on school trips to Stratford. "I remember seeing Francesca Annis as Juliet and being completely blown away. It was the best thing. I wanted to be in theatre because film seemed so abstract. And I loved watching all those BBC series that drama they did in the 1970s and 1980s, you can't get much better than that."
Her father died in a plane crash when she was five and, bizarrely, her stepfather died in the same way when she was 11. By then, she was at Cheltenham Ladies' College, and she remembers being told the news by her housemistress. "My reaction was a sort of non-reaction. I just kept going, really. But the housemistress had taken some Dutch courage, she was slurring her words slightly. I just remember watching her, then I probably went away and giggled. I was in huge denial. But it must have been awful for her. As I get older, I feel more sympathy for adults who have to deal with things like that."
She wasn't academic and was over-shadowed by a brilliant younger sister. She left school at 16, went to London and worked as a shop assistant and secretary before applying to Central School of Speech and Drama. Oddly, she applied for the teaching rather than the acting course. After a year, she decided to switch to acting and was, rather brutally, rejected as being untalented. "It was actually horrible, completely demoralising. Then I had the whole thing of living in London on tuppence ha' penny, constantly poor and not being able to do things, not even being able to go home. Being broke in London is miserable, but being broke in Paris is quite nice."
And so, equipped with a French A level, she went to Paris with vague plans of getting a job or going to the Sorbonne. In fact, she worked as an au pair, then went to drama school. "I discovered it didn¨t matter that I had an English accent. There are lots of actors in Paris with funny accents."
She dreamt of being a grande dame of the French theatre, and was demoralised yet again when one of the teachers said she should be in film. "I was shattered, devastated, it was the worst thing anyone could say." But film was what it was to be. After a play in Burgundy in 1983 (until now the best review of her life, she says: "It¨s been downhill ever since"), she was cast in the Prince film Under the Cherry Moon, primarily, it seems, because they wanted an English actress in France. She got the full star treatment limos, hangers-on, people to laugh at her jokes, a girl to do her nails at 6am. So that's it, she thought, she was a film star. She went to Hollywood for four months and got nothing: the Prince film bombed. So she returned to Europe to make a small Swiss film. By then, Paris was her home, as it still is. She'd married an obstetrician, François Oliviennes, and they now have three bilingual children Hannah, Joseph and George. Her mother, who still lives in Dorset, sometimes tells her it's time she came home. But Paris, or at least France, is home.
Steadily, via television, she began to become the face everyone now knows, and then, with Four Weddings and a Funeral and The English Patient, she became a movie star. She did The Horse Whisperer with Robert Redford and Random Hearts with Harrison Ford. Briefly, they considered moving to Hollywood, where she could work and François could be a high-priced doctor. "We thought about it, but it was too complicated. My sister lives in LA, and she has a wonderful time. But I'd miss old things, old stones, old buildings. I love going to America, but I always miss old Europe."
The Redford and Ford films were both six-month shoots, and by 1999, she was exhausted and wanted one more child "It had drained me, I wanted to stop." She stopped, and in 2001, George was born. She has since made a French film, Petites coupures, with Daniel Auteuil, out this autumn. And she has more films lined up, including two, from books by Elizabeth Jane Howard and AL Kennedy, from a production company called KST she has started with an American friend in Paris. "I know KST is such a pathetic name somebody called it KFC the other day. But the idea was that I wanted to get away from constantly playing weeping-women roles or being an adulteress or a beautiful reflecting glass for a male star. In fact, the part I've chosen to play in the Elizabeth Jane Howard novel, The Sea Change, is another weeping woman, but she's not weeping in that kind of way."
Through all this, of course, she'd missed out on theatre, something she knew she had to do. "I think great actresses are the ones who are more famous for their theatre work than their film work. It's more respectable, more noble. But it's not for the faint-hearted. It's amazing the courage you need when you're absolutely petrified, and then suddenly, when it starts, you're not."
And so she seized the chance to play Racine's Bérénice in Paris. It got bad reviews but good audiences, and she loved it enough to accept the offer of Masha in Three Sisters in London. In the latter, she has deservedly got good and, indeed, great reviews. At last, she has formally become a great actress one of the greatest of her generation, according to Hollywood boss Harvey Weinstein. But she is still a face: Armani is using her in his campaigns, hence, probably, the eagle on her backside.
But, to be honest, there's something seriously wrong with this interview. She's supposed to clam up whenever the talk gets personal. "She's great to be around, but she's quite unknowable," said Anthony Minghella, director of The English Patient. But she's chatted happily about her children (she takes the Eurostar to see them on her days off, and they're all coming to London to see her in the play) and she even talks about her psychoanalysis (it worked for her, resolving old problems. "Only you can tell if you need it, and, if you do, it's fantastic").
And she's supposed to be "difficult", "foul-mouthed, bad-tempered, lewd and decidedly scruffy". All of this is true some of the time, she admits, but I can't say I saw any of it. She thinks it's all because people are desperate to make actors more interesting than they are. "The trouble with actors is that we're often rather ordinary and boring. People who interview us have to make us a little more exciting. But that's probably why you are an actor because you're ordinary and you're fed up with it. What's really exciting about being an actor is not just that you're an ordinary person being extraordinary, it's that you are able to interpret, to be able to play things as a musician would play things."
The other trouble with actors is that, so often, the job is not enough. KST certainly feels guilty enough about her privileges to want to do something else, something practical. "I want to do something that is useful long-term. People say entertainment is useful, but I'm not sure. I'd just like to be a help say, for children who are growing up in a world of crime and are never going to get out of it. Any woman who has children of her own is appalled and amazed by the sight of children in trouble.
"I don't see myself as a charitable lady in a hat opening gymnasiums, but I am aware how lucky I've been to be successful is lucky, to be married is lucky, to have three children is lucky. Oh, don't write this, it makes me sound so smug and holier than thou. But I'm always aware that there are people who don't have my choices, and I want to give something back." It is, she says, the remnants of "Catholic guilt", though she left the faith in her teens.
So that's KST, really: ordinary, guilty, beautiful and, I insist, very French-looking. We part in the lobby after an off-the-record discussion of psychoanalysis, and she walks back up the gloomy stairs. I wave goodbye to Armani's little eagle. That night, I watch her in Three Sisters, and she is, indeed, wonderful and, believe it or not, utterly Russian.
Three Sisters is at the Playhouse, WC2; Petites coupures opens in September
