Kristin's soft centre
Genevieve Fox
Fuelled by such roles as Katherine in The English Patient, Kristin Scott Thomas has gained a reputation as an ice queen. But, as Genevieve Fox discovers, the actress, who is also the face of Armani, is happy to show her warmer side.
Kristin Scott Thomas has an image problem. 'Frosty pants', 'foul-mouthed,' haughty, these are just some of the 43-year old actress's soubriquets. Since she hasn't deigned to give me a proper interview slot, demanding that I talk to her while she is having her hair and make-up done for our photo shoot, I think I see why. Filled with dread, I set off for our meeting armed with a pickaxe with which to chisel away at this ice queen's cold demeanour.
I needn't have bothered. Kristin Scott Thomas is funny, self-deprecating and loquacious. She deflects compliments with gracious wit. Unaffected and smart, she responds to personal issues with courteous brevity. She tells you just enough to be playing the game, the celeb game, but not enough to give you a window into her soul and her psyche. Fair enough.
Although she is too thin, and her face is drawn with fatigue, she still pulls off a patrician beauty. Her grey-green eyes dart within sockets that are as chiselled as her famous cheekbones. The star of Four Weddings and a Funeral, The English Patient and, more recently, The Horse Whisperer with Robert Redford and Random Hearts with Harrison Ford, is also the face of Armani. The Italian designer who turned the adoration of beautiful women into a way of life couldn't resist signing her up; she is 'magnetic,' he says. 'I love her British calm and candour.'
We meet the day before she was setting off for Cannes, where she would be promoting her new film, Petites Coupures, with Daniel Auteuil, and wearing the same Armani ballgown that she's chosen for our shoot. The dress is not, I can reveal, a sample size. 'We have a problem getting her into those', says one of the girls from Armani. 'Ouch! I perch on a stool in the loo of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, asking her questions while she stares into the bathroom mirror as the slap is piled on.'
She's an elegant bird. Armani suits her. But when I remind her that someone recently described her as 'the perfect role model for growing old gracefully', her feathers are ruffled. I was incredibly upset about that,' she says indignantly. '"Grow old gracefully." I thought, "F*** off!" You have to be about 60 to grow old gracefully. I don't feel in the slightest bit old, really. Does anyone when they get to 40?'
Other celebrities certainly do, which is why they sign up for everything from Botox to full-blown facelifts. Not Kristin. A publicist once suggested she get rid of the bags under her eyes. Kristin fired her. I detect three lines on her neck and almost faint from the shock of coming face to face with a mortal movie star. Obviously I don't point them out. When she grabs the eyelash curlers and clamps them on to her lashes, I can see the pink of her inner eyelids, which makes me feel queasier still. You can't imagine Catherine Zeta Jones letting you get this up close and personal.
She insists she is 'scruffy' and apologises for turning up today in ten-year-old cream trousers and a pair of 'clogs'. But, she adds in her cut-glass accent that brings to mind the upper-class froideur of many of her film roles, she adores glamour. 'I love dressing up!' she says, before telling her friend Louise, the make-up artist, that she's got the eyeliner squiffy. 'It's basically just showing off, isn't it? But I also love going into shops and seeing the shock on peoples faces when I haven't got any make-up on. My husband tells me I scrub up well!' Ooh, the cheek of it.
She fell in love with François Olivennes, now a globetrotting gynaecologist, at drama school in Paris when she was a 21-year-old with fame on her mind and he was a trainee doctor in search of a pretty girl. She had fled England as an unhappy and, she has said, overweight teenager three years earlier. The couple have grown together, had a family together, and become successful together. This, she says, is what enables her to lead a double life: supportive wife and working mother vs seriously successful movie star. I met my husband a very long time ago. Now he's running his own unit, he's doing fantastically well and he travels the world. His career is as important to me as it is to him.'
Stepping in and out of her two lives is not easy. When she was playing Masha in Three Sisters, she saw her three children, Hannah, 15, Joseph, 12, and George, two, every other weekend, either here or in Paris. 'The difficulty,' she says, 'is going backwards and forwards between real life, where you are supposed to behave like a normal human being, and the actor's life, where you have to be an ultra human being.'
She's not whingeing. 'I've probably got an easier lot than most working mothers in that I have chunks of time off. Another great advantage is that, very often, I work away from home so it means you can concentrate completely on your work.' Plus, she says, she and her husband are 'both quite strict. He's good at not letting work come home and I'm quite good at that as well. And anyway, when you've got three children you can't let work get in the way, it's just too stressful.'
Three Sisters, in which she has just been replaced by Susannah Harker, stretched that work-life balance to its limits, however. It was only her second stage role (her first was doing Bérénice, a tragedy by Racine, in France in 2001) and her debut on the West End stage.
'When I accepted the part, I thought, "This will be fine." Chekhov is so modern, I thought it would he really easy. Well, that was a big mistake, a huge mistake. I hadn't realised how much it was going to demand of me. Chekhov is incredibly precise and intimate. It's really petrifying.'
She got rave reviews. Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein has since described her as the greatest actress of her generation. When I tell her that a theatre-critic friend rated it as one of the most impressive West End debuts ever, she replies with typical self-deprecation: 'I was just well cast.' She does admit she was playing to full houses but so, she adds, does Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
The triumph of Three Sisters has expunged the theatrical demons that have haunted her ever since she was rejected by Central School of Speech and Drama aged 18. 'I'm not frightened of it now, though I was for years and years. The most difficult part is not being in front of lots of people, but acting on stage. It's physically and emotionally exhausting and much, much, much more difficult than acting on film. Doing a play means taking a deep breath and jumping in.'
She misses the camera's caressing eye, too. 'I am longing to get back to film. I want to be in front of the camera now, hitting marks.' And boy does she love the camera, even a stills camera, as I discover during the photo shoot later on. Before we get to that stage, however, she has to have her hair done. I follow her like a lapdog from bathroom to bedroom, where she tells the hairstylist she wants curls, but not too many, and no 'stuff' in it.
In between blow-drying, she tells me why she will never live in London. You can't buy dirty lettuces here for a start, it takes too long to get anywhere and Londoners live off Thai food. Hmmm. This is a strange list. It occurs to inc that maybe KST has had a bad morning.
True enough, it turns out the concierge at The Metropolitan, where she's been staying in an apartment for the past eight weeks, refused to lend her a brolly, despite the downpour. Did she complain? 'Oh no!' she replies, with deliberate melodrama. 'I didn't want to cause a scandal!'
So now she's taking it out on our vegetables. 'You can't buy a lettuce that has mud on the bottom here,' she says. 'I mean, you can, but you have to hunt around for a market stall.' When I say I can't see what's wrong with having all the hard graft done for me, she's off again. 'Half the pleasure of doing something as basic as preparing food that you are going to ingest,' and she clips the last word for emphasis, 'is...' She pauses to regain her composure. 'It's a way of living that you don't have here. For example, in the area that I live, which is a perfectly' ordinary little area [near the Jardins du Luxembourg], I can nip downstairs and cross the street and there is a man who sells five different kinds of lettuce.'
She hasn't finished yet. 'It's not convenient. It's inconvenient and I kind of like it. Because you have to spend time doing something, not rush rush rush rush rush rush rush.'
Her life sounds pretty full-on to me, but I don't dare say so. I ask her if she's political instead. 'No,' is the curt reply. So when France grinds to a halt in a national strike, as it did earlier this month, it doesn't provoke her? 'It makes me very angry,' she interjects before I've barely finished my sentence. She spends the next five minutes outlining the iniquities of the French so-called social conscience; how people will march to protest against dodgy pension schemes but barely turn out to protest against the ghettoisation of immigrants in the Paris suburbs or the sexual maltreatment of Muslim girls.
'I'm not going to do any France bashing, because I live there and I love it and I pay my taxes and I am thrilled to pay my taxes because I get great services for my taxes. But I just think, some times, that they've just had too much for too long and it's all taken for granted. There are so much worse things going on.' But she does enjoy a good march as much as the next Frenchwoman. 'I went on one the other day - I love marching, I love joining in, that's very French.'
There is little in this country that she misses, not least the class system, despite, or perhaps because of, her staunchly middle-class upbringing. The eldest of five children, her father was a naval pilot, she lived in Dorset, she boarded at a tiny convent in Sherborne ('I was eight - far too young. That is bad') before being packed off to Cheltenham Ladies' College. 'They were not rich. There were a lot of hand-me-downs,' she says.
Her father was killed in a plane crash when she was five, as was her stepfather, also a naval pilot, six years later. She is reluctant to say how it has affected her, though he once said she was attracted to the Racine play because it explored a fear of abandonment, and she has recently discovered psychoanalysis. 'When something like that happens, you don't have to be Einstein to work out that it has an enormous influence on the rest of your life. Its part of my make-up.' Motherhood was the catalyst for an emotional reappraisal. 'Having children, that's when it hits you. I'd been ignoring it, pretending it didn't matter until then. Then I realised how important it is to have a father.'
On that note, she stands up and prepares to step into her gown. I wait outside. She emerges in a gruesome blue towelling dressing gown. It suits you, I tell her, and she laughs, pulling it off her shoulders to reveal the strapless gown beneath, and declares: I am a Grecian goddess!'
We take the tradesmen's elevator down to the ballroom. As soon as her stratospheric heels hit the dancefloor, she segues effortlessly into glamorous movie-star mode. She pouts, peers, flicks strands of hair across her face. Sinuous and sexy, she teases her body in and out of poses. 'I am a natural!' she shouts, in mock self-aggrandisement, then she mumbles something about feeling a complete nerd under her breath. This is not a woman who takes herself too seriously.
