The Cool English Actress Ignites Desert Love Story
Elizabeth Snead
LOS ANGELES - Kristin Scott Thomas wanted the part of elegant, aristocratic Katharine Clifton in The English Patient bad. Real bad.
Sorry. Make that very badly.
"This mysterious woman in Cairo, she fascinated me, she intrigued me," says British-born Scott Thomas, her voice so rich it melts on the ear like toffee on the tongue.
She had devoured Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel of love, loss and loyalty in 1992. When she heard about the film, the little-known but well-respected actress (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Angels & Insects, Richard III, Mission: Impossible) fought for the plum role, beat out big Hollywood stars and is now being hailed by critics as the '90s Greta Garbo, destined for an Oscar nomination.
"I was desperate to be in this film," Scott Thomas recalls. "It was so obvious to me, so painfully evident, that I had to be Katharine Clifton, that I am Katharine Clifton."
The English Patient has struck a sensitive nerve in American viewers starved for film fodder more satisfying than one-joke comedies and big-screen blow-'em-ups.
The romantic epic, adapted by screenwriter/director Anthony Minghella, is about a burned pilot (Ralph Fiennes) cared for in his final morphine-hazed days by an emotionally damaged nurse (Juliette Binoche) in an abandoned Italian monastery at the end of World War II.
Through flashbacks from his deathbed to the North African desert, the patient's identity is revealed (Hungarian desert explorer Count Laszlo de Almasy), as well as his tragic love for Clifton, the beautiful, headstrong wife of a fellow pilot.
Patient, showing on 593 screens, averaged an impressive $9,949 per screen over the five-day Thanksgiving weekend and ranked No. 7. The movie will open on more screens in more cities in the next several weeks.
Film critics are frothing with praise for the film and Scott Thomas' performance. The New Yorker's Anthony Lane likens Patient to classic films such as Casablanca, calling it "close to a masterpiece." The New York Observer's Andrew Sarris is pounding the drum for Scott Thomas' Oscar, writing that she and Fiennes "take cinema across new frontiers in the depiction of grown-up passion."
Roger Ebert of Siskel & Ebert says, "She's a very smart actress with an edge and great potential for surprise in her characters. Although Patient is outside the Hollywood mainstream, she has a great chance for a (Oscar) nomination."
Ironically, she almost didn't get the role. Many American stars were considered and backers hinted a big name would secure big bucks.
A determined Scott Thomas begged a meeting with Minghella where "she was so anxious it was palpable," he recalls, finding her "brittle, cool and insecure."
Sitting cross-legged on a couch at the Four Seasons Hotel, Scott Thomas covers her face with her hands at the mortifying memory. "It was all my stupid English sense of 'Don't show what you are. Keep it all quiet.' I wrote to him later, 'Look, I know that was all horrific, but just audition me.' "
That cinched it. "Watching Kristin and Ralph, I saw they're cut from the same cloth," Minghella says. "They're both these long-limbed, overbred, extremely high-strung people, rather like racehorses. You get the sense you can keep unwrapping them and there will be still another skin underneath."
20th Century Fox backed out of the film when Minghella insisted on casting Scott Thomas, and Miramax rescued the project. But it wasn't until shooting began that Scott Thomas allowed herself doubt. "I thought 'What have I done?' I made them have me and now I've got to be this wonderful woman who looks splendid, whom everyone thinks is so mahvelous, and I was, like . . . ooohh."
To Minghella, her insecurities only make her more compelling. "She's full of contradictions," he says. "For every joyous note, there's a dark noise underneath."
Scott Thomas, 36, is no stranger to dark noises. Born in Cornwall and raised in Dorset, England, she lost her father, a Royal Navy pilot, in a plane crash when she was 5. Her stepfather, another pilot, also died in a crash.
The eldest of five children, she attended a convent school. Ignoring Mum's plea for a proper university degree, she took off to Paris and worked as a nanny. She enrolled in drama school and enjoyed a healthy career in more than 40 French films and BBC productions. Her U.S. film debut was an inauspicious role in 1986's Under the Cherry Moon with Prince.
In past films, Scott Thomas has been cast as smart-but-uptight women such as Matty, the sexually repressed governess in Angels & Insects.
"That's another reason I wanted to play Katharine," she allows. "She never holds back. . . . She's not frivolous but she enjoys life, explores the desert but has this fantastic gown and goes off dancing and enjoying young men and champagne.
"With Katharine, I suddenly saw a chance to, you know, get some air in there," she admits with a throaty chuckle.
She got a chance to lighten up as well, bleaching her brown hair to become a cool blonde - and cropping it off when filming ended. "After the desert, the blond and the mad Italian hairdresser - 'Come here, let me curl,' pffft - my hair just went like wire wool."
She loves it short but may grow it back out. "It does give casting people a bit of a fright. Wig, they think. Wig."
Not that she's anxious for work so soon after Patient, which she found emotionally and physically demanding. "My aim at the moment is to make fewer films," Scott Thomas says. "One good one a year would be just dreamy."
Although Scott Thomas does a full-frontal nude scene in Patient, the characters' emotional nakedness is far more erotic. The film contains some of the most adult love scenes ever filmed - intense and intelligent rather than explicit.
"It's not lyrical or tender," cautions Minghella. "Both Kristin and Ralph have a horror of emotional discharge. When their characters do fall into each other's arms, it's with blows, not embraces. They both boil."
Scott Thomas found the desert location (her scenes were shot in Tunisia) enhanced the scripted sexual tension.
"The desert is so incredibly sensual," she says, her eyelids narrowing with remembered pleasure. "When you walk, you can feel each step, all your muscles are working.
"It's terrific for concentration because it's so quiet you can't hear anything apart from the wind in people's clothes. All you can hear is the shirt on the skin," she whispers, gently rubbing the sleeve of her jacket.
So was there any romance in the desert with her appealing co-star Fiennes?
Oh, dear. Rather not. Scott Thomas lives, quite happily thank you, near the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris with her French physician husband, Francois Olivennes. They have a daughter, Hannah, 8, and a son, Joseph, 5.
Still, she has witnessed on-set affairs. "It's always such a mess and your heart bleeds for them. You see them falling in love and you know it's going to end in three weeks. They'll go home and telephone, promise to cross the earth to see each other, but it won't happen. Then there's another film . . ."
She has an actress girlfriend who has a baby each time she falls for her leading man. "She deals with it incredibly well, but the idea fills me with panic. I'm so . . . old-fashioned."
Perhaps that's why she can grasp how Katharine could end her torrid affair. "The thought of betraying her husband . . . it's like betraying herself because he's such a part of her. But you are torn, aren't you? You think, 'Oh, if only they'd met the year before.' But that's just life, isn't it?"
Warned that The English Patient's success could accelerate her career and life, Scott Thomas is as circumspect as Katharine would be.
"I'll cross that bridge when I come to it," she says, slowly smiling. "There's no point in getting my knickers in a twist."
