Great Scott
Vicki Woods
She's London's talk of the town, a Hollywood heavyweight, and Giorgio Armani's new muse. Vicki Woods chats with Kristin Scott Thomas about becoming a beauty icon after 40.
Here is a romantically beautiful picture of a slender, dark-haired woman in a long, narrow wrap dress and heels. She is putting on a deliberate pose for the photographer, piling her hair up on top of her head and laughing at him. Her cheekbones would slice the Federal budget; her wide mouth curves up at the edges like a Ming sauser; and her heavy-lidded eyes recall Greta Garbo in Queen Christina. She looks very glamorous, and very grown-up, though she could be any age--29 to 38.
The woman in the picture--la donna Armani, the star of the designer's upcoming fashion campaign--is sitting opposite me in a Parisian brasserie: Kristin Scott Thomas, the Oscar-nominated star of The English Patient. Her amazing face, with her near-transparent skin barely made up, is amused, and her voice is the poshest in the bussiness. Though France has been Scott Thomas's adopted country since she ran away to Paris at nineteen, though she married a Frenchman, and though she has three French children, she still delivers the queen's English in tones of cut crystal.
She is explaining how she came to be muse to such a maestro. One day last year, as she slipped into her seat at a fashion show, she heard a man utter, "Ah! Ma che be-ee-ee-lla!" ("Oh, but you are beautiful") in the Italian way that never fails to make a woman purr.
It was Giorgio Armani. They liked each other on sight. She liked his "sort of sparky eyes"; he was taken by the way "she literally turned heads. you cannot fail to be captivated by Kristin's natural beauty when you are in her presence," says Armani. They chatted companionably for five or ten minutes in French(her adopted language, and one he prefers to English), then, over lunch at his home in Milan, he asked her to be in his upcoming ads.
"He likes my face," says Scott Thomas, arching a perfect eyebrow. "He thinks I've got a very interesting face." He clearly likes her long, narrow, English body, too. "He loves that whole thing that I'm supposed to be very good at, the thirties and the forties. He loves that period--which shows in his clothes." So, she has to wear Armani all the time now? "Yep," she says. "Not a problem, really, is it?"
American audiences first noticed Scott Thomas as the tart-tongued, scene-stealing Fiona in Four Weddings and a Funeral, but it was her performance as the tragic Katharine Clifton in The English Patient that made America really sit up and take notice. With her hair dyed Dietrich-blonde, she played an upperclass Englishwoman, glacial and controlled. What lay beneath was an almost unhinged passion.
She was 36 wgeb she played that role. She is now 43("on Saturday") and says crisply that she wouldn't be 30 again if you paid her money. "It's very difficult to be 30," she says. "You're neither young nor old. Of course, I try my hardest not to get any older-looking. I mean, I don't want to look like-wizened..." (she giggles at the thought of "wizened.")
Though she has never considered surgery("I just don't like lying."), she has toyed with the idea of Botox. "I was thinking about doing it before the summer, because in the sun I'm like this [screws up eyes, wrinkles forehead, scowls horribly]. If I could somebody who could do it where it ends after three months, that would be great." Does she notice it on other women? "Yes, There's a shiny sheen in the middle. People glow between their eyes when they've been Botoxed," She circles a little third-eye disc with her finger.
As we speak, she is fresh from her London stage triumph as Masha in Chekov's Three Sisters. The production was such a sensation, the BBC will be broadcasting it later this fall. Scott Thomas mesmerized the audience even when she wasn't speaking, her brow wrinkled with aggravation and ennui, her whole body electric with frustration. A thought suddenly strikes her. "Can you imagine if I'd been Botoxed and then played Masha? It would have been impossible. I'm against Botox," she decides. For his part, Giorgio Armani thinks she has no need to "chase eternal youth," because, he says, "she has a beauty and grace that literally transcend time."
She does watch her weight, like any other actress. "I have a very big bottom," she says. (Oh, really?) "But if I didn't have a bottom, I wouldn't have anything. I only look like a woman from the back." If she diets too hard, she get "Keith Richards syndrome. Holes in my cheeks," she says, sucking them in. "Quite frightening."
She admits to having become "a bit French" about her beauty rigimen lately. I go to this lady who does these massages, with um, special creams and what have you. But I eat way too many bad things," she says, confessing that her favorite meal in the world is a baguette with ham, butter, and gherkins washed down with French beer. "Every time I go to the beautician, they say 'Ooh, la, la, vous devez eliminer, madame! ['Rid yourself of toxins!'] I did once do this fantastic thing: a no-wheat, no-diary diet, combined with all these massage--and I looked fantastic."
So why did she stop? She howls with laughter, shoots me a very English look, and says she couldn't cope with all the massaging. "Incredibly time-consuming."
