The Secret Life of Kristin Scott Thomas
Chrissy Iley
When I told one of my male friends that I was meeting Kristin Scott Thomas, his whole being ignited with jealousy. I'd never seen him like this. I know she has the sort of beauty that makes women want to be her, but I hadn't a clue that, for men, she's such a sex siren. "Oh, yes," he purred. "It's that ice-queen thing. You just want to melt her."
Now, having met her, I know she'd be horrified. The "ice queen" misnomer is the first thing Kristin wants to clear up when we meet in Paris.
"What is it with me that, in interviews, they always go on about how I'm this ice queen, but then I turn out to be lovely? It's so boring to be pigeon-holed. There isn't an article written about me that doesn't say how posh I sound or how cold I'm supposed to be."
It's true, people love the extremes of highly-strung, posh English totty living in Paris married to French globetrotting gynaecologist François Olivennes. She, of course, hates those labels, hates to be pinned down in any way.
I wonder whether the emotionally harrowing acting roles she's always gravitated towards satisfy any urge to indulge in despair, so that in real life she's actually pretty carefree. But when she read the part of Katherine Clifton in The English Patient, a devastating, career-defining epic role of all-consuming tragedy, she said, "It was my role. She was so like me."
Since then there's been the overwrought mother in The Horse Whisperer, the unlikely foil for Harrison Ford in Random Hearts, and more recently theatre - Chekhov's Three Sisters and the überangst-ridden Berenice by Racine. "I enjoy the emotionally harrowing roles. A lot of people go to see a film because they need to express things," she explains. "And one way of expressing yourself is by weeping, so in some way I'm serving the public." She checkles at her clever self-deprecation. "To be able to give people a safety valve, I love that."
Does it provide a safety valve for her? "You know, it's better that you're not a bore, pouring your heart out to your girlfriends." Does she think people are either listeners or squealers then? "Well, I've been a squealer for a long time, but now have professional help so I don't complain any more." Her experience with therapy is quite a recent thing. I wonder if it was post-natal - she had her last baby, George, three years ago. "No, no, no. It was just part of me, and I couldn't bear it any longer, so I did something about it. It worked very well and, you know, I don't get depressed anymore," she says crisply, sounding like Mary Poppins, but looking like she's just off to boarding school and doesn't want to show she's lonely.
What sort of things used to upset her? "Well, that's the problem with depression. It isn't one thing, it's everything. It's just part of my make-up. Having said that, I do feel that in playing emotionally traumatic roles you are doing something, because it's going outwards."
Next, Kristin's doing a French film where she plays a wicked countess with daggers in her sleeve and poison in her rings. She's countered the problem of being pigeon-holed by starting up her own production company, KST, and optioned a moving love story by A.L. Kennedy, Original Bliss, in which the protagonist is an edgy housewife who falls for a porn addict. She said she was desperate to find something interesting.
"I was frightened of making so many films where I was going to break down at any given moment, just frightened of people seeing me on the screen and thinking, 'Oh, when's it going to happen?'"
She once said she was attracted to the Racine part because she wanted to explore her fear of abandonment. Her history is riddled with it.
Her father, an RAF pilot, died in a crash when she was five, and this horror was curiously mirrored six years later when her stepfather, also a pilot, also crashed to his death. Those tragedies must always be in her consciousness, I suggest. She munches on a slice of fennel and without a beat shrugs, "I got away quite lightly. Nowadays we see so much tragedy. The news, the war." (Yes, she says, she did march against the war in Iraq.) "I know compared with a lot of people I had an absolutely perfect childhood, no problems whatsoever," she says.
It's not so much that she wants to hide pain or hide herself. It's simply that she abhors victim-tude and emotional overindulgence of any kind. To her, it's wasteful. "A lot of people have to go through these things. That's just the way it is. Talk to people who had divorced parents who were screaming at each other every night. Thank God that never happened."
The eldest of five children, Kristin is full of that eldest-child mentality: coping, sorting and doing it for yourself. She went to boarding school - "Hated it, but at the same time, it was a pill you had to swallow because everyone went to boarding school," she says. "My cousins all went to boarding school, but then if we hadn't, it would have been awful." You mean you would have been a social outcast? "Yes, it was me wanting to be the same as everyone else." This is another Kristin strangeness. In her world, everyone went to boarding school. To have been excluded from it would have been alienating.
She says she would have liked to have had five children like her mother. Now 43, she has Hannah, 15, Joseph, 12, and George, three. "Having a baby at 40 is very different to having a baby at 27. If I hadn't had a career, I would have had loads more in between."
Did she get this kind of last-minute urge - "If I don't do it now, I never will?" "Yes, I was in full flow, filming, filming, filming, but I really did want another baby." It must have been a massive conflict. "Yeah. Every time I saw a pushchair, I was desperate."
But it was also the time she was being offered the most savoury roles, commanding super-high fees. "Exactly," she says. "So I was completely torn. But the most important thing was that in five years, I might not have been able to have kids so I asked my agent to stop sending me scripts. It's so frustrating because, physically, we look the same [at twentysomething as at fortysomething], what with the gym and Botox and good diets, but we are not the same. I know this especially because I have a husband who is in the fertility business. You see so many women put their career first and child-rearing after and then it's too late. My priority was not my career, but to have another baby. So I took a year off [to get pregnant] and then another year off when I had the baby."
People in Hollywood have short memories, so that must have been a risk. Does she think she would have been able to take such risks, and choose the type of work she has, had she not had the backdrop of a long and stable marriage? "I hadn't thought about that," she says. "Probably, yes, because if you feel safe in one direction, you're able to go off on a limb in others." Did she always have the need to feel safe? "On a personal level, yes, but I'm a terrible coward for dangerous sports. I don't swim in the sea and I don't like horse-riding and driving fast." She drives a Volvo.
She met François at 21. He was a medical student in her drama class. After being told at her British drama school that she'd never go anywhere, she left to start over again in France. "I didn't get married until I was 26 and I felt I needed some kind of anchor. It was a conscious decision to have a solid base from which to float. Call me old-fashioned, but I wanted to have children, and to do that you have to have a solid base."
She's very keen on keeping up this solid base to her children. She has it written into her contracts that if she has more than three days off, she is allowed to go home and be with them and if she works for three weeks, she has to have her children come for two weeks. She didn't have a live-in nanny till George was born because she was horrified at having someone in the house the whole time. "The whole idea of being traumatized and bullied by a 23-year-old was just ... ugh." Her languid, elegant body shudders.
Did she think she was taking a bit of a risk marrying a gynaecologist? I tell her I've always feared the idea that a man who went into gynaecology would have an unseemly desire either to worship women or to control women. She laughs.
"Sometimes people ask me, 'Did you meet him while you had your legs open?' It's a bit like saying did you seduce your shrink, isn't it? He's the most wonderful man in the world. He helps people have babies. When I met him, he was toying with psychiatry, but he just loved obstetrics too much." Now, he's one of the world's leading fertility experts.
Did it ever bother her, the nature of what he did? "You mean looking up ladies' fannies? It's just the mechanics for me. I never think of it, really." Does that translate to the equivalent of her having a passionate love scene? "You could say it's exactly the same. The only difference is, I've got eight people in the room."
I read that she sacked her publicist because he said she should get her eyes done. "I'm afraid that's true, but it wasn't the only reason. It's quite amazing, with Botox, that everybody looks the same." We then enter a huge diatribe about non-surgical facelifts and an acupuncture treatment she's heard of that plumps things up. She moans that her hands are looking old and when I tell her I've had a non-surgical hand lift, she's examining mine in delight and says she wants to get hers done immediately.
I look at her gorgeously angular face and the charasmatic trauma-vortex of green eyes, and tell her she doesn't need to change anything. It's as if I'm torturing her. "You're really not good at taking compliments, are you?" I add.
"It's something I've learned to be better at," she says. It dawns on me that this is another indulgence that her no-nonsense upbringing sees as excess. She has banned dinner party conversations that start with, "What was it like working with Robert Redford?" She can't stand that kind of fuss, yet there's something very steely inside of her that wants to rise to every occasion, submerge herself in every traumatic role, make people weep - a public service, of course.
She deflects the compliments gracefully, effortlessly, then calls for the make-up person to touch up her forehead where she's been excercising her lines and rubbing them to show me there's no Botox. She quickly slips into something elegant and the crispness dissolves for the camera into something truly ethereal.
