Kristin Scott Thomas has always specialised in repressed English women trapped in unhappy marriages. Now she¨s thrown her own life into turmoil, Lydia Slater asks: is the ice queen thawing?
Lydia Slater
Kristin Scott Thomas slinks on stage at the Playhouse Theatre in a barely-there glittery number, looking the epitome of decadent sex appeal. She is playing a nightclub singer in a revival of the Luigi Pirandello play As You Desire Me, and as she opens her scarlet-lipsticked mouth to sing, the first few bars are drowned by a roar of applause.
A few days later, as I wait for her to arrive at a suite in Claridge's, I'm feeling distinctly nervous. Her agent has rung me several times to warn me that her client can be 'tricky' and is fearsomely intelligent. Kristin has a record of unashamed rudeness in interviews, staring blankly in response to questions she finds dull, or walking out if her privacy is intruded upon.
Thankfully, my worst fears are not realised. Although she attempts, briefly, to live up to this grumpy reputation, launching into a querulous attack on the 'really irritating' label on the mineral water she is drinking, which describes the contents as 'delightfully still', her heart isn't in it. In fact, she's rather jolly and self-deprecating, even though one look at her face shows you she'd much rather be in bed. Her face is an interesting shade of pale yellow; she has dark rings around her eyes and her voice has the huskiness that speaks not of gin-soaked nights but of days in bed with Lemsip.
'Oh God, I'm feeling so ill,' she moans, putting on a pair of unflattering black-framed specs to rummage for antibiotics in her cluttered handbag.
One night the previous week, she lost her voice completely and was unable to go on stage. 'It was horrible; you feel as if you're letting everybody down. Ooh, look at that,' she goes on, gazing longingly at the king-size bed. 'Can I get in it?'
Amazingly, despite the flu, and the resolutely unsexy attire (jeans, jumper, clogs and green woolly socks), Kristin's porcelain beauty remains almost undimmed.
Her features have an aquiline perfection that relies on bone structure rather than youthful bloom, which is why at 45, an age when most actresses find their career on the skids, hers appears to be going from strength to strength.
'I'm getting fewer roles,' she says, 'but they're more interesting. When you're 35, roles are two a penny but they're all the same – lots of lustful looks across a crowded room.'
While winning rave reviews in the Pirandello play for her performance as Elma, an amnesiac torch singer who discovers that she may in fact be an Italian aristocrat, she is simultaneously hitting cinema screens in a very different role, as the irritable, midlife-crisis-hit wife of Rowan Atkinson's plodding country vicar in the black comedy Keeping Mum.
The plot hinges around Kristin's torrid affair with a smarmy, perma-tanned golf pro, gruesomely played by a leering Patrick Swayze. 'Poor man,' she says of Swayze, 'I don't think it was much fun for him because I got this dreadful cold, hacking away as I was about to kiss him eugh!' The affair threatens her marriage until her serial-killer mother (played by Maggie Smith) decides to eliminate any potential obstacle to her daughter's domestic happiness.
Reality, alas, has not supplied Kristin with any such maternal murderess to keep her on the straight and narrow. Part of the reason she is willing to leave her family home on Paris's Left Bank during the entire Christmas period is that her own marriage is not all it should be.
Since 1988, Kristin has been married to François Olivennes, one of France's leading obstetricians. Hers was famously one of showbiz's strongest liaisons. Frequently, in interviews, she sang the praises of her cuddly, bespectacled spouse; screen clinches with Hollywood's sexiest leading men – including Tom Cruise, Robert Redford, Harrison Ford and Ralph Fiennes – apparently leaving her cold. So it was all the more surprising when, this October, she was photographed out and about in London with the lantern-jawed Tobias Menzies, a relatively unknown actor 14 years her junior who is currently appearing as Marcus Junius Brutus in the BBC's torrid toga saga Rome.
The couple met when they starred in Chekhov's Three Sisters two years ago. 'I had such a fun time doing Three Sisters; it was great,' she says with a reminiscent smile. They are now reportedly an item. None of the parties involved has so far publicly commented, although 'friends' of the doctor say he is devastated. Certainly, Kristin has no intention of being the first to break the silence. 'It's really boring and scummy,' she says of the press interest. 'And that's all I have to say on the subject. I mustn't talk about it, because it sets you up for people to prod and pry and speculate.' However, one can possibly draw some conclusions from the noticeable thaw in her attitude towards her native land. In the past, Kristin has seemed more French than the French. She has lived fulltime in Paris since she was 19, and is at the centre of a glamorous Gallic coterie that includes the actors Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu. This year she was awarded the Légion d'honneur, the French equivalent of the OBE (which she has also collected). And she has, in the past, been in the habit of saying nasty things about England and its denizens, claiming that the country is stuck in the Fifties and that we're all overweight, acquisitive telly addicts. (An idea she hasn't quite relinquished, it turns out. 'Little Britain! I rest my case!' she says triumphantly.)
Ironically, though, just as the French have accepted her as an honorary daughter, along with her friends Charlotte Rampling and Jane Birkin, it seems she is having second thoughts.
'Now I feel more English than French,' she says. 'Though I've got horrible French habits, such as queue-barging and being a dreadful driver.' She doesn't even go back much at weekends, she says, because she finds the journey 'tiring'.
Of her three children – Hannah, 17, Joseph, 14, and George, five – only Hannah remains in Paris, where she is studying for her baccalaureate. Joseph is now at boarding school in England. 'He loves it; he doesn't want to go back to France.' And the day after we meet, George is coming over here, too, having been enrolled temporarily in a junior school so he can be near his mother until she finishes the play.
Kristin denies as 'rubbish' the gossip that she has been viewing houses in Notting Hill with a view to moving back.
'But I love filming in England, I love coming back here. I moved away because I didn't like it but now I do like it. You get to an age when you suddenly feel I am who I am. I'm able to accept and even encourage the idea of roots. It's a silly thing. It boils down to being happy when you're driving down a country lane and you can't see the top of the hedges because the fields are above the road, as they are in Dorset. There's something really comforting about being in England, even though there are lots of things I'm sad about.' (Mostly, it seems, our telly-viewing habits and the general lack of attention paid to the provenance of our food.)
Three of her four younger siblings – Sam, a housewife, and businessmen Matthew and Ben – live in London, and she is thoroughly enjoying the renewed family closeness. (The fourth, the actress Serena Scott Thomas, is based in Los Angeles and most recently appeared in the Bruce Willis blockbuster Hostage.)
And Kristin herself eventually intends to retire to the UK, probably to Dorset where she was brought up. 'When I'm old, this is what I want to be doing!' she goes on gaily, leaping to her clogs and bending over in the middle of the room, grubbing away at the carpet. 'Do you know what I'm doing? I'm weeding!' she says, giggling triumphantly. Clearly, there is a wide streak of silliness beneath the poised exterior.
If any ambivalence still remains about Britain, it would be hardly surprising. Kristin describes her own childhood as 'great and horrendous', but for most people, horrendous would just about sum it up.
She was born in Cornwall and brought up in Dorset, in a regime that she describes as 'fairly free and slightly batty'. The rural idyll came to an abrupt end when her father Simon, a pilot with the Fleet Air Arm, died in an air crash when she was just five. 'It's really sad,' she says. 'I was fairly happy at the time, or I thought I was. But when my little girl was five and I could see her with her dad oh!' She utters a groan of pain. 'Then I realised that I'd had an unhappy childhood. You see the things this child must have gone through when her father disappeared. But it is like looking back at someone who doesn't exist any more.'
Her mother Deborah was pregnant at the time with her fourth child, Ben. 'He was born postmortem, which was difficult,' she says with dry understatement. Deborah went on to marry another pilot, with whom she had Matthew; horribly, her second husband died in a replica crash six years later. Kristin was 11 and had just started at Cheltenham Ladies' College. She was told the news by her housemistress.
'It was dreadful for her. I felt really sorry for her at the time. I think I was just displacing the pain. I remember she had a lava lamp and I was staring at it – I can't look at lava lamps any more.' Has she ever properly dealt with her grief? 'I've accepted it, but it's taken me a long time,' she says.
She missed her family too much to enjoy boarding school, and left at 16. She lived in a flat above a fish and chip shop in Hampstead, and worked for a while in Selfridges, then won a place at the Central School of Speech and Drama but, oddly, on a teaching rather than an acting course. When she tried to change over, she wasn't allowed to. Extraordinarily, it seems her acting wasn't considered good enough. 'And I was regularly given stick about the way I spoke,' she goes on. 'This was the end of the Seventies, when it was super-uncool to be middle class, and so I just got bullied. I carried so much baggage from my education and my upbringing. I just wanted a clean slate.'
So, at 19, she fled as an au pair to Paris, where, encouraged by her employer, she enrolled in the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Techniques de Théâtre. And it was at drama school that she met François, a medical student who'd enrolled in the hope of meeting girls. He had so little confidence in Kristin's ability to make a living from her acting that he gave up on his own dramatic ambitions to concentrate wholly on medicine, feeling it was important that at least one of them should be able to earn a regular salary.
Of course, he need not have bothered. Admittedly, her first film, Under the Cherry Moon, in which she starred opposite Prince, was a flop. (She recently recommended it to her children as a good laugh, she says, only to have them tell her it was so embarrassing they had to switch it off.) But since then, she has barely put an elegant foot wrong and, aside from time off for the births of her children, has been in work ever since.
Her dazzling career has been built on portraying adulterous women (Random Hearts, Gosford Park, The Horse Whisperer, The English Patient). Why does she think that is? 'I can't think of a story that's not about a woman either having an affair or wanting one,' she says. 'That's what stories are about – love and betrayal and not being able to get what you want.' And life, too, it would seem.
The Pirandello play is due to run at the Playhouse Theatre until January. When it closes, Kristin will finally have to choose between her husband and Paris, or her rekindled love affair with all things English? Whatever she decides, it promises to be as interesting a spectacle as any role she has yet played.
