The Heart of The English Patient

Gary Susman

Kristin Scott Thomas is known for playing haughty, cool, elegant women who seethe with hidden reserves of passion. Take for example her inauspicious debut in the former Prince's Under the Cherry Moon, and subsequent projects as a sardonic socialite nursing an unrequited love for Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral, a buttoned- down Victorian entomologist in Angels and Insects, and a sleek, short- lived spy in Mission: Impossible. The passion is hidden no more, however, in Anthony Minghella's adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient in which Thomas portrays Katharine Clifton, a married woman who falls fatally in love with a Hungarian explorer (Ralph Fiennes) in the Sahara Desert. The character is a far cry from the actress' other roles and her daily life as an Englishwoman living in Paris, married to a gynecologist and raising two kids.

Thomas certainly showed no frosty reserve to Gary Susman during a 9 a.m. Sunday morning interview in an unfamiliar New York hotel, where she seemed androgynously sprightly, with her close-cropped blond hair, dressed in a dark pantsuit.

You were a big fan of The English Patient as a novel.
I read it three years ago when I was in Romania. I was making a film called An Unforgettable Summer. I was making it in Romanian, and I desperately needed English books. I took a whole load with me. One of them was The English Patient, which I bought because I liked the cover. I'd never heard of Michael Ondaatje. I was completely bowled over by this book. I cried and laughed and everything. When I got to the end, I could not bear it, and I started again. When I got to the end the second time, I started a third time. Admittedly, the third, I sort of skipped through it. I couldn't bear to leave it. There's such poetry in it. Something in it touched me deep down. Everybody who's read the book has been moved by it. It feels like it was written for you and about you. It pinpoints things that are so terribly intimate and would appear to be terribly private, and you realize that they're actually quite universal.

Such as?
There's one section I find very moving, where Hana wonders whether her father lay dying and was being nursed by a total stranger the way she was nursing the patient. And then there were the extraordinary coincidences, like a village that is mentioned is three miles away from where I grew up. The stuff about pilots, of course, was very poignant for me. It's Hana's story that really affected me. She's the one the book is about. Katharine is just sort of a ghost in the story.

Why did you respond to the stuff about pilots?
My father was a pilot and was killed in an air accident. My mother married another pilot, who was also killed in an air accident. It was a training exercise.

You've said you campaigned very hard to be in the film.
Probably by American standards, it was peanuts. I felt very strongly about the book, and when I read the screenplay, I launched into an offensive. I rang everybody I knew and said, "So, do you know this Minghella person? What's he like? And the next time you see him, could you. . .", which I thought was incredibly brave. And then I wrote to him and asked if we could meet for lunch one day. That went horribly wrong. I spent the whole lunch, having been revved up for it for a week or ten days--you know how you really want something, and then you go and just blow it. So I had to write to him again and said I didn't think the lunch had gone so well, and would he consider auditioning me? What I've learned from the experience is, if you really want something, you can't be English about it and say, [whispering] "Well, you know, perhaps it will happen." You have to get out there and say, "I'd like it, please."

Why did you want to play Katharine, rather than Hana?
I fell in love with her. I found her an extraordinary woman. I would love to be her. What better way to be her? Don't bother about real life. Cut to the chase. And yet, I persuaded him all through this lunch that I was so unlike Katharine that it would be a very bad idea to cast me. No, I'm not doing that again.

Was it your bi-cultural life that gave Katharine such resonance for you?
Yeah, I think that has a lot to do with it, this sort of wandering that goes on in the film, no frontiers and no boundaries, just people together. That is certainly something that pressed huge, great, clanging buttons in me. People are always saying to me, "How do you feel? How do you identify yourself--as a British woman or a French woman or a European, or what?" And I'm always absolutely stumped for an answer because I hate giving an answer. I don't see why I should have to produce one. Why should it matter? Passports have always really, really irritated me. I always get in a real panic any time I have to go through any sort of immigration. That is why coming here is always a bit of a sweat.

Is it hard for you to shed roles?
A couple of the ones I've done have been quite hard to shake off. When I did Angels and Insects, I had trouble getting rid of her because I just liked her so much. The more you like them, the less you want them to go away. It was quite difficult getting back to the mundane reality of city life after living in a gothic mansion or having the beauty of the desert around you every day.

Will this film change your image?
I hope so. Maybe they'll see me as not quite so bitter and twisted.

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