Feel the Heat

Margy Rochlin

Suddenly, movie stars from abroad are hot again--none more so than the British actress who drives Ralph Fiennes mad in one of the most romantic films ever

"Hello!" "Oh, really?" "Why, thank you!" It is three o'clock in the afternoon, and Kristin Scott Thomas is in the petite, walled garden of the Four Seasons Hotel, standing near a silver coffee urn and several trays stacked with glistening pastries. And this is how she is greeting a noisy bunch of press-junket journalists: Her wide mouth breaks into a slow, warm half-smile, her head gently tilts to one side. Her grey eyes, filled with a wondering curiousity, never leave the reporter's face as she talks to them one by one. Her expression says, Your small talk is riveting. Their expression says, She is completely in my thrall.

Later, while driving up 3rd Street toward the Farmer's Market, you ask the 36-year-old actress what was going on in her mind. At the time, she is rolling down the passenger window so that she can scrutinize the antique stores and gift shops as they whiz by. "Well," she says in that tinkly British accent of hers, which makes each syllable that spills from her mouth sound as if it's been individually gift-wrapped, "sometimes you just want to scream."

And so it was all an act, but Scott Thomas's charade still wins hands-down over the behavior of those American ingenues who think working a room means being photographed on the red carpet, then disappearing into the VIP lounge. And her Royal Family deportment is just another reason why she's such an exotic in Hollywood.

Scott Thomas's big moment has finally come after a decade of acting, which is certainly time enough to acquire an identifiable profile in the business and a Ivory Tower cult of her very own. ("Every time someone writes to me, it starts out, `Hello. I'm a professor of linguistics and...'"). In fact, her shrine page on the World Wide Web is compiled by a London University physics instructor, and as it tells the tale--in review blurbs and screen-time that is meticulously calculated in percentages--she's made a speciality of briskly intelligent types in dozens of French and British films that were never released here. Anyone who caught those that were--Four Weddings and a Funeral and Angels & Insects--knows how believable she can be as the one with the classical bone structure who's too self-possessed and sharp-tongued to get the guy.

Now at long last comes Anthony Minghella's The English Patient, and she has managed to wipe away any trace of her brittle character-actor status. It didn't hurt that she had a style team to soften her edges, outfitting her in a flowing, desert adventuress wardrobe, and turning her lank, brown mop into a glorious Garbo mane. What really makes her performance work, though, is that she doesn't externalize her tortured complexity, which is how it's usually done in Hollywood movies. Instead, she was all about the large emotions that can stir beneath a still, elegant outer shell.

Scott Thomas's natural hauteur would lead one to assume she has confidence to burn. And that's the very reason why Minghella, who directed The English Patient (and adapted it from Michael Ondaatje's novel), initially felt she was too upper-crust to bring his lustful heroine to life. That's when Scott Thomas she set out to woo Minghella with a letter-writing campaign. ("I think I actually wrote only two," she admits when pressed. "But I must have written 50 million in my head.") Then came the lunch with Minghella, which Scott Thomas says was "a complete disaster.

"You know when you're thinking, `I've really got to make this man fall in love with me,' and you do the exact opposite?" she says, explaining how her preplanned speech was about knowing she was just a nobody, but also being certain that she was up to the task. "The only problem was I forgot the last part. I went there and told him that I knew I was a nobody."

Somehow, she finagled an audition with The English Patient star Ralph Fiennes, and when the pair displayed a special chemistry the director began to see possibilities behind her superior pose. Says Minghella, who became so loyal to Scott Thomas that when 20th Century Fox film execs reportedly tried to make him hire a bigger-name star with the name Demi Moore, he let the financing be pulled rather than budge, "Kristin is slightly cool and aristocratic. But that's just how she protects herself from showing how vulnerable she is. And when you get glimpses of that fragility, it has this delicious sensation of discovery about it, of your thinking that you're the first person who has seen this in her. And suddenly I realized that was the perfect hinge for Katharine Clifton."

Scott Thomas was in Prague, playing one of Tom Cruise's doomed colleagues for five minutes or so of screen time in Mission: Impossible, when she got the telephone call from Minghella. "That night, I went on the set,and I said, `Yargggh! I got the part!" she says, hoisting her arms overhead like an Olympic gymnast. "And everyone was so happy, I couldn't believe it. I think I grinned for three days straight."

Now that her critical raves from The English Patient have piled up, Scott Thomas is less sure of how she feels. "Everybody keeps saying to me in a menacing kind of way, `Maybe you will become a celebrity...'" she says, while sitting at the Farmer's Market. "And I keep thinking, Oh God. What do you know that I don't?" Well, for one thing, you want to say, there's a tableful of lookiloos to your left, who can't stop grinning at you.

If she notices how excited they are to see her, she's not letting on. On the other hand, she's wrapped up in own people-watching. Gazing intently over the lip of her decaf cappuccino, she stares at a white-jacketed chef and his female assistant behind a food stall as they frantically try to squish something. "Did she find a big spider?" Scott Thomas wants to know, although she's probably erred in her bug identification. "She's taken the most terrible face. That's it: I'm not eating there."

Then she wants you to check out a gaudily made-up dowager whose cruising past the espresso bar. "Discreetly," she instructs in an impatient, lockjawed whisper when she feels you've swiveled your head too quickly. "Discreetly! Discreetly!" To her, the woman's get-up--which, by the standards of Farmer's Market's anything-goes dress code, is merely ho-hum--is so incredible that Scott Thomas can't stop babbling about the matron as she slowly vanishes into the crowd. "You don't get that at home. Not with the white pants and the wig with the sparkly hair grips. Sorry, what were you saying?"

Hugh Grant is no stranger to this habit of hers, of sporadically behaving as if she's more tasteful than thou. "At the drop of a hat, she can make you feel kind of...hairy," says Grant. "Suddenly, you feel like a vulgar, badly dressed, beer-swilling Englishman." After costarring with Scott Thomas in Four Weddings and a Funeral and Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon, though, Grant learned how to loosen her up by teasing her mercilessly. "It takes not more than five or 10 minutes," he says. "But you'd have to do it everyday, like yoga. You know, you arrive in the morning, shake Kristin up a bit, then everything's lovely."

"She doesn't like talking much," says Anthony Hopkins, who played a destitute lawyer to her sulky estate owner in The Tenth Man, and felt Scott Thomas's approach toward acting was reminiscent of Jodie Foster's in The Silence of the Lambs. "She's friendly, but very businesslike. I remember once she said to [the director Jack Gold], `What do you want me to do? That or this?' And he said, `Whichever you like.' And she said, `Well, which do you want me to do. Do you want me to do that or this?' He said, 'Well, that...' and she said, `Thank you.' Boom! I like that. None of this waffling around, analyzing things. That drives me up the wall."

Still, in this era of I-love-everybody mediated celebrity interviews, it's almost inspiring to hear Scott Thomas laugh out loud about how she responds to fear and pressure. "I can get quite grumpy and cold," she admits, although her usual set of defenses failed her during the making of Bitter Moon. Before a scene where she was to tango and eventually bed her costar, Polanski's wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, Scott Thomas simply burst into tears. "I was so upset," she says, with a mock sob. "I can't do it. I can't do it. I don't want to do it."

Yet, in front of the cameras, she danced like a trouper. And examining the footage you can't help but be awed by Scott Thomas's breezy authority during the pas de deux, especially because, according to Hugh Grant, both he and Scott Thomas fond Seigner "quite intimidating. She was at a time in her life where she had no kind of control mechanism. You could be in a restaurant and if [Emmanuelle] got bored, she'd whip her top off and just show the waiter everything. She's that kind of girl."

Given Scott Thomas's background, Grant talks about her with an us-and-them easiness--at least 50 percent of the time. Because she was born British, he'll say things like, "We bonded as two English actors in the middle of all this Polish madness." Yet, she's been living in Paris for over 16 years, something which, Grant says, accounts for her sporadic flashes of formality: "She can go a bit French on you--all that elan and poise."

And it's true. She has the chic thing down pat: Today, sitting among the alte kakers at the Farmer's Market, Scott Thomas looks like a stylish gamine in an outfit that on anybody else would suggest laundry day: Well-cut burgundy TK suit, a bright blue striped boy's T-shirt, black loafers, lime-colored Nina Ricci sunglasses, and a kelly green Dellvaux handbag.

Yet, eyeing the display at a nearby candy counter, Scott Thomas begins to estimate how long it would take her to drag 5-year-old daughter Hannah and 8-year-old son Joseph from such a spectacular array of all-day lollipops and rainbow-colored gumballs. "Three hours," she decides, and instantly you get the feeling that she's also just a beleagued soccer mere whose self-effacing humor is just a way of letting you know how hard on herself she is.

"She has this blind self-deprecation," says Minghella, who often found himself poring over dailies, marveling over Scott Thomas's unique sensuality. "She's so smart, but I think she's very quick to feel inadequate. There some adjudication of her skill which is totally distorted in her."

On-screen, Scott Thomas has an soulful weightiness about her. ("You feel like there's history in her," says Minghella. "And pain.") It drives Scott Thomas "mad" that, across the Atlantic, profilers attribute this to her upbringing, to the death of first her Royal Navy pilot father when she was five, then of her pilot step-father in 1973. "I hate the whole `Oh, the tragic childhood...'" she says. "It was bad. But you just ride it. I mean, people have been through worse."

Until she was in her late teens, she thought of herself as "the team leader" for her four younger siblings, "the one who was always showing everybody a good example." After that, she moved from tiny Dorset to swinging London and "showed them all a bad example for a bit."

She was attending the Central School of Drama, when a pair of acting teachers informed her that she'd never amount to anything. "I was just so hurt," Scott Thomas says. "It was like, `How can they say that to me? I am an actor, I am.'" It was then she decided to move to Paris, finding employment as an au pair in one of the city's ritziest sectors. Her bosses probably remember her as a hazard to their safety, but she insists she was a good babysitter who was undone by her ice-cold room. "I always left the electric radiator on," she says, which is how she came to burn the curtains down. "I didn't close them properly and they just went pfftttt."

Still, her patron was the one who urged the 19-year-old to enroll in drama school. And her new French boyfriend (and future husband), obstetrician Francois Olivennes, encouraged her as well. Somehow, this two-person cheering squad helped boost her self-esteem. "From then on," she says, "things started to, you know, just get better and better."

Until, of course, they didn't. In 1986, she made her feature film debut in Under The Cherry Moon, and for all of the ways that Prince's directorial debut is a carnival of unintentional yucks, it did provide Scott Thomas with no lack of challenges. In it, she plays drums, frugs stiffly, and gets aroused at the sight of the spit-curled pop star. "It took some acting, I'll tell you," says Scott Thomas, then turns in a husky-voiced imitation of what the spoiled heiress she played must have been thinking. "'I'm here, you small, but clever thing...'"

At the time, people couldn't stop saying that her mere proximity to Prince would make her a star. But Scott Thomas's first warning that the flick would bomb huge took place at the premiere: The house lights came up and her mother, who was sitting next to her, said, "Oh, darling!" followed by "a sniff, then a dreadful silence," she says, then she buries her face in her hands. "I find it embarrassing. I'm so bad in it."

The experience wasn't a total loss. Later, when she played a mercurial socialite in A Handful of Dust, Scott Thomas would model her Lady Brenda Last after Prince's habit of being bratty one minute and benign the next. And she makes sure to praise him for bestowing her with her first leading role, although the collaboration is unlikely to repeat itself: "Somebody once rang me up and said, `Prince would like to see what you've been doing recently...' And a hot flash happened, I'll tell you."

Scott Thomas says the most enduring lesson was what Under The Cherry Moon taught her about high hopes. "You learn that every time you make a film it happens. Everyone says, 'This is so fantastic! Watch out!'"

Perhaps this explains why the mention of the hysteria she's now generating in Hollywood makes her eyes dull over. "Well, I'll just wait and see," Scott Thomas says. As far as she's concerned, only one thing from her English Patient success seems to be taking permanent hold. "I'm never going back to brown," she says, raking her fingers through her short, streaky-blond thatch. Then she directs your attention to a woman who has a tan plastic full-body back brace clamped over her floral cotton housedress. "Why is that lady wearing a girdle on the outside?" she asks. "Do you think it's Madonna's influence?"

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