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MIGHTY Mouse
Stephen O¡¯Shea
After starring as the tragic bombshell in The English Patient,
Kristin Scott Thomas may no longer be convincing as the overlooked
plain Jane she used to play. You can never go homely again.
The frog may instantly turn into a prince and Cinderella into a
ballroom dancer, but for the rest of us, the overnight transformation
remains a fiction. You simply do not wake up one morning as Venus on
the half shell unless you've made Botticelli happy as a clam the night
before. What's true of life is even truer of the movies. Any
actress who has spent a career looking like an also-ran cannot
suddenly turn up on film as the full-blown sexpot.
But then there's the case of Kristin Scott Thomas. As Katharine Clifton in The English Patient, a performance likely to put her in the running for an Academy Award, the British actress comes across as a superbly confident sexual operator, given to tangling amorously with Ralph Fiennes amid the sand dunes of the Sahara and the courtyards of Cairo. In the prewar tale of love and betrayal adapted from Michael Ondaatje¡¯s Booker Prize-winning novel, Scott Thomas could have delivered the usual yawn-in-her-undies Miss British Empire 1930-something; instead, we get a peaches-and-cream adulteress, a character that gives a new head of steam to the winded genre of historical romance and, in the process, gives Scott Thomas a break from playing duds in love.
"In the book, you don't really think of Katharine as ever existing, she's just like a memory," Scott Thomas says in a cafe near her Paris home. "She¡¯s not really there in the pages, she's just, like, talked about. She's somewhere in the back of somebody's mind, a sort of lost woman. In a lost world." When she read director Anthony Minghella's script, she found that the presence had been fleshed out. "Katharine's totally glamorous without being flashy," Scott Thomas says. "She's liberated, in a way that doesn't exist anymore. At the time there was a huge gulf between men and women, which she uses to her advantage. She remains the very clever, well-educated woman who has a strong sense of sex and exploits it to the full."
That Scott Thomas succeeds so totally in portraying the beautiful, self-assured Katharine is unexpected. Apart from her fleeting appearance as a doomed operative in Mission: Impossible this past summer, Scott Thomas was last seen in an offbeat film called Angels and Insects, which featured her as Matty Crompton, a soulful governess who looked like Laugh-In's Ruth Buzzi without the handbag. Before that, as Fiona in Four Weddings and a Funeral, she was the bitchy brunet who was overlooked by Hugh Grant as he bumbled his way to happiness with Andie MacDowell. And in Roman Polanski's kinky Bitter Moon, she could not compete with the spectacle of Emmanuelle Seigner (a.k.a. Mrs. Polanski) squirting yogurt in her cleavage and writhing on the dance floor.
"It got frustrating always playing frustrated women, keeping your ammunition under cover," Scott Thomas says of all her consolation-prize characters. "But with Katharine, I had to go for it. What was frightening was having to be easy and confident and gorgeous. It's much harder to do than sit in the corner and be a mouse. It's much easier to put up walls in front of your character than to get straight to love, passion, and desire. It's hard to be brave enough to go all the way."
Scott Thomas glances in the mirror above the cafe table and tousles her spiky, blondish hair. She looks like Annie Lennox with the angles softened, and she sounds like Masterpiece Theater. The inflection is perfect, the vowels plummy, the tone sovereign. The classy Katharine Clifton did not come out of nowhere. Scott Thomas's grandparents were farmers in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), the archetype of gin-and-tonic gentility. "I have pictures of my grandparents all dolled up in black ties and formal evening wear, dressed for dinner in the wilds." Out of Africa, the family moved to Dorset in southwestern Britain. Father was a pilot given to "doing barrel turns over the house" and who died in an air accident when she was six. Mother scrimped to send her daughter to the best of England's posh private schools. "She dreamed I'd become a bluestocking, go to Oxford or Cambridge and study classics," Scott Thomas says of her mother, "then meet some dashing young man and have 93 children."
Instead, she went to drama school in London. The lovely accent cultivated at private schools was a source of aggravation in classes where tough Bob Hoskins types were the ruling majority. "I was suddenly confronted with completely different people who started to take the piss out of the way I spoke, where I¡¯d been to school," she recalls. "I became superdefensive, even paranoid." She must have been in a major snit, because on January 1, 1980, Scott Thomas went for a two-week visit to Paris that has yet to end. The upscale Englishwoman on-screen is actually the wife of a French obstetrician (who specializes in fertility treatments) and the mother of two young children whom she picks up after school for walks in the park. ("Very Madeleine," she admits.) Whereas other posh-talking actresses - Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Helena Bonham Carter - often trade on their upper-crust accents, Scott Thomas has made several foreign features that have found little echo in the English-language world.
"I was so desperate to do Katharine, I needed to do her. I remember during the screen test, I had this stupid grin all over my face." Of her affinity with the fictional adulteress, Scott Thomas states, "Katharine is not a man-eater or a woman who has affairs left, right, and center. Her ease and confidence are mostly in another area - they come from her intellect, her intelligence, her education, her bravery, her humor." Filming The English Patient, Scott Thomas spent two-and-a-half months on location in southern Tunisia, near the Algerian border, where keeping the sunscreen on the skin and the sand out of the hair where the primary beauty concerns. The fairer-complexioned Fiennes had more trouble with the Saharan sunshine than did Scott Thomas. In some scenes, what appeared to be a passionate flush may in fact have been sunburn - or even a case of the giggles. "We knew it was a very passionate love story," she recalls. "We both giggled like mad during the love scenes. We were desperately trying to keep straight faces."
Nonetheless, Scott Thomas is getting tired of playing opposite hot leading men. "You usually work with boys. Normally you're paired off with some boy in a love story, then you have to deal with another boy and his camera." Her face lights up as she continues her low-level rant against male leads. "I hate making generalizations," says the actress, who has made 12 films, "but sometimes you get the odd actor who's quite immature. They're constantly demanding attention and approval. I get really cross and think, Hey, what about me?"
Lack of attention isn't a problem now. She speaks of the mountains of scripts on her desk, though she thinks it "would be a miracle" to find something as great as The English Patient. Her modest celebrity in France - "Wouldn't you like hotel managers groveling at your feet?¡± She jokes - may pale in comparison to the impending international acclaim for her performance as Katharine Clifton. "I'm socially inept, a complete disaster," Scott Thomas says of the prospect. She remembers with a shudder her awkwardness when hobnobbing with celebrities at the dinner following the U.S. premiere of The English Patient: "I'm really bad at giving compliments, at telling people I like what they do, which is agony in America. Everyone was coming up and saying, 'marvelous' or something like that, and I was dying to say something nice back. I just couldn't get it out. It was just too embarrassing. What do they care what I think?"
