Why Kristin Loves Her Double Life
Allison Pearson
Kristin Scott Thomas, Oscar-nominated heroine of The English Patient, talks to Allison Pearson about passion, glamour and fishfingers
There should be a few sheepish faces on Oscar night as Kristin Scott Thomas awaits the opening of the Best Actress envelope. There will be the men from Twentieth Century Fox who refused to put up the money for The English Patient if she was the leading lady, suggesting that its cut-glass heroine should be played by the injection-moulded Demi Moore. And then there will be "the bitch" at London's Central School of Speech and Drama.
This is the woman who, in 1976, took the teenage Scott Thomas into her office and explained that it was impossible for her to switch from teaching to the acting course because she clearly couldn't act.
"She said: 'If you want to play Lady Macbeth, dear, you'd better join an amateur dramatics group'." Ouch. "Yes, she was purrfectly horrid," says Kristin Scott Thomas with a sly cat-got-the-budgie smile.
She has a lot to smile about. The English Patient has taken the world by sandstorm and Katherine Clifton is a role to die for. Scott Thomas is incandescent as the spirited, well-read blonde, married to a good sort, who brings her to the desert in the late Thrities to map unknown territory. Which is exactly what Katherine proceeds to do with the cool contours of Count Almasy (Ralph Fiennes).
The two of them fight so furiously to resist each other that when they finally surrender, they do so unconditionally: love has got them for ever. With this pair of actors, it is also a Battle of the Cheekbones. "He's so ridiculously beautiful," hisses Scott Thomas with mock exasperation. "I realised I had competition when I saw the bit where he runs off into the sunset and I thought: Damn, give me more make-up, quick!"
Audiences are used to seeing her play upper-class gels with a padlock on their heart - the impeccably cruel Lady Brenda in A Handful of Dust, poor thwarted Fiona in Four Weddings and a Funeral - but to secure the part in The English Patient, Scott Thomas had to display a very un-English impatience.
"I hated it all. Loathed it. I remember when I was trying to be an actress, I couldn't even dial the number of a famous casting director who had called and said he would like to meet me."
Why ever not?
"Because I was terrified of him knowing that I wanted something from him."
But with Katherine you thought, to hell with it?
"Absolutely. Pride completely out the window. All I did was write a letter to the director Anthony Minghella, which was bad enough for God's sake. It opens you up to failing; it opens you up to being told: 'Don't be silly'. Which it did. They said: 'Fraid not, honey, we need a big American star', and so I had to ' persist." She pronounces 'persist' with the distaste of a duchess holding a dead mouse in sugar-tongs.
We are talking in a suite at the Dorchester. Immaculate in black Donna Karan, Scott Thomas is an elfin figure perched on the edge of a fat sofa. Katherine's fair mane has been cropped to designer urchin, but the skin is still toffee from the sun. The huge hungry-child's eyes, regularly described as blue, are really a shade of fathomless green that you find only in rock pools or well-bred cats. And as for the voice, believe me, Kristin Scott Thomas could teach Henry Higgins a thing or two about Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire.
It is a voice to summon a hockey ball from a dozy right-wing at Cheltenham Ladies, Scott Thomas's Alma Mater. And yet within the sinuous poise, there is the faintest twitch of nerves. As we talk about her childhood, she absent-mindedly starts to pile up the sofa's embroidered cushions and hugs them to her chest.
She was born in Sherborne, Dorset. Her father was a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm. Kristin and her sister Serena (the actress recently seen in Nostromo) would stand in the back garden and yell at the sky: "Can you hear us, daddy?" he was killed in a plane crash when Kristin was five and her mother was pregnant with her fourth child. "Kristin didn't seem to be affected by what had happened to us. It was as if she just wasn't there," Serena has said.
It seems more likely that it was a classic case of the eldest child feeling she had to cope for her mother's sake. Does Kristin have any memories of her father? "No. Well, I can vaguely see someone in a navy blue uniform with gold bits. And smells. Yesterday, I took the kids to HMS Belfast and I was quite overcome. I almost couldn't breathe. The oil and metal, the male... Him, I suppose."
Her mother married another pilot. In 1973, he, too, died in a crash. "There was a lot of 'Come on now, stiff upper lip'. My mum wasn't at all like that, but she'd married into the forces and that was what she thought you were meant to do."
So nothing was said?
"No. Nothing. When my stepfather was killed, I was sent back to school. It happened three days before the end of the holidays and I was put on the train. And it was just like, we have to keep going and, um, I really must learn to finish my sentences."
There was one occasion during the filming of The English Patient when she really couldn't soldier on. It was the scene where Katherine herself is in a plane crash. "I couldn't do it. I wouldn't. I didn't want to imagine what it would be like coming down."
I realise that she is crying. Instead of letting the tears take their course she swats them aside as if they are pestering her. "Sorry, too early in the morning for this kind of thing." Sorry, I reply. "No, sorry," she insists. With feelings leaking all over the Dorchester upholstery, we do the only thing possible. We have another cup of tea.
Thus fortified, Scott Thomas regains her natural briskness, making it plain that the "Orphan Annie thing" is not her style at all. "There have been worse childhoods, for Christ's sake. I really have got off lightly as far as life goes."
After her rejection by Central, Scott Thomas ran at first to fat - "I was totally neurotic and 12 stone" - and then to France, where she worked as an au pair, got into drama school and began to carve out her double-life as the perfect Parisienne. To be dubbed "Ice Queen" by English journalists is merely confirmation that she has succeeded. Everyone in Paris is cold and scary. "Precisely!"
At 21, she married Francois Oliviennes, a doctor who is one of France's leading fertility specialists. They have two children, Hannah, seven, and five-year-old Joseph, and live in some style round the corner form the Jardins de Luxembourg.
Scott Thomas says that when she lived in England, just hearing the word 'psychiatrist' would make her blush. In Paris, she found herself related to three shrinks by marriage. Did she ever have therapy herself?
"The only person who ever sorted me out was my husband. I just met someone who was taking care of me. I wasn't alone any more. I wasn't fighting. He's my age. He's batty and we're just a team."
"Team" sounds a bit tame compared with the wild hearts of The English Patient. "We want all these stories of love overcoming everything and people making huge sacrifices. I don't think they actually exist in real life. That's why we make films. I can go off into the desert and be glamorous and adored for three months, and then I can come home and start making fish-fingers."
But isn't that double life a lie? "It's a fantastic life, it's a high-maintenance life and it costs a lot. But I don't want to stop doing that." By now she is getting angry. "Anyone who tells me that I can't do it will be proven wrong. The things that you want are hard. The things that are easy aren't desirable. I don't see where the lie comes in."
I ask her if she feels at all rueful that success has arrived now, "just as you're coming to that awkward age when actresses start to..." She cuts me off. "Oh yeah, I'm going down hill when I'm just peaking; is that what you're saying? You're a bit long in the tooth..."
She is doing one of her gorblimey voices and laughing at herself. "Oh I think I've got a couple of years left in me, possibly even 10. Since I was a child, I've always had a face that didn't match my age. I feel that now I've found my true age. I'm ripe. Riiipe," she chortles fruitily.
"I'm just glad it didn't happen when I was 23. Now, at 34," Thirty-four? In 1993, she was happily admitting to 33. I congratulate her on this proof that she has become a true Hollywood star - "You've just started lying about your age."
"I have not. Thirty-four last birthday."
Right, and the next time I interview you, you'll be 29? She wrinkles her nose and the green eyes flash me a look somewhere between merry and murderous. How will she cope with the ritual barbarity of the Oscars?
"Well, I as absolutely terrified before the Golden Globes. I was thinking: God, what's going to happen when I lose? I was terrified I was going to do something terrible and pass out or roll about on the floor, kicking and screaming because I hadn't got it. In fact, I was relatively well-behaved."
Whatever happens on March 24, we can all look forward to the Best Performance by an Englishwoman Pretending Not to Care if She Wins. I hope they give it to Kristin Scott Thomas, though. She deserves it.
