The Patient Englishwoman
Phillip McCarthy
No producer could stop "Four Weddings and a Funeral's" Kristin Scott Thomas securing the role she was determined to play.
If Kristin Scott Thomas wins the Oscar for Best Actress this month - and she's odds-on favourite to do just that - she'll be winning it for a role Hollywood didn't want her to get.
Two years ago, when Kristin was cast as the sexy and aristocratic Katharine Clifton in The English Patient, the studio then backing the film gave the producers an ultimatum: get a bigger box office name for the pivotal role, or get the film's AUS$40 million budget somewhere else.
The studio, 20th Century Fox, had an alternative list headed by Demi Moore (before Demi's box office disasters, The Scarlett Letter and Striptease).
"I know there were a lot of actors who were dying for this role, " Kristin says. "But the producers decided t stick with me and it was an incerdibly brave decision because they didn't know if the film would proceed." Bu the producer, Saul Zaentz, got money elsewhere and the rest is history; the film swept the Oscar preliminaries with more nominations then any other film, receiving twelve all up.
Zaentz added sting to Fox's embarrassment by gamely pushing Kristin as Best Actress nominee instead of her bigger-name co-star, Juliette Binoche. The two have an almost identical amount of screen time, but Zaentz steered Binoche to the Best Supporting Actress catergory instead.
Now the film is in the can and about to hit our screens, opening March 6, it's very hard to imagine anyone else- least of all Demi - bringing the vibrant Katharine to life as memorably as British-born Kristin. One reason The English Patient's" producers might have thought twice about abandoning Kristin was her sustained lobbying for the part. Her campaign of letters, phone calls and auditions was a lesson in actors' determination. "I read it and I knew I had to be Katharine," she says. "Fortunately, the audition went extremely well and the director and the producer remained very loyal to me."
Kristin, 36, has piercing blue eyes and the same knack as Emma Thompson of talking about risque topics in an incongruously plummy voice. As Katharine, in the movie, Kristin lets her hair down in some very steamy love scenes with Ralph Fiennes in a bath, a closet and a bed.
"No, we didn't have an affair, even though he's a very attractive man," she says. "We were very professional and, anyway, I'm a married woman." Since finishing the film, she's adopted a radical short-cropped hairstyle because she was sick of her screen persona's more elaborate, pre-war mane. "After all that sand in the desert, being turned into a blonde and the mad Italian set haridresser who was always saying 'Come here, let me curl you', I wanted no-fuss hair."
Kristin has a couple of scenes of full frontal nudity in The English Patient and one US critic called the film's love scenes among "the most adult ever filmed".
"It takes a lot of energy and a lot of concentration to act naturally when you don't have your clothes on," she explains.
"The worst part isn't the actual nudity, it's thinking 'God, what happens if I make a hash of this? I'll be totally, literally, naked to the world'." Strangely enough, playing the romantic heroine with such sensuality is actually new to Kristin: she's usually the well-bred woman who screen heroes ignore. She was a British spy in Mission: Impossible, the girl who loved Hugh Grant to no avail in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and the sexually repressed governess no-one notied until the very end in Angels and Insects.
"It got very frustrating playing frustrated women and keeping one's self in check," she says. "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 that than to play someone who sits in the corner and is a mouse."
While Kristin was born and educated in Britain, she has spent most of her acting career in Paris - a locale almost as exotic as Katharine's Cairo. "I was in Drama school in London and I was very unhappy so I just up and left one day," she says. "I went to Paris to visit a friend for two weeks and just stayed."
She has now been there 16 years and has no plans to move, even though Hollywood is now comparing her to Greta Garbo.
A good reason to stay is her French husband, obsetrician Francois Olivennes, who is the father of her two children, Hannah, eight, and Joseph, five.
"I obviously don't just sit on my hands in Paris and wait for roles to fall on my head," she says. "I get on planes and work at it. But my husband is French and so are my children, so Paris is home. But my kids still ask me why I speak French with a funny accent."
But since "The English Patient" there has been no shortage of Hollywood scripts, and the frenzy will only increase if she walks out with Oscar this month.
