Kristin Scott Thomas has arranged to meet me at a restaurant in the East End
of London, which seemed peculiar. What was such a well-shod woman doing in
such a down-at-heel postcode? Typically, interviewers who are granted an
audience with England’s thorniest rose travel to her home city of Paris.
They meet her in an upmarket cafe and watch as she eats a steak (bloody),
drinks a coffee (black) and then become increasingly agitated as their
questions freeze and shatter under the frosty glare from her hooded eyes.
They scuttle back to their desks in London, where women journalists write
sniffily of her froideur, while the men mostly perve about her beauty.
And lo, though Scott Thomas is an actress of 25 years’ standing, who starred
in the most beloved British film of the 1990s – Four Weddings and a Funeral
– and the most celebrated – The English Patient – she remains, as the late
director Anthony Minghella once said, “unknowable”. Hugh Grant, her Four
Weddings co-star, put it more brashly, saying she needed “warming up” every
day on set. It’s a fair comment. Scott Thomas never gives an inch more than
she wants to, not even on screen. Anthony Lane, the film critic, marvelled
that she was like Audrey Hepburn, with an “infuriating habit of stealing a
scene, or an entire movie, without appearing to make a grab for the goods”.
It’s no coincidence that all the best quotes about Scott Thomas fall from the
mouths of men. At 48 she could still make a good dog break his leash, though
– on screen, at least – I always thought her angular beauty had a niche
appeal. Her powers of seduction are nevertheless fierce, and she has a
particular gift for making overgrown public-school boys gaga. When Jeremy
Clarkson interviewed her on Top Gear last year, she deftly disarmed him with
a thrilling barrage of haughty chin-raising, eyebrow-arching and quips,
leaving a gooey-eyed Clarkson purring that, yes, maybe his Lamborghini was
terribly uncool and he would flog it immediately just to please her.
Yet, the occasional flirt aside, Scott Thomas remains a mystery. Is she some
automaton, sent to seduce the world with her chilly wit and jutting
cheekbones? At first glance, I could well believe it. Here in east London,
she is on a break from rehearsing The Seagull by Chekhov, which she
performed to great acclaim in London last year and is now appearing in on
Broadway. I sent her agent a list of “movie-star-friendly” lunch spots near
her rehearsal rooms – no easy feat in this scruffier end of town – and she
opted for a tapas joint. Save for a few waiters, the room is empty when I
enter, not that it would have been hard to spot Scott Thomas sitting against
the far wall, wrapped in the thinnest white cashmere, hair blonder than it
used to be, and her skin that peculiar shade of Hollywood butterscotch. The
effect of her beauty – which is more extreme off screen – in this humdrum
setting is bizarre. It’s as if Renée Adorée has stepped onto Albert Square.
It’s no wonder she’s looking so good. After some low-impact years for her
professionally, this autumn Scott Thomas is back. Not only is she on
Broadway, but she has three films slated for release: a British period piece
(Noël Coward’s Easy Virtue), an American crowd-pleaser (the chick flick
Confessions of a Shopaholic), and a harrowing French drama. The last, I’ve
Loved You So Long, in which she plays a woman trying to readjust to civilian
life after 15 years in prison, performing entirely in French, is generating
an Oscar buzz. It would be her first nomination since The English Patient 12
years ago. Her personal life – which she likes to keep very personal – is
also back on track. In 2005 she separated from François Olivennes, the
renowned French gynaecologist and her husband of 17 years. There was talk
that she was having an affair with an actor almost 14 years her junior, but
– French privacy law being what it is – she was only busted when she spent a
few months doing a play in London. Her lover – or “Toy Boy Lover!”, as he
was known in the tabs – was Tobias Menzies, her co-star in a 2003 production
of Three Sisters. They saw one another on and off for a year, but she has
since split from him and hence is on good terms with her ex-husband. She has
moved into an apartment on the Left Bank, selects her jobs to fit around her
children’s school terms, and is happy about getting older, as it lets her
indulge in one of her favourite pastimes: being rude to young people.
I watch her for a couple of seconds before going over. She is putting her hair
up, then down again, every inch l’actrice. But when she sees me approach,
she visibly gathers herself together and throws on a smile that doesn’t
quite reach her eyes. Her hand is cool to the touch and, for all the wow
factor, it occurs to me that interviewing Scott Thomas could turn out to be
as rewarding as defrosting a freezer. She uses all that physical allure and
verbal reserve as a nifty shield, but who knows what’s underneath? Maybe
nothing.
With the food ordered (she opts for lamb – served bloody, of course), I decide
to come out with it. Will I have to warm you up, like Hugh Grant, I ask. She
smiles coolly. “Oh no, I’m pretty quick off the mark now,” she says, adding
she believes the perception of her as uptight is unfair. “I did have a face
that often looked very distant, supercilious, but it was just my face,” she
complains, her face, at this point, haughtier than ever. “But I was hiding
because I was shy and desperate that no one should notice me. It’s so nice
to be more confident now. It came with maturity, and it’s a huge relief.”
Which rather suggests she has become easy-going in middle age. Wrong.
Instead, she says dispensing with some of her nerves has allowed her to
release her inner dragon. “I’ve become what they call in French exigeante –
a polite way of saying a pain-in-the-arse stickler. I want everything to be
the best, to be done properly. If I’ve asked someone to do something and
they don’t, I get terribly cross.” Are you difficult with directors? “Yah, I
am. I’m not that assured in the rest of the world, but with my work I feel I
know what I’m doing. Sometimes I make a complete arse of myself, saying we
can’t do it a certain way, and I can see everyone thinking, ‘Just shut up –
get back in your box.’ There’s a hush when the technicians look at their
shoes when you know you’ve gone too far.”
Have you alienated people? “Oh, I’m sure I have. But,” she shrugs, “if you
find them irritating or dim, it’s difficult. I can get very angry with
the director, and they can get very angry with me, and there can be a huge
showdown. The director is the one who gives you your boundaries, so I test
them like mad.” She pauses. “But I’d hate to think I was malicious. Other
times I’m delightful,” she adds, coyly.
But you can be withering when cornered? “Oh, God, yes. There was the most
awful young runner on the last film I did, and I was as withering as
possible with him. The first thing he did was me tutoyer [address her with
the familiar tu rather than the polite vous], which was – of course –
absolutely not on. I was so evidently not his little mate from school. Ooh,
I was frosty – not acknowledging him, walking away when he approached me…”
She chuckles. “The silly boy was poison, utter poison.” Phew.
“Young people are very frightened of me, too, which I enjoy,” she continues,
“especially young girls. But I had a PA for about eight years,” she adds
quickly, by way of defence. How did she last eight years? “She could read my
mind, that’s how.” Are you a woman’s woman? “Yah,” she trills,
unconvincingly, “but I couldn’t think of anything worse than a girls’ night
out. I’d rather drink ink.”
This little rant has livened her up no end. She launches into a rebuke of her
agents, who, through minor confusion, caused her to put back our interview
by 15 minutes. “I like being on time,” she says so sternly that I ask if her
fondness for it is on the level of OCD. “I don’t think I can answer that,”
she says, suddenly more nervous. “I don’t think so.”
But the nerves she claims to have left behind, and her new need to wither
those around her, must both be underpinned by something. She drops the Grand
Bitch act and addresses me seriously. “I can’t bear being disappointed, to
expect something and for it not to happen the way you want. For example, I’m
terrified it [The Seagull] is going to be a massive flop in New York.” I
raise an eyebrow. “But it might!” she cries. “I spend an awful lot of my
time expecting the worst.” Why? “If you want to get psychoanalytical about
it, you could say the biggest disappointment in my life was when my dad
died,” she says, quietly. “When you grow up with that massive event, you
daren’t expect things – so it’s very bizarre that I chose this path. The
world I work in, that I live in, that I breathe, is one of constant
let-down.”
Scott Thomas was born into a naval family stationed in Redruth, Cornwall, in
1960. Her father, Lieutenant Commander Simon Scott Thomas, was a pilot with
the Royal Navy and a devout Catholic. Her mother, Deborah, had trained as an
actress, “but then she met my dad and went into full-swing wifedom, and that
was that.” Scott Thomas has a handful of happy memories of early childhood –
playing dress-up and putting on plays – but before she was five her father
died in a plane crash. As the eldest, she was encouraged not to cry, so as
not to upset the younger children. Later her mother married another pilot,
who, in an unimaginably cruel twist of fate, also died in a plane crash, six
years after the first one.
Deborah, then in her early thirties, was left twice widowed with five
children. Later, during a brief stint on a drama-teaching course in London,
Scott Thomas recalls, “I got needled a lot for being middle-class. They
thought they were so right-on and took the piss out of me. I thought, ‘You
don’t know anything about me.’ Just because I’d been to a convent school,
and spoke a certain way, did not mean I was loaded. It was a struggle
growing up. You can’t bring up five kids on a naval pension and have it be
easy and comfortable. My mother had to fight tooth and nail to give us the
education she gave us, ringing on doorbells, telling people, ‘I went to this
school – my children need to go there.’ I’m fantastically in awe of her
courage. It made me so angry when people assumed I had this easy life.”
As a boarder at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, she didn’t thrive. “It was a tough
time. I was aware I was lucky to be there, and at the same time I’d just
lost my stepfather and I was always being put down all the time, always in
the C-stream, rubbish at everything. It gets to you after a while, being the
thick one.” She was stunned when she got onto the drama teachers’ course at
the Central School of Speech and Drama. “It was the best acting job I ever
did, saying I wanted to be a teacher, that I really believed drama could
help young people, that I wanted to get out there to some underprivileged
areas – Hahaha!” Once she was there, a tutor thought she might be good
enough for the actors’ course and sent her off to audition. “They got me in their
office, these two women, and said, ‘There is no way you could be an
actress. If you want to play Lady Macbeth, then join your local amateur
dramatic society.’ I was 18 years old – so cruel!”
By this point she was fed up with the course and fed up with England. Since
her mid-teens she had been visiting Paris as part of an exchange programme
for naval girls, so she upped sticks for the City of Light to become an au
pair. She never came back. “People always say I’m snooty about England, but
I love coming to work here,” she says, before rather undoing her point by
adding: “though I’m so glad I live in France, and I’m not the only one. Look
at all the English OAPs buying up half the Dordogne. They all know they’ve
got to get out of England as well. It’s une qualité de vie.” She is
swoonsomely in love with her adopted home, citing everything from the
“perfect bread” (which saw her weight reach an improbable 12 stone in her
twenties) to the lack of “palaver” she is afforded by the kinder attitude of
the French press, which means she can walk the streets unbothered by
photographers. That must have been handy during the breakdown of your
marriage. “Oh, God, yes. There’s still rumours and backbiting and bitchery
that goes on, but not on the scale of Britain.”
In her early twenties she got into a Parisian drama school, where she met her
future ex-husband, an owlish medic who had enrolled in acting classes to
meet pretty girls. Their marriage was apparently a “fairy tale” – she the
film star, he France’s leading in-vitro expert. Not that there weren’t
problems. At one point I praise her organisational skills. “I wish you’d
tell my ex-husband that,” she sniffs.
She has also suffered from depression and, raised as a Catholic, believes she
has an overdeveloped sense of guilt.
“I have Catholic guilt, then I learnt Jewish guilt from my husband’s family.
They think you want to join the gang – it’s so frustrating, though I did
think of converting for a time. Someone very dear to me said I shouldn’t
bring up my children as Catholic, I should bring them up as Jewish, as it’s
a much better religion.” What did you say? “I ran away at that point,”
she laughs.
After graduating from drama school, her first job was a Marguerite Duras play,
performed in a field in Burgundy.
“I got my first newspaper review.” Was it a good one? “Oh yes,” she says
smugly. A year later she was cast as the female lead in Under the Cherry
Moon, a vanity project for the singer Prince. It was a total flop but she
was on the map, and her subsequent career has run the gamut from Euro-dross,
such as Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon, to megabucks Hollywood and quality
independent films (Gosford Park). She had always intended to be a theatre
actress, though, and by the late 1990s she was bored with playing “older
gents’ crumpet” to the likes of Harrison Ford (Random Hearts) and Robert
Redford (The Horse Whisperer), so she decided to stay nearer to home, have
another baby – she has three children, Hannah, Joseph and Georges, who
are 20, 17 and 8 this year, respectively – and concentrate her efforts on
French film and British theatre, only taking the occasional American gig
when her US agents beg her to.
It was a smart move that is beginning to pay off, not least for all this Oscar
talk. “I don’t see any point in even thinking about that, because I can’t
see them giving it two years running to a French performance,” she says,
pointing out that Marion Cotillard won it for La Vie en Rose last year.
Her career is exactly where she wants it, though. She is coping with the
“disappointment”, she laughs. “I used to like getting the offer so then I
could say no,” she laughs. “Now I’m not so bothered.” And now she’s a bit
older, the parts are picking up, as she likes playing grown-up women. She
still suffers from “dreadful typecasting” outside France – where “they let
me play anything, not just posh bitches” – and feels zero nostalgia for the
way she used to look. “When I moved house I was looking through some old
photos, and I don’t know what people were talking about with this idea that
I was so beautiful. I thought I looked horrible. I honestly think I look
better now.” Actually, she’s right. Up close, age has softened some of those
angles. “Once you’ve calmed down about whether you’re seductive and
attractive – the idea of wanting to please, wanting to be loved – you can do
all the things you never could before. Walking into a room used to be
hideous for me; now I don’t mind at all.”
It’s true that her face isn’t the only part of her to have softened. She has
begun to open up. For a woman who usually keeps her own counsel, I’m taken
aback when, discussing the deaths of three of her past directors – Robert
Altman, Sydney Pollack and Minghella – she actually begins to cry a little.
“Awful, such a loss,” she says, shakily. “As Richard Curtis said at
Anthony’s memorial, ‘There are many more people in this room I would wish to
be dead before him.’ She is also comfortable enough to talk about her
insecurities. “I don’t think I’m the brightest spark in the box,” she sighs,
“and that pains me.” You’ve been hanging out with too many Parisian
academics. “Yes.” Who wants to be like that anyway? “I do,” she says softly.
Behind the snooty-cow act, she is still nagged by doubt and insecurity. She
says her stage fright will become “horrific” in the lead up to her Broadway
debut. It’s ironic – because, in the same way that a few more miles on her
clock has thawed her personality a little, made her more likable, it has
also done wonders for her day job. Judging by her turns in The Seagull and
I’ve Loved You So Long, she has gone from being a really good actress to a
great one. But thanks to that childhood of hers, she can never fully shake
off the doubt. “I’m a terrible worrier. I’m the sort of person who has a
Rolodex of worries. I lie in bed at night thinking, ‘No, don’t worry about
that one yet – choose another one!’”
Do you worry that you kept the world at arm’s length for too long? “Perhaps. I
was in Italy last week, and some Italian wit said to me, ‘You have to be
careful with mysterious women, because sometimes when you get behind the
mystery, all you find is stupidity.’” Is that why you have kept your guard
up for all these years? She opens her mouth as if she is about to say
something, then turns it into a cryptic little smile instead. “Anyway, I
can’t be late for rehearsal,” she blurts out of nowhere, leaping to her
feet.
She scrapes her hair back into a bun and pulls on her Burberry mac, belting it
tightly around her tiny waist. She bestows two cursory air kisses, and a
barked instruction not to look at her toenails because her pedicure isn’t up
to scratch, and hurries halfway across the restaurant at a speed that
borders on the offensive. But then – as if she has suddenly thought better
of it – she turns and gives me a goofy little wave goodbye. It doesn’t sound
like much, but for Kristin Scott Thomas, this is progress. A small sign
that, nearing 50, she is finally happy to let herself go a bit.
I’ve Loved You So Long is released in the UK on September 26. Easy Virtue is
out on November 7
