Interview: Kristin Scott Thomas, actress

Published on Friday 17 February 2012 00:00

At 51 and still effortlessly glamorous, Kristin Scott Thomas loves making movies in the French capital, her adopted city. In a rare interview, Albertina Lloyd asks the actress if she’s given up Britain for good

AS ONE of Britain’s more chic actresses, it seems only natural that Kristin Scott Thomas should have made Paris her home. She first came to work in the city as a 19-year-old au pair and has never looked back. “There’s just something about Paris … culture is God here. Or the idea of culture is God,” she says, when we meet at a luxury Parisian hotel. “It’s a Paris of people passing through. It’s a Paris of ex-pats, a Paris of all these people trying to recreate their own little sphere, and I think that’s very particular to this city. Everybody’s allowed to become someone else for a couple of years and then they must move on to do serious things.”

She pauses, then adds with a laugh: “And some of us get stuck here.”

The star of such resolutely British films as The English Patient, Four Weddings And A Funeral and Gosford Park has lived in the city so long that she now thinks of herself as French. Indeed, she flits seamlessly between English language and French-speaking roles, receiving accolades for both. Her two latest films are both set in the French capital. In The Woman In The Fifth, Scott Thomas plays the enigmatic Margit, a glamorous, Eastern European ex-pat who befriends American writer Tom, played by Ethan Hawke.

And in Bel Ami, opposite Robert Pattinson and Christina Ricci, she plays a prim society wife, who becomes needy and desperate after being seduced by an arrogant social climber. Elegant as she is, there’s an air of informality about her today, a chunky knitted cardigan worn over a chic, leopard print dress and a warm smile breaking through her razor-sharp cheek bones. She appears very comfortable and relaxed as she settles back in her chair and huddles her cardigan around her against the cold of the air conditioning, which blasts forth with the efficiency of all French service.

Based on the hit novel by Douglas Kennedy, Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski’s film The Woman In The Fifth is an intriguing thriller, designed to confuse its audience. “I heard that Pawel was making a movie in Paris and I really wanted to make a film with him,” she says. “And I quite liked the idea of playing this enigma, wrapped up in history. I liked the characterless character. I liked the fact she didn’t really make sense.

“She was just layers and layers of fantasy; the mother, the whore, the inspiration, the muse, the critic. That’s really what drew me to the subject.”

Pawlikowski explains that he cast Scott Thomas in the title role because it’s not a very contemporary character: “I always thought of Kristin as a timeless being. You can’t quite place her.”

Ethan Hawke co-stars as writer Tom, who arrives in Paris to try and make contact with his young daughter and finds himself lost in a strange city with no money, no job and no friends. At the same time, this gives him an opportunity to reinvent himself, something Scott Thomas relates to. “I’ve been to places where they all hang out in certain restaurants and wander around with novels in their pockets. And you often see young girls looking a bit lost and thinking hard in cafes, writing in books. Of course I did that, I would be abnormal not to. I did that when I first got here and then gave up.”

Divorced from French gynaecologist Francois Olivennes, the actress lives in the city with her three children. As her acting has taken her to locations all over the world, she says she understands the guilt portrayed by Hawke in the film, of balancing the desire to be a great writer with the struggle to be a good parent.

“Once you choose an ‘art’ – a creative thing that can only come from your head – you’re going to be torn between that and your duties as a parent,” she says. “You’re constantly divided, sharing your emotions between your art and your children. Whether you’re a painter, an actor, a writer, a musician – you just feel guilt!”

Born in Cornwall at the start of the 1960s, Scott Thomas trained to be a drama teacher at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama, but left at 19 after being told she would never succeed as an actress, and went to work as an au pair in Paris, where she studied acting. She has said that she feels she’s given more variety in her French roles, throwing off the typecasting of the upper-class British woman.

In Guillaume Canet’s thriller Tell No One, she played the lesbian lover of the hero’s sister, while in I’ve Loved You So Long she earned several award nominations for her portrayal of a mother who has just been released from prison.

Scott Thomas is now back as the recognisable commanding beauty of her past films. The lady of the manor who took a young valet into her bed to relieve the boredom of her marriage in Gosford Park. The reserved Englishwoman who kept a stiff upper lip about her unrequited love in Four Weddings. Or the stoic wife who keeps the guilt and passion of her infidelity hidden in The English Patient.

But in Margit we also see frailty, despair and madness, as the layers unravel and the mask comes off. “I think that’s what was exciting, the whole idea of the project was that the two should meet,” she says. “From the idealised, wonderful woman that I’ve played in the past, to these more fragile nutters that I get asked to do in French. It was a nice meeting place for those two parts of my life, and in my artistic world.”

Her next project will see her return to the UK to be reunited with English Patient co-star and “old friend” Ralph Fiennes in The Invisible Woman, which he will direct. Scott Thomas will star as Ellen “Nelly” Ternan, the secret lover of Charles Dickens. Another mysterious character, intriguing enough to lure Scott Thomas back to England.

“I wouldn’t choose a bad film in France over a good film in England,” she says. “I love making films in the city where I live, because it makes life so much easier. And recently, it just so happens I’ve been asked to do quite a lot of really good films in France.”

• The Woman In The Fifth is in cinemas from today. Bel Ami follows on 9 March

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