THE IMPATIENT ENGLISH WOMAN
The Kristin Scott Thomas Interview by Paul Fischer
Once
the very epitome of aloof Englishness, Kristin Scott Thomas has emerged
as an unlikely Hollywood star - unlikely and unwilling being the operative adjectives
here. Now starring as a Washington senator who discovers that her late husband
was having an affair with Harrison Ford's late wife, in the new Random
Hearts, Paul Fischer met the Brit in Los Angeles.
It seems that petite English actress-cum-Parisian resident Kristin Scott Thomas, would prefer to be anywhere but a Beverly Hills hotel room on a publicity tour. She giggles a lot to hide her nervousness. "It's not my thing at all", she says shyly. Known for her diverse work on films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and The English Patient, Scott Thomas is starring in her second American-shot outing, following her turn in The Horse Whisperer. Hollywood stardom may have reared its ugly head, but the demure actress denies it's changed her that much." I don't think so," she says with a degree of hesitation. "Others may disagree. I'm still quite jolly on set. I just love it. I'm a terrible show-off, I suppose." She pauses to choose the right words. "I've got a little bit more short-tempered now." Scott Thomas also spends her time between takes "gossipping an awful lot and doing a little tapestry. What I don't do is lie on the floor, deep breathe and sing." At 39, one can say that in an industry dominated by the young, she has left it late in the day to embark upon a career as a leading Hollywood actress, but on screen, as in director Sydney Pollack's assured romantic drama Random Hearts, Scott Thomas is radiant on film, and always has been.
She can hardly be defined as a newcomer of course, having notched up a reputation as one of Britain's most dominating character actresses in several low-budget films. She also played what she rightly calls "the best female role" in Four Weddings and a Funeral, as dignified, rejected Fiona, and garnered a best actress Oscar® nomination as the seductive Katharine Clifton in The English Patient, who is fetched up in the desert for a doomed affair with Ralph Fiennes. Yet Scott Thomas was a controversial choice to play Katharine. Director Anthony Minghella insisted on her, though executives at Twentieth Century Fox wanted a bigger, if less suitable, name - someone like Demi Moore. So opposed to Scott Thomas were the execs at Fox, they dropped The English Patient completely.
Having triumphantly vindicated Minghella's faith, she's now a Hollywood leading lady in her own right, and made an auspicious American-shot debut in Robert Redford's The Horse Whisperer, and now stars opposite Harrison Ford in veteran director Sydney Pollack's $70 million dollar Random Hearts.
The
two experiences were quite different. "Horse Whisperer was my first American experience,
and now working with Sydney on Random Hearts, has confirmed that the American
style is different. When you're in England, you've got to make it as different
from you as possible, so you've really got to pretend. In America, on the
other hand, you've got to open up more and use what you've got in yourself, which
I guess is based on the Method."
Random Hearts is based on the complex bestselling novel in which Scott Thomas plays a Washington congresswoman who discovers that her recently deceased husband, who'd been killed in a plane crash, was having an affair with the equally dead wife of an Internal Affairs cop, played by Harrison Ford. It's a film that explores the nature of trust and truth, in the least mainstream film to emerge out of Hollywood in years.
It also allowed Scott Thomas to play an American politician and learn about the political process. "Of course I knew absolutely nothing about American politics when I went into this", she says laughingly. "I had to go and read a book, and still found it hard to fathom it all." But the politics, she adds, was the least important area she needed to focus on. "I needed to concentrate on what the story is about, so that's what I did: I stopped and moved on, and started thinking more about the character, rather than what she did for a living."
One
of the most complex issues in the film is that of trust. There's a key scene when
Ford's cop asks Scott Thomas' character whether she was glad the plane, featuring
their spouses, went down. One wonders whether the actress needed to ask that question
herself in playing the character. "I think you love what you have, and I think
she probably did love her husband, which is perhaps why she can't cope with the
relationship that's happening right now with Ford's character." Random Hearts
may well be a big studio film, but with its opened-ended conclusion and emotional
complexity, it's hardly the stuff of mainstream Hollywood, making it a comparatively
tough sell. Scott Thomas tends to agree. "There are some pretty rough moments
in this movie; I think there are some pretty shocking elements to it. It's also
a very strong film, as well as very moving. You tend to get caught of your guard
by it as well. It's not like: a + b + c = happy ending. It's not at all like that."
This character is one of a series of strong women Scott Thomas has brought to the screen, an anomaly in terms of American cinema, but admits that those parts still remain hard to come by. "The one thing I do not want to be in, is a film in which I'm someone there to make men look good, muscularly and strong." That doesn't happen to be the case in Random Hearts, but what does happen, is that her co-star is 20 years her senior (and Redford was slightly more so in The Horse Whisperer). It seems that it's fashionable for today's veteran male stars to share love scenes with much younger women. The message, according to a laconic Scott Thomas is clear: "Movies make you immortal and ageless."
Success has come relatively fast for the actress, and she has no doubt that she has stepped over a threshold. "It happened overnight, as soon as I got the Oscar nomination. It was extraordinary, weird, and I was offered The Horse Whisperer right away."
Born and raised in the English town of Dorset, her childhood there was punctuated by tragedy. When she was five her father, a Fleet Air Arm pilot, died in a plane crash. Her mother married another pilot; six years later he too died in similar circumstances. Within days, she was put on a train bound for Cheltenham Ladies' College, where she boarded. "I shouldn't have gone there," she once recalled. "I just needed to be at home. But everyone thought they were doing the right thing."
After Cheltenham, Scott Thomas spent a year at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, only to be told abruptly that she simply could not act. Disheartened, she headed to Paris to become an au pair; then things got better. At an evening acting class she met a young doctor whom she married when she was 21, while he has become one of France's most eminent infertility specialists. With their children, aged 11 and seven, Scott Thomas continues to make Paris her home, and rarely takes her children to work. "I don't think it's good for them, and unless we're nearby working, I never take them with me."
To get away from lengthy, high-budget Hollywood shoots, Scott Thomas spent this year's European summer in Tuscany shooting the more low-budget Up at the Villa, adapted from a Somerset Maugham novella. Here she'll be seen as a capricious widow who enjoys dalliances in 1930s Italy with Sean Penn as an American playboy, James Fox as a kindly older diplomat and Jeremy Davies as a love-struck young Austrian refugee. "Bit of revenge, this role," she explains laughingly. "It's not a case of the guy gets the girl, but the other way round. This girl gets the guys. All three of them." And having spent five arduous months making Random Hearts, she says that she looks forward "to making a smaller film again."
Copyright © 1999 Paul Fischer. All Rights Reserved.