She's fun to be around, but Kristin Scott Thomas is also a tough character who likes to be challenged - even if it means locking horns with the gruff Paul Schrader, director of her latest film. She talks to Ryan Gilbey
For someone who wouldn't drop her guard if her life depended on it, Kristin Scott Thomas is fun to be around. The 47-year-old actress, raised in Cornwall but resident in Paris since she was 19, sits at a corner table in the restaurant at London's Claridge's hotel, wearing a white smock with chunky brown and turquoise beads. She's playfully combative, but she can also be suddenly, shockingly serious. When I ask if she thinks her new film, The Walker, is any good, she looks straight at me and says: "I haven't seen it. Do you want to carry on now I've told you that?" I mull it over and decide, on balance, not to storm out.
"I can tell you about shooting it," she offers helpfully. Then she gets very defensive: "There's not much point me talking about what the film is anyway, because I have nothing to do with that. I'm just the raw material." And finally, a dash of ebullience: "What did you think of the film? People have told me it's fantastic! I'd love to see it. They really should've set up a screening for me." Phew. And - relax.
Her sources are not just flattering her. The Walker, written and directed by Paul Schrader, is something to be proud of. Hers is a supporting part - the picture really belongs to Woody Harrelson as a gay "walker", or escort, to politicians' wives in Washington DC. But, as Lynn Lockner, one of these pet socialites, who draws him deeper into her life when her lover is murdered, Scott Thomas captures the sadness and sense of waste in a vibrant woman worn down by years of being ignored by her senator husband. "Lynn is frustrated that she has become an accessory," she explains. "She wants to be a normal person and be loved, and get back what she sacrificed for her husband's career."
SCOTT THOMAS GIVES the impression of needing to work with people who are her equals in toughness as well as talent; if this is so, she met her match in the famously gruff Schrader. On the day of her big scene - a showdown with Harrelson in a hotel room - she asked Schrader how he planned to shoot it. "He said, 'Well, we'll shoot Woody, then we'll turn around and do the complementary.' I said, 'That's me, is it? The complementary?'" She turns livid at the memory. "I had to stay concentrated, but I was fuming." Still, the scene went well, and the next day she asked Schrader for instructions on what to do during one of Harrelson's scenes. "Just be attentive and attractive," shrugged the director. "That's when I realised he was teasing," she laughs. "As he was walking away, he caught his head on the scrim, and I called out, 'Serves you bloody right!'" She adores that story.
"What I loved about Paul's script," she explains, "was that these people are lying all the time. That's what drew me to it - the idea of that double life, the weight of secrets. Lynn has to keep going whether she's terrified or heartbroken; she has to maintain her facade and hold things together. She's acting the whole time."
No one who is familiar with recent developments in Scott Thomas's life can possibly hear this talk of secrets and double lives without interpreting it as some kind of veiled confession. I'm sure she's not playing peekaboo here - it wouldn't be her style to drop hints about her personal life when she works so hard to purge her conversation of intimate details. And journalists know better than to ask. If there's one thing you learn from perusing nearly 20 years' worth of interviews with her, it's that you don't enquire about anything other than her work unless you want a cold response.
But the fact remains that she separated from her husband, François Oliviennes, with whom she has three children, after starting an affair in 2006 with Tobias Menzies, who was then her co-star in a London production of Pirandello's As You Desire Me. The tabloids got very excited because Menzies is 13 years her junior. Meanwhile, she moved out of the family home and installed herself in a Paris apartment.
All this has coincided with the most fruitful and unpredictable part of her career to date. I put it to her that there are three stages of Kristin Scott Thomas. She responds by arching an eyebrow and booming theatrically: "What dooo you mean?" Well, there was the interesting but obscure stage. This ran from the moment she landed her first film role straight out of drama school. She had toiled so hard to get there in the first place - after leaving London's Central School of Speech and Drama, where she was not allowed to switch from teaching to acting, she gained weight and fought depression, then worked as an au pair in Paris before her employer encouraged her to apply for the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Techniques du Théâtre. After graduating, she was picked by Prince in 1986 to be the romantic lead in Under the Cherry Moon (1986), a wretched film but a head-spinning experience.
"Whenever something wonderful happens to me, it's automatically downgraded because it's me," she admits. "But even so, it was like a fairytale. When I got the call, I'd been doing a Marguerite Duras play. In a field. In the rain." She hasn't stopped working since. This first stage included her chilly Lady Brenda in A Handful of Dust (1988) and a plucky turn in Roman Polanski's foolhardy erotic thriller Bitter Moon (1992). But her career back then is best encapsulated by something Scott Thomas overheard in a restaurant in the early 1990s. As she was getting up to leave, she said to a friend: "See you in a couple of months." A man at a nearby table muttered to his companion: "See you in your next obscure European film."
If this unidentified wiseacre ever returned to that restaurant, I hope they made him eat his words. In no time at all, the second stage of Kristin Scott Thomas was upon us, kick-started by Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), in which she was only the hero's friend, but was much sparkier than drippy old Andie MacDowell. But Scott Thomas has never been finer than she was in The English Patient (1996), where she did all sorts of exciting things: she got buried in a sandstorm and committed adultery with Ralph Fiennes, before being left to perish in a cave. She also pulled off one of the most poignant moments in modern cinema - walking away from Fiennes, and their affair, only to bang her head on scaffolding.
"The parts I've been most successful in are the ones I've desperately, desperately wanted," she explains. "One of them being Four Weddings. I couldn't think of anyone better for that part than me. And the other was The English Patient. Occasionally, you read scripts and, well, there you are on the page."
She leans forward conspiratorially. "And do you know what? I just missed one. A film that I'm convinced they should've hired me for. I can't tell you what it is. But I can't understand why I didn't get it. It's my first big defeat. I was like, 'Hold on a minute, that's mine!'"
The Oscar nomination she received for The English Patient led to glossy Hollywood projects in which she was called upon to get it on with men old enough to be her father - Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer (1998), Harrison Ford in Random Hearts (1999). And that was the end of stage two.
NOW, STAGE THREE finds her doing exactly as she jolly well pleases. She's nodding along in agreement. "Yes, that's it," she says. "After Random Hearts, I made a choice. That film and The Horse Whisperer took so long to make. I was just never at home. And I felt very out of place on those sets; everyone was so much older than me. Of course, I wanted to be top of people's lists. But I thought: What is the point of this? I wanted to have another child, anyway, so I told everyone I was taking a year off."
Her agents warned her that if she stopped working, she would be forgotten by Hollywood when she returned. "And I said, 'Oh, that's rubbish.' And, of course, it all dried up horribly." She lets out a grim laugh. "Within five minutes, you're nothing. Gone. It's so brutal." Then she hisses wickedly: "I love it!"
She can say that now because her career is going so swimmingly and shows every sign of carrying on in that manner. She stared Hollywood in the face, decided it didn't matter that much, and plumped for something else instead: quality, integrity, fun.
I'd say the third stage of Kristin Scott Thomas began, triumphantly, with Gosford Park (2001), in which she trooped around a country house being bitchy to everyone and kicking dogs. "I'd been wondering when Robert Altman was going to call," she sighs. "When the script arrived, I looked at the character's name - Lady Sylvia McCordle - and thought: 'Oh no. Why can't I be the governess or something?' But it was such a wonderful part."
Since she ticked Altman off her list, she's been waiting for Woody Allen to get in touch. "I wish he'd wake up and smell the coffee. But he's quite contrary, isn't he?" I don't think she needs Woody. Who does, these days? Her recent career choices have made Scott Thomas the new Charlotte Rampling. She's finally getting to do the stage work that she says she craved from the start (she was in The Seagull at London's Royal Court Theatre earlier this year). And she can currently be seen in the hit French thriller Tell No One, about a man who is contacted by his supposedly dead wife. "I can't believe how well it's doing!" she hoots, throwing herself back on the banquette. "I get stopped on trains by people who say: 'Oooh, you're in Tell No One.' My response tends to be: 'Hang on. It's a French film. With subtitles. And we're in Peterborough'."
The Walker is on release