KRISTIN SCOTT THOMAS:
“turning 60 is rather fabulous”
Dame Kristin Scott Thomas is known for playing frosty, posh Brits but behind the aristocratic cheekbones, Louise Gannon meets the real KST, who learned her craft in France, loves babies and laughing, and refuses to reveal the name of the lady who keeps her skin so radiant.
Kristin Scott Thomas has a reputation for being an ice queen of the movie industry. As an actress she has immortalised those particular roles which require a certain aloofness and hauteur. Her breakthrough came in 1994 in Four Weddings and a Funeral when she played the acerbic Fiona, who is madly in love with the hapless Charles (Hugh Grant) but too proud to let him know how she feels. She went on to star opposite Robert Redford as the powerful, successful-but-broken Annie MacLean in The Horse Whisperer, and then as a frosty, married congresswoman who falls for a tough police detective (Harrison Ford) in Random Hearts. But it was as the brilliant, complicated, Katharine in The English Patient in 1996 – where her steamy affair with Ralph Fiennes won her multiple award nominations, including an Oscar – that she really put her mark on Hollywood.
Now 59, Kristin has never played the Hollywood game. She cannot bear Los Angeles (“Who would want to actually live there?”) and has spent much of her life in France. She is not a fan of social media (“I do have an official Twitter account but it is for work purposes,” she says. “I think we should be aware that social media can be as dangerous as it is useful.”) And she has never really cared what people think of her.
Hugh Grant famously remarked she had to be “warmed up” every morning on set, and in interviews she is infamous for refusing to suffer foolish or intrusive questions, and happier to sit in chilly silence. She has been known to launch withering attacks on “vulgar” girls with fake tans and short skirts. She is a woman who knows her own mind. I have been warned.
In her latest movie role in Military Wives, true to form, Kristin plays
a stiff, posh, emotionally frozen colonel’s wife in a film based on the true-life story of the partners of British soldiers who formed a choir to help them deal with the pain of separation from their loved ones. Their success – appearing on television and having a chart-topping album – inspired similar choirs on bases all over the world, including 12 Military Wives Choirs in Australia.
Military Wives is a feel-good, tearjerker of a movie from the makers of The Full Monty and, as usual, Kristin’s performance is flawless and cleverly nuanced. As Kate, whose teenage son died in conflict, she takes it upon herself to help the other military wives forget about their worries when their men are deployed to Afghanistan, and she does so by leading them in a choir. Except no one really likes her, including the wine-chugging, popular staff sergeant’s wife, played by Sharon Horgan, who wants to sing the Beatles rather than Beethoven, and pop songs instead of hymns.
It is as much the story of their unexpected friendship, and the journey of these unsung heroines of combat, which makes the film such a must-see, heart-warming movie. But as ever, it is the story of Kristin playing a singular woman who is not part of the crowd.
We meet in the suite of an upmarket London hotel. Kristin is wearing a long, heavy, black and white tweed coat that is fully buttoned-up over elegant black dress trousers, black leather high heels and a crisp, classic white shirt. Her highlighted chestnut hair, cut in the same voguish bob she has worn it in for the past four decades, is salon perfect.
She is pencil-slim but it’s her face that stops you in your tracks – the transparent skin, those high, aristocratic cheekbones, the hooded grey-green eyes under arched eyebrows and the wide, symmetrical mouth which is, right now, shaped into a surprisingly welcoming smile. Many, many words have been used to describe Kristin’s enduring beauty. This year she will be 60, but still the sensual-woman parts keep coming – most recently as actress Phoebe Waller Bridge’s ultimate girl-crush in the black comedy, Fleabag. Fashionistas regularly vote her the most stylish woman in the world.
You wonder how it must feel to be universally feted. She gives me a sideways look then laughs. “Oh, I’ve just got one of those faces which works in front of a camera. From any angle and any distance, you will always see my eyes and my nose. I’ve grown into my face. I was never considered anything special as a child or as a teenager, but somehow I was given this gift of having a certain beauty which appeals to people on a screen.
“It doesn’t make me think: ‘Gosh, aren’t I wonderful?’ I understand it’s because I work in an industry where there are a lot of people happy to pay an awful lot of attention to making me look as good as possible. Offscreen, away from everyone, I can melt away and be invisible. And there are plenty of moments when I look in the mirror and think, ‘Ugh’. And then I quickly look away. Things aren’t always as they appear.”
Right now, Kristin – or KST as she’s known to her friends – is not quite living up to her reputation. True, she won’t “go personal”. There is no hint of whether or not she is in a relationship (since her divorce 11 years ago from François Olivennes, the Paris-based obstetrician and gynaecologist, Kristin has been linked to Game of Thrones actor Tobias Menzies and the multimillionaire financier Arpad Busson). But she laughs a lot, and coos over tales of her two-year-old granddaughter by her daughter, Hannah, 30, the eldest of her three children (along with Joseph, 27, and 19-year-old George).
“Oh God, I love babies,” she says,
dramatically. “I just love them. I have her to stay with me and we have the most tremendous fun. I can spoil her, I can be strict. But as a grandmother you don’t have that constant fear of ‘am I doing this right?’ that you do as a mother. And she behaves so well for me. She sleeps, she eats, she listens. My daughter can’t believe it, and I never imagined having a grandchild would change my life so completely.”
It is appropriate we are talking about family because in so many ways, Military Wives is all about family to her. To understand Kristin Scott Thomas is to understand her past. She, like Kate, came from a military family going back two generations. And like Kate, Kristin grew up on a military base; hers was in Dorset, England.
It is not an easy past and it is only now, she admits, that she is ready to start going back to memories both poignant and painful. “I think this is something that we almost unconsciously do when we get older. I have friends – Jane Birkin, Charlotte Rampling – who also did the same. Something almost outside of you drives you back there.”
Military Wives and a documentary series called My Grandparents’ War were what drove her back there. She discovered that her quiet, reserved grandfather, Thomas, was a military hero whose brave command of a destroyer ship, HMS Impulsive, saved the lives of thousands of troops from Dunkirk. He was also awarded a Distinguished Service Cross for laying mines across an enemy minefield. “And he never said anything to us about any of it when he was alive,” she says. “We didn’t talk about it. We didn’t talk about any of it.”
Grief and tragedy were forever wrapped in silence. She was five and at the military base when her pregnant mother, Deborah, told her that her father, Simon, had been killed in his fighter plane during a Cold War training mission. Six years later – after her mother had remarried and had a fifth child – her second husband, who was also a Royal Navy pilot, was killed in another flying accident. Again, there was no weeping or wailing.
Within a year, a decision was made for Kristin to go to boarding school, and there she felt lonely and abandoned.
She has talked about a desperate feeling of sadness as a child, but it was something she kept hidden. I ask her why, and she answers simply: “It was just the way things were. I was a child of the ’70s. It was different times then because you just didn’t go around screaming and shouting.
“And before I was even an adult I had lost two key people in my life. I had one left: my mother. I didn’t want to scream and rage at my mother because I could not risk losing her from my life. So you close down and keep it all contained. It was what
I was used to. I understood the need for silence, the need to just keep on.”
It was this aspect of Kate she completely understood. “I don’t think I’m like her in any way,” she says. “She lost a child, which is something I just cannot comprehend, and something
“I was never considered anything special as a child.”
– thank God – that has never happened to me. But I do totally see the way she coped was by keeping busy, by pushing all those emotions down. It’s not a very fashionable way to deal with life, but it’s the way many of us deal with things that happen to us. You just carry on.”
In her teens and early 20s, Kristin was a lost soul. Miserable at school, she trained to be a drama teacher and then realised that what she really wanted to do was act, but was “kicked off my course for being useless”, she says. “I wasn’t going in to lessons.
I was unhappy. Useless.” At 19, she began working in Paris as an au pair for a couple who worked in the opera world. “One day, the mum asked me what I wanted to do. I mumbled that I wanted to be an actress but I knew it was a laughable ambition because it was never going to happen.
“She just stopped me and told me never to think like that, and if that was what I wanted then that was what I must do.” She pauses, looks at her hand for a moment and then says, “It was probably the first time in my life I felt that there was someone who actually believed things were possible, and that not everything was going to
“I had to do a lot of work on myself to get to where I am.”
end in disaster. It sounds silly but it was a real follow-your-dreams, believe-in-yourself moment. And it changed everything. I studied acting in France and started working.”
I ask her why she, a girl who spent her whole life keeping all her emotions so bottled up, wanted to become an actress, and she pauses for a moment to think.
“It’s simple really,” she says. “I wanted to be other people.” Then she corrects herself. “Actually, I wanted to know what it was like to be other people, to escape from being me, to try on someone else’s shoes.” She pauses again. “And to walk out on stage was – still is – terrifying. But each time you do it, you feel you have done something quite brave. Not brave like my grandfather. Brave for the person you really are underneath.”
She has said, in the past, she has been too typecast in these uptight, ice-queen roles, but today Kristin seems far more relaxed about life. We talk about depression, something she suffered from until 15 years ago. “It’s not a state of mind, it’s an illness,” she says. “It’s a crippling thing to go through. Nothing people say to you can change the way you see yourself and the world. People can say you are beautiful, they can say you are wonderful. It means nothing. I suffered from it on and off for years.”
Did she have therapy, I ask. She nods. “I had to do a lot of work on myself to get to where I am now. You have to do it. Hard work. And then you start to get through it and come out the other side.”
On paper she has ticked all the boxes: marriage, a career, a family and financial success. Her marriage to François lasted 18 years and they have three children – and their granddaughter – together. She has, in the past few years, moved back from France to Britain. Does she consider herself more French than English? She laughs. “When I’m in England, I miss France. In France, I miss England. I think I dress like a French woman, and I’ve learnt a lot from French women. I have an amazing lady who looks after my face. I have been going to her for years and she keeps it looking far better than it should with these facial massages which are incredibly painful but have unbelievable effects. And like all French women, I keep her name secret otherwise I’ll no longer be able to get an appointment.”
Family, she says more softly, is the thing that keeps her anchored in life. In Military Wives, the power of family – however dysfunctional – is one of the core tenets which rings true with Kristin.
“I am very, very close to my family,” she says. “My mother is still alive, which is wonderful, and of everything I ever did, being a mother myself has been pretty remarkable. I don’t think I ever thought I was doing a good job. I worked a lot but my children were always on my mind. They are all lovely and I’m so very proud of them.”
The idea that she will turn 60 in May, is “rather fabulous”. “Life for me has been a process of getting better, getting more relaxed and becoming happier,” she says. “I love getting older. It’s a gift. In an ideal world I would spend my days with my family in a French orchard, eating good French food, laughing and talking and holding my granddaughter on my knee. What could be better?”
A happy-ever-after ending. AWW
Military Wives opens on March 12.