Dame Kristin: I was groped but they sacked ME for being rude
DAME Kristin Scott Thomas has revealed that she was groped as an aspiring actress – and fired when she retaliated.
Years before the #MeToo movement transformed showbusiness, the actress was working as a waitress while studying at drama school in Paris.
‘One of the clients grabbed my a***,’ she told Telegraph Magazine.
‘I was rude to him. He reported me and I got fired. But I believed I had done something wrong.’
Likening the experience to the knowledge that it was accepted for much of her career that her male co-stars were paid more than her, she added: ‘I started thinking about it, and, actually, that really p **** s me off, when I find out that someone who does the same job as me got paid more because he has a penis.’
She added: ‘I have come to realise that the subject of equality, and all that implies, is something that has to be addressed every day by everybody.’ Dame Kristin, who turns 60 in May, said that she was bullied as a teenager while trying to break into the acting profession for being ‘posh totty’. ‘It was very uncool to be middleclass at the time, so I got bullied because of the way I spoke,’ said the star of films including Four Weddings And A Funeral and The English Patient.
‘It was horrible. One or two people, mature students, were super mean. “Just because you are born with a silver spoon in your mouth,” they would say.’ Her father, a naval pilot, died in a flying accident when she was five.
Her mother, Deborah, remarried another pilot, who also died when Dame Kristin was 11.
She has drawn on her childhood experiences for her latest role in Military Wives, a film about a group of women who start a choir while their partners are away serving in Afghanistan.
Her two stepbrothers served in Iraq and Afghanistan and she called on them for guidance on the role.