Kristin Scott Thomas wears Richard Quinn and Cartier
Kristin Scott Thomas has distinguished herself as a peerless performer in films from ‘The English Patient’ to ‘Darkest Hour’. As she stars in ‘Military Wives’, she speaks to Lydia Slater about her steely reputation, feminist spirit and finding strength in adversity
Why the hell,’ demands Kristin Scott Thomas indignantly, ‘should I be appealing? Why should I be pretty, and sweet, and kind, and nice, and have everybody love me? Why?’ To be perfectly honest, I had never imagined universal popularity to be a particular concern for Scott Thomas. The actress seems rather to revel in her Snow Queen image, admits she enjoys young people being frightened of her, and is not averse to showdowns with her directors. ‘I’m incredibly grumpy about lots and lots of things,’ she agrees with relish, as we are chauffeured through the winter sleet to our Town & Country photoshoot. ‘You’ll probably see some of that this morning!’
I am not young, but had I been faced with the forthright Dame even a year ago, I too might have been scared stiff. That I am instead enjoying every minute of her company is in part thanks to Phoebe Wallerbridge, who, last March, gave her an unforgettable cameo in Fleabag.
Playing Belinda, a successful, disaffected gay businesswoman, Scott Thomas delivered a trenchant speech in praise of the menopause, before rejecting Fleabag’s sexual advances. This brief screen outing went viral, and transformed Scott Thomas into the thinking woman’s national treasure. She had no idea that the role was going to have such an impact, she says. ‘But I knew this was something that a lot of women were just longing to get out there, because I was too,’ she says. ‘What’s so clever about Phoebe is she articulates these really buried feelings – she expresses what we’ve all been thinking about for ages. There is a freeing thing of not having to be appealing.’ This is when she launches into her diatribe, recalling an occasion she was instructed to be so by a director (who must have rued the day he opened his mouth). ‘I was so cross! That really rubbed me up the wrong way. It kicked something off in me.’
I should say immediately that at 59, without makeup and wearing glasses, Scott Thomas is still arrestingly beautiful. In her prime, she was devastating. Nevertheless, it is true that she hasn’t ever flung herself fully into the Hollywood game, nor portrayed straightforwardly sympathetic heroines. There is always a heart of darkness to every role she chooses – from cynical, lovelorn Fiona in Four Weddings and a Funeral, to the tempestuous and tragic Katharine Clifton in The English Patient, and charming yet steely Clementine Churchill in Darkest Hour. ‘I want people to like my characters because they can identify with them in some way, because of the naughty bit, the bad bit that is recognisable in each of us,’ she explains. ‘I think it’s sort of fun.’
Her latest outing is no exception. In Military Wives, she is Kate, a colonel’s imperious wife, who helps to establish a military wives’ choir as a way of coping both with her husband’s absences on tours of duty, and the death in battle of her soldier son. Sharon Horgan is a brilliant foil as the downtoearth spouse of the troop sergeant, with whom Kate battles for control of the choir. ‘I got on terribly well with Sharon,’ Scott Thomas enthuses. ‘She’s really good fun, and we were able to beat each other up in a friendly manner. What I love about her is that she knocks characters sideways a bit; she won’t give you an obvious interpretation of a line. She’s unafraid, as well, of the darkness.’
Scott Thomas hasn’t yet seen the film herself and is dismayed when I tell her that at the screening I attended, stifled sobs could be heard at its poignant ending (mine included). ‘There is sadness that you get through, but it’s also very funny and very sweet…’ she protests. ‘It has been my motor for a very long time, that you can have a catastrophe and it’s all right, you’ll be OK. That’s me telling myself that through different characters.’
Scott Thomas’ childhood is the source of her stiffupperlip approach to life and work. She herself was born into a service family, but navy rather than army. Her early childhood in Dorset was idyllic and outdoorsy: she remembers discovering her métier at the age of four while playing cowboys and Indians, and trying to collapse convincingly when she was shot.
But then her father Simon, a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm, was killed in a flying accident. (‘Waiting for someone to come back – I know what that’s like and it’s horrible,’ she said, visibly moved, in Channel 4’s recent fascinating documentary My Grandparents’ War, which covered the wartime heroism of her grandfather William, a naval commander.) Her mother Deborah remarried to another navy pilot, who was, with appalling symmetry, himself killed in a flying accident six years later, leaving her twicewidowed, with five children and in dire financial straits.
‘It’s a fairly banal catastrophe,’ says Scott Thomas, untruthfully, ‘but in a child’s life, as any specialist will tell you, losing a parent is the catastrophe. Abandonment, et cetera,’ she goes on selfdeprecatingly. ‘The reaction is to make you stronger. You’ve survived, and actually it isn’t all that bad.’
She is full of admiration for her mother: ‘She’s extraordinary… But I think it was very, very hard. There were quite basic questions of where are we going to live, how are we going to eat. People rallied round, and my mother was being very clever and fighting for every penny she could get from the MOD and all the rest of it… but it was a mess.’
Scott Thomas, who was sent away to boardingschool, found consolation in her classmates. ‘I just got on with it and at the time, I didn’t feel hard done by. It was what was going on, you had to deal with it. It was the 1970s, all sorts of disasters were going on and [other] parents dying.’
She seems indeed to have been remarkably self-sufficient; at 11, she was despatched to stay for weeks with a French family she had never met, despite barely speaking the language. ‘I did develop a taste for it. I loved the way they dressed, I loved the way they looked, I loved the music they listened to and the food they ate, I loved the smells…’ she says. Subsequently, a French penfriend was found for her, the daughter of an admiral. ‘I went on an exchange with her, and it went incredibly well, despite the fact that her father died three days after I got there.’
We both pause to consider this casual mention of a third suddenly deceased paterfamilias. ‘How extraordinary!’ she says. ‘I never thought about that before.’
Perhaps it’s less surprising than it might be that the pair have stayed friends ever since, and Scott Thomas is godmother to her friend’s son.
So when a 19-year-old Scott Thomas was denied a place on the acting course at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama, she took off for Paris and never looked back. There, she sailed into drama school and fell in love with a medical student, François Olivennes (who became a leading fertility expert); they married and had three children, Hannah, Joseph and George.
Scott Thomas’ innate sophistication and icy beauty resonated with the French in a similar manner to that of her compatriot Charlotte Rampling; her bilingual career flourished on both stage and screen, and she was even awarded the Légion d’honneur in 2005. No wonder she liked to say she felt more French than British.
Following her separation and divorce from her husband, however, she appeared to soften towards her native land. There were critically acclaimed stage roles in Chekhov’s Seagull and Pinter’s Betrayal. She moved back permanently to Britain in 2013 – she now has a house in north London – and the following year, starred in Sophocles’ Electra at the Old Vic. This last seems to have been a turning point for her. ‘I came full circle,’ she says. ‘Electra is all about abandonment, revenge, love for one’s father, fantasies about one’s father, all that psychological stuff, which I was quite happy to dig around in.’ Having exorcised those demons, she felt ready to move on. ‘I never want to do another tragedy in my life,’ she says.
Indeed, Scott Thomas seems both fulfilled and happy these days. She was made a Dame in 2015, and a few days before we meet, inaugurated a new and unexpected role as the honorary president of the Women’s Economic Forum (perhaps it’s the Fleabag effect again?).
‘I was very surprised to be approached, because I’m not particularly famous for my activism and I’d never really considered myself a feminist,’ she admits. ‘I really did assume that things had been dealt with by my parents’ generation – votes, bank accounts, equal pay – and having been brought up in a very female world, I wasn’t aware of quite how deep these things run and the unconscious bias.
‘But then I started to read what they sent me, and realised, oh, so that’s why I shout at the radio when I’m in the car! That’s why I get cross! Because I am a secret feminist.
I’m not just imagining it or being paranoid, this is actually happening.’ She admits there have been times when she was ‘absolutely spitting with rage’ at the way she was mistreated as a woman – ‘stupid things, like being spoken over, that we are faced with constantly and don’t even notice’.
Although Scott Thomas is keen to become more involved with promoting women’s rights, her screen career is also in the ascendant, after several years when she declared she was bored of making films. ‘Now I’ve got my groove back,’ she says. She stars as the sinister Mrs Danvers in the forthcoming adaptation of Rebecca, opposite Lily James as the second Mrs de Winter. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been in such a stylish film. The costumes are unbelievably beautiful – it’s going to be a feast!’
And she has just been offered a ‘thrilling’ part in an independent project that tells the true story of a female political activist who attempted to assassinate Mussolini. ‘It’s so nice to be offered something that isn’t a tragic mother, or an evil, scheming person,’ she says, brightly. Finally, there is the role with which she seems most delighted: that of a doting grandmother. Her daughter Hannah, who is a writer, now lives in Geneva with her family, and Scott Thomas talks to her two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter every day via Facetime. ‘She’s got chicken pox – she was showing me the spots on her tummy today, very proudly,’ she says. ‘Being Granny is such fun!’
She smiles happily at me; but alas, by now the car is bumping up the drive of the grand pillared mansion where our photographer and team are assembled, and she must once again don the cloak of frosty hauteur that has kept her safely enigmatic for so long. ‘Military Wives’ is released in cinemas on 6 March.