kristin scott thomas kinder
"I think she has been realising, since then, what she is capable of. Did this dent her confidence? The Oscar nomination she received for The English Patient led to Hollywood films in which she became the romantic interest of men about twice her age – Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer, Harrison Ford in Random Hearts. Playing in The Seagull on Broadway was very empowering for her, and in some ways I'd say it allowed her to do these extraordinary films like I've Loved You So Long. All the while, she was finding ways to make sense of her grief, thinking of "advantages" to what had happened to her, such as "at least I never saw my parents argue, and at least it was quick, and at least there was no thinking, is he going to die, is he going to die, is he going to die? British-French actress Kristin Scott Thomas poses during the photocall ahead of the Dior Women's Spring-Summer 2020/2021 Haute Couture collection … Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Observer. It's strange having watched it because there are bits of the play, certain lines where I can hear exactly her voice as he must have remembered it. Kristin Scott Thomas as Aunt Mimi and Aaron Johnson as John Lennon in Nowhere Boy. ", She certainly does, and she seems settled too. I can't tell you how fantastic that is. And of course the Dame looked super stylish … I wanted to have a real life, rather than a pretend life. Kristin Scott Thomas is back on the London stage in Harold Pinter's Betrayal. And as a 23-year-old actress it was very, very important. Or that she seared through the screen as Juliette in I've Loved You So Long, as a child-killer just released from prison. We had a psychoanalyst in for a session, we went to see Pinter's widow, Antonia Fraser… Kristin responds with great intelligence to all of that." "Yes," she says. One way of looking at the progression of Scott Thomas's own career is as something of a comparable journey (though she started from a far more liberated place). I'm just worried about people. ", The character Scott Thomas plays in Betrayal, Rickson says, is perfect for her because "she has a deep yearning for fulfilment, and she has been open to all of the ways we have looked at it. Her father was a pilot for the British Royal Navy and died in a flying accident in 1964. If anyone says 'Let's have a girls' night out', I will run in the opposite direction." It's that cliche, what are you most proud of? It is about trusting your imagination. - Premiere Of "Il Y A Longtemps Que Je T'Aime" - Arrivals - TIFF 2008 Is she surprised by how popular Botox is among actors, a group of people who do, after all, need to be able to move their faces? ", She dates that escape from her own "image" instead to the first time she stepped on to a major stage, to play Racine's Berenice, in Paris in 2002. ", She separated from her husband in 2005 and is now divorced, but there was a time, years back, when they toyed with moving to Los Angeles. So very bright and attractive. The acclaimed Cornish actress Dame Kristin Scott Thomas was born in Redruth, Cornwall, to Deborah (Hurlbatt) and Lieutenant Commander Simon Scott Thomas. Her father was a pilot for the British Royal Navy and died in a flying accident in 1964. Most of her interviewers over the years have explained her capacity for scene stealing, for always drawing your eye to her in a crowd, in terms of her cheekbones, the way the camera loves them. This play has proved telling for her in that sense. Jodie Foster. "Normally you go in to a scene charged with the emotion of the scene before," she says, "but here you have to sort of uncharge things all the time. . International Women’s Day: Stars share their words of wisdom, from Kristin Scott Thomas and Tayari Jones to Ella Eyre and Kathy Burke. . I have been a very, very sad person in my life, but I'm not any more.". Then her life took a turn. She played the romantic foil to Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer, to Harrison Ford in Sydney Pollack's Random Hearts – and then she dropped it all and did a tour of Racine's drama Bérénice around France. When I meet Scott Thomas for lunch in a break from rehearsals she is full of the complications that this back-to-front narrative presents, and also characteristically anxious to work her way toward a resolution. Two extraordinary films in the past few years – both in French – have seen her play first a woman trying to piece together reality having spent 15 years in prison (I've Loved You So Long) and subsequently a wife who abandons oppressive bourgeois domesticity for a life of precarious lust with her builder (Leaving). Who knows, when you write this, I may be down in the doldrums again. "I don't think it was a parent literally, in my case," she says, "but you are certainly acting to please an authority in some way. I mean, I may have been terrified, but I still did it. No editor was going to work it out. In an effort to cope, her mother packed Kristin off to boarding school, where she was left to make sense of the losses on her own. Kristin Scott Thomas as Aunt Mimi and Aaron Johnson as John Lennon in Nowhere Boy. Her father, a Naval pilot, was killed in a crash when she was five. They think we're sexy." Even for a woman who suggests that her acting has always been driven by a need to scare herself, it was the most terrifying thing she had ever done. Acting looked like one way of expressing emotions that were not talked about. But every time you do something, and it works, you're getting braver and braver. She thinks she "would be a basket case" if she had moved there, partly because of the pressure to have cosmetic surgery. The insecurity is a surprise in the woman whom the producer Harvey Weinstein described as one of the greatest actresses of her generation; who has been nominated for an Oscar and won a Bafta; who has the sculpted, refined beauty of a Klimt or De Lempicka, and is also warm and funny. "It's all all over now," she says determinedly, when I ask about her sense of absence. ", The actress herself describes rehearsal as one of the most consuming experiences she has had. ", Did she find it boring playing love interests? The acclaimed Cornish actress Dame Kristin Scott Thomas was born in Redruth, Cornwall, to Deborah (Hurlbatt) and Lieutenant Commander Simon Scott Thomas. Negotiating the same problems. "Which one shall we have today? "Completely. Harold Pinter's play Betrayal, in which Kristin Scott Thomas is about to star at the Comedy theatre in London, explores a love affair lived backwards. I didn't run out. So why does she do it? "I don't think the change is about being single at all," she says. "Is it middle age? But partly I think it is growing older, growing up. "I just get really worried about things. Or that she has won superlative reviews for pretty much all her films, from the very good (The English Patient, Gosford Park) to the rather bad (Bitter Moon, Confessions of a Shopaholic, Easy Virtue). I mean my father was killed when I was six. ", "Yes," she says quickly, "but only a very little bit. She's referring to the death of her father when she was four, and that of her stepfather six years later. "I think people here have seen her coded by class too often, but this play does not carry those kinds of codes. She always used to be a dreamer as a child, "always on planet Kristin, miles away, dreaming about running down Normandy beaches into the arms of Monsieur Whoever." "I really felt I'd burned out . Sky News speaks to Kristin Scott Thomas, who stars in a new adaptation of Daphne du … In-demand star Kristin Scott Thomas campaigned to win the role of the icy housekeeper Mrs Danvers in Ben Wheatley's new adaptation of Rebecca for Netflix. She opens a gallery. "Keep away. "When you go from the age of eight to 18, just girls, that's enough, thank you. To say: 'This is me playing this character. Kristin Scott Thomas appears on the latest episode of Graham Norton, promoting her new film Rebecca. "The thing I now cherish most," she says, "is this: I speak two languages. I ask whether she is a happy person, and she says, "I think I am now, yeah. There was a flurry of tabloid stories when she split up with Olivennes and was briefly linked with a "toyboy" actor some years her junior, but if she has a romance at the moment, she's not telling. It's sobering to think that you can look after a child for six years and then cop it, and they will hardly remember you at all.". I could see it in them. JEREMY Clarkson has been left “heartbroken” after his crush Kristin Scott Thomas unfollowed him on Instagram. "But anyway after a night or two I had a revelation, which was just this: I could do it by myself. It was an opportunity to reappraise Mimi, she says, because "she got a bad rap, really. Kristin, 59, whose episode airs tomorrow, grew up in a naval family. But the great thing about doing theatre is that people just see you as human, not this vast image. Kristin's grandad, Lt Cdr William Scott Thomas, was the captain of destroyer HMS Impulsive. I mean we all deny it like crazy but deep down there is always that voice saying you should be at home." I had got to the point where I was really fed up with playing characters who were quietly tearing their hearts out, and I wanted to do something less constraining. 76.4k Followers, 199 Following, 740 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Kristin Scott Thomas (@kristinscottthomas) I can make films in France and do theatre over here. And then I was going to move over there and they were all going to watch me. Kristin Scott Thomas is back on the London stage in Harold Pinter's Betrayal. Scott Thomas can remember the exact moment that she decided to become an actor, "because I was about four, and I was playing cowboys and Indians. Particularly French comedy, which I know sounds like a contradiction in terms.". When I speak to him subsequently he describes almost breathlessly how he "absolutely loves rehearsing with her… She is like a sort of concert violinist," he says, "or how I imagine a concert violinist to be, with this enormous ability to keep going at a part, really mining something, always looking for more." Only lately have I thought of it more as what it could be like as a play. In the past, Rickson suggests, Scott Thomas has sometimes been too easily defined by her bone structure and her Cheltenham ladies' college accent. You lose that progression with which we make sense of things, so it's more like shards of people's lives strung together.". She is here to talk about her latest film, Nowhere Boy, in which she plays John Lennon's Aunt Mimi, a woman defined by her repression, her stiffness; for much of the film it is not clear whether she has her nephew's best interests at heart at all, though you warm to her by the end. Not on my patch. It was a very unnerving situation for me having to say no to Harold Pinter, though. - Premiere Of "Il Y A Longtemps Que Je T'Aime" - Arrivals - TIFF 2008 This time, though, she had no hesitation. I suggest that other actresses need to learn French. Kristin Scott Thomas is a flawless Mrs Danvers in Ben Wheatley’s conventional take on the Du Maurier classic Published: 18 Oct 2020 . "I met Harold for the first time years ago when he was going to direct Ashes to Ashes in Paris. British/French actress. You know my mascara is down here, and my nose is running. "When I was starting out, it was such a defining thing for me as an actress, it was a huge part of who I was. "Yeah. I'm not going to move to London, but just my own bed here would be good.". Her two older children – Hannah, in her early 20s, and Joseph, in his late teens – have moved to Britain, and she lives in Paris with her youngest son, George, who is nine, and enjoys taking him to school, and walking their dog, and seeing friends. No camera was going to help. Sun 20 Dec 2009 19.05 EST. ", She went to board at Cheltenham Ladies College when she was eight – she didn't particularly enjoy the academic side of it, and wasn't won over by single-sex education. "I do feel that," she says. "It's the kind of thing I fantasise about when looking out of a train window, anyway. "I don't know about that," she says, "I just want to have fun. she asks. Keep out. Suzanne "Dame Kristin Scott Thomas" is a well to do married mother, but her bourgeois lifestyle gets her down and she decides to go back to work as a physiotherapist by building an office in their backyard. And not always having to tell everyone all the time who you are through your characters. But the braver you get, the more interesting it becomes, and the possibilities become wider, and," she pauses, "well, you're less afraid of making a complete fool of yourself, I suppose. I'd love to do some comedy. Robert Redford's took six months, Sydney Pollack's took five months, and I'd been asked to do this Bérénice, and I was off. There is a star system of sorts but it is much less arsey.". British/French actress. Five years later her mother's second husband, her stepfather, died in almost identical circumstances. For someone who has spoken openly about having suffered with depression, and attended psychoanalysis, she seems in great shape. She wanted to cross over to the acting course, but was told that she wasn't talented enough; if she wanted to play Lady Macbeth, they said, she'd have to join an amateur dramatics group. And it's like: thank God for that. I didn't pretend I was sick! Was it a conscious decision to step away from her film career? I'm sort of liberated from expectation." One of the things that has been extraordinary for me is seeing my eldest children become adult-ish. Everybody knows something about that." It is odd to hear Scott Thomas talk of her younger self in this kind of disarming way, I guess because on screen she mostly never appears less than entirely self-assured. It was an astute response. She is thankful for the fact that "there are usually six of us in the rehearsal room including two other women, because we find we are talking all the time about our own betrayals… not necessarily in the same circumstances, like adultery, but all the times you let people down, in friendships, in family, that kind of hurt. Kristin Scott Thomas on the 'foul' woman she's been waiting to play. For a memory of something gone, something lost. For those admirers of the actress who feared she would spend her career playing buttoned-up and increasingly remote English women of a certain class the sudden broadening of range has been startling. One of the things that has disappeared with that feeling, probably not coincidentally, is the debilitating depression that Scott Thomas was plagued by, from time to time, as a younger woman and of which she has spoken eloquently in the past. I didn't fall over. "I often have fantasies about giving up and going off and doing something completely different. But I had no confidence anyway. . You know," she starts talking through the side of her mouth, "it's all a fluke, what am I doing here, they're going to find out in a minute." In her more recent films she seems able to play that ability off against a new kind of vulnerability. Does she recognise that shift? November 21 2008, by: Chris Hewitt, "Actress Kristin Scott Thomas Is at Her Wits' E" The Washington Post (US) November 17 2008, Vol. Because she did have an abrasive nature, but there's so much love in that woman. I think that's really typical of children who grow up with only one parent. Scott Thomas was born in Redruth, Cornwall.Her mother, Deborah (née Hurlbatt), was brought up in Hong Kong and Africa, and studied drama before marrying Kristin's father, Lieutenant Commander Simon Scott Thomas, a pilot in the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm who died in a flying accident when Kristin was aged five. Would she ever contemplate coming back to live in England? All of those things. "Just the way that we look is such a brilliant piece of casting," says Scott Thomas, who is now 49, "because you get my really sharp, thin, papery kind of face, and Anne-Marie's luscious, fecund face. It upsets me.". Review: Kristin Scott Thomas in Electra, Old Vic Theatre The star attraction is Kristin Scott Thomas in the central role and she certainly is a commanding presence on the stage. Because it's all very well, telling stories, but unless you can fuel them with some proper experience . Emma Thompson. ", Scott Thomas talks with affection of Pinter, whom she met several times in Paris. For a while, her success meant that she became cast in a succession of limiting roles. My neighbour pretended to shoot me and I fell to the ground and, as a good Catholic, I tried to fall in the shape of Jesus [on the cross]. "Not at all," she says. "No. There is less wastage, of time or money like there often is in Hollywood. In Vogue 's January issue, Giles Hattersley met a woman reborn as she returns to the big screen as a vivacious Clementine Churchill. Partly, she says, doing this play makes good an old disappointment. It's her own thing and her own space and she does it for herself.". "I can see why she was such a lure for Harold," she says. I don't feel the need for that any more.". Unofficial fanpage. Kristen Scott-Thomas, that doyen of actresses who habitually play hard-faced, toffee-nosed, upper-class English aristos, here takes the role of an ex-pat Parisian doctor, randomly kidnapped by a man she doesn't appear to recognize and who gradually begins to gain some semblance of humility when it appears that the reasons for her abduction are those of revenge. It is a temptation, though, that she firmly resists. "Now," she is scrupulously kind about everyone she's ever worked with, "playing a love interest can be really thrilling, if you're working opposite thrilling people. She thinks about that for a moment, and then, after a brief pause, she heads back to work. Rebecca review – perfectly watchable romp. When Scott Thomas arrives, she slips into the booth, and fixes me with an expression that's not scary, but wary, eyes framed with a frown. By Giles Hattersley 10 January 2018. unless you can sit on a bus and know what it feels like to sit on a bus, then you develop a weird take on life. Still, there are these nerves. "Paris is home. But I like to be busy, too." . Years and years of psychoanalysis helped of course. Cate Blanchett. "But then," she says, "I have never met a woman who works who doesn't feel guilty. I just wanted to be at home. Go and join a community and wear an orange robe and live on a hill and watch the sun set, that sort of thing.". I didn't like that. And I really love to make films in France because they have really great women's roles, still. "I was used to cinema questions – you know, 'what's it like to work with Robert Redford? She grew up in Dorset, the eldest of five children; when she was six, her father, a commander in the Fleet Air Arm was killed in a plane crash. 13 talking about this. Having been, aged 24, plucked out of drama school by Prince, of all people, to play opposite him in his vanity movie Under the Cherry Moon, Scott Thomas had made 60-odd films and never really been off screen. She has a nervous, self-conscious habit of appending her own comments with "she says", as in "you're too young to have seen A Handful of Dust – she says in a very grand dame kind of way". But she discovered, living in Paris, that she had a great advantage over other "English" actresses who had gone to America. ", Kristin Scott Thomas on self-belief, not being on the right list in Hollywood and playing John Lennon's Aunt Mimi in her latest film, Kristin Scott Thomas: 'I've been a very sad person, but I'm not any more'. But you can still look fabulous. I had that in spades. And it's always your children…", Her youngest son, who is 11, is back at home in Paris, at school. "Although not so much in this play… I feel I have a hell of a lot to live up to, as usual. People would be scared of that idea. No, I don't want to do that. She once remarked – accurately – that it had become "impossible to read anything about myself without the words 'ice' or 'thaw' — and to be honest, I am bored by being judged and weighed up by 'writers'." As a younger actor you want to be approved of, you want to gain respect, be admired. Because the one thing I am is brave. He was very persuasive and quite frightening and brilliant and funny and always right there in the moment. Maybe she will dislike me, or I her, or both. She was born in Redruth, Cornwall in 1960. Kristin Scott Thomas is late for our breakfast at the Quo Vadis club in Soho. C1-C2, by: Ann Hornaday, "Coming Into Her Own: At 48, Kristin Scott Thomas Is Redefining Her Roles" Red (GB) It's my nature. "I can't bear it.". ; Name * You get on and make the film. With that perfect blend of English reserve and Parisian chic, Kristin Scott Thomas had a reputation for iciness. Twitter. The Grand Tour host, 60, insists … After graduation, her first big break was at 26 in the film Under the Cherry Moon, in which she was cast as a French heiress opposite Prince. You don't have to dig too deep into Scott Thomas's biography to imagine the psychology of that former need for approval.