Star of wonder: an audience with Kristin Scott Thomas

If anyone can make being holed up in the back of a cab for an hour feel glamorous, it’s Kristin Scott Thomas. Not that she would necessarily thank you for the compliment, for neither a simperer nor a gusher is she. Indeed, she is agreeably tough, funny, thoughtful, honest and seemingly unafraid of anything — certainly not of speaking her mind. The glamour is partly to do with her transfixing beauty, but she also has that luminosity that only real stars radiate. When she removes her sunglasses, you practically gasp — the planes and angles of her face are so familiar, albeit chiselled by time. The 54-year-old’s eyes crinkle wonderfully at the edges when she laughs, which is often.

She doesn’t pretend to be unvain about her looks: ‘Of course I care. But I’m not going to spend my life worrying, because there are better things to do, and I could spend hours and thousands of pounds having injections, but I’m not sure it gives the required effect. If I could find a surgeon who could make me look exactly like I did — not even ten years younger, but at 46, 47, 48… that’s when I looked the best — I would go for it.’

She quotes a line from her new film, My Old Lady, an adaptation of the Israel Horovitz play (the old lady in question is Maggie Smith and Scott Thomas plays her daughter, opposite Kevin Kline): ‘I’m not beautiful; I’m nearly old’ — omitting Kline’s rejoinder that it is at precisely that point that a flower, just before the fading of its bloom, is at its most beautiful.

I had arrived early at the white stucco mansion Scott Thomas is renting in Little Venice. She emerged in relaxed, hipsterish attire: skinny jeans tucked into low-heeled black suede boots, a loose grey beanie covering her hair, leather bag slung across her chest. If she was wearing make-up, it was very minimal indeed.

A few nights earlier, sitting in the audience at The Old Vic, I had been faced with a very different Scott Thomas. The actress had a filthy, chalky face; matted hair standing up in awkward tufts; feverish hands clutching her ripped, sweat-stained baggy dress; barefooted; with pink-rimmed eyes. She was playing the title role of Electra, for which she has been much acclaimed, in a version of the Sophocles play by Frank McGuinness, who calls it the female Hamlet. At its simplest, the work revolves around Electra’s grief and avenging anger after the murder of her father Agamemnon by her mother Clytemnestra (played by Diana Quick) and her lover Aegisthus. Electra waits long, barren years for her missing brother Orestes to return and make his bloody amends.

It is, to put it mildly, intense. From the moment Electra runs on to the dirt-strewn floor (the play is staged in the round), she shrieks and scowls, paces and roars. Her performance is a tour de force. What Scott Thomas loves about the play is that ‘Sophocles was so clever at reproducing and understanding human behaviour… the longing for the brother and not quite knowing what to do with it, the anger of being denied marriage and childbearing — all those things can be put so easily into a modern context.’

She is conscious that she is older than most who play the part — ‘I’m cutting it a bit thin’ — so she and Ian Rickson, the director with whom she has worked on four plays now, came up with the idea that the actress plays her as a woman of indeterminate years who has been arrested in her development: ‘She is stuck in this angry teenager and until she’s killed off the mother — hahaha — she’s not able to move on. She’s the daughter from hell, but at the same time she’s very touching. Actually, that’s what my daughter [Hannah, 26, a journalist; Scott Thomas also has two sons, Joseph, 23, and George, 14 — ‘Yes, a little one, which is really lovely’] said: “It’s really funny because sometimes you just want to say, Oh, come on, get on with it — stop being so annoying, and then you feel really, really sorry for her.” So part of you is irritated by her and part of you identifies with her.’

The other night, Scott Thomas was maddened by a man in the audience: ‘There was a guy sitting on the front row who clearly didn’t want to be there,’ she says. ‘He was right by my tree where I have to go and smoulder. I’m at his feet and he’s sitting there reading his programme! It just made me really, really angry and because I was playing anger in that scene it’s much more difficult to be in control when you’ve got something like that happening.’ But she loves the matinées when the schoolkids are in.

The day after our interview it is announced that she will play the Queen in The Audience by Peter Morgan, the part first played by Helen Mirren last year, who is taking it to Broadway, while Scott Thomas fills her London throne. She messages later to say she is — no surprise here — ‘thrilled to be working with Stephen Daldry and Peter Morgan and looking forward to playing a completely different role on stage’.

Her mother Deborah studied acting, but gave it up when she married Kristin’s father, Lieutenant Commander Simon Scott Thomas, a pilot for the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm. When Kristin was five, her father died in a plane crash. Her mother remarried, but six years later her second husband, also a Royal Navy pilot, was killed in a flying accident. I refer to these tragedies and say, So here you are now in a play about a lost father… ‘Yes, it’s true and when I first saw it back in ’97 or whenever it was [it was Zoë Wanamaker’s performance in New York in 1999 that partly precipitated Scott Thomas’ decision to renounce film for theatre], I was definitely, definitely affected by that. Since working on it, I’ve discovered it’s about so much more — but it is about death as well. There’s a wonderful line — I can’t remember what it is exactly because I can never remember my lines when I’m not standing on the stage — when she says something like, “We all die; you are all mortal…” And I confront my mortality every day.’ Do you really? ‘Not in a morbid way,’ she says, ‘but I am aware… I don’t mean in a conscious way but you are, you know — every breath you take. And I did grow up with quite a lot of it. I mean, I had to come to terms with it. But you can’t spend your life worrying about it because that would be terrible.’

She says that, growing up, she was aware that the family were not exactly well-off but the children went to good schools (Scott Thomas went to Cheltenham Ladies’ College). ‘Yes, because my mother went around and… petitioned. She was amazing.’ Petitioned other family members? ‘No, the schools,’ she says. ‘In public schools, at that time, there was always room for people who couldn’t afford it. And I had great godparents who rallied round.’

Why was she so embarrassed, as a young person, about her aspirations to become an actress, particularly given her mother’s training? ‘I think because, growing up, I had serious self-confidence issues. Well, it’s not being able to trust anything, isn’t it? Lack of trust… you can’t count on anything.’

Aged 19, she moved to Paris to be an au pair, enrolled in drama school and met her future husband François Olivennes, a French gynaecologist — they divorced in 2005. After the singer Prince discovered her (she starred in his 1986 film Under the Cherry Moon), she made 65 films in 30 years including playing Hugh Grant’s best friend in Four Weddings and a Funeral and leads in adaptations of The English Patient and The Horse Whisperer, and more recently John Lennon’s aunt in Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Nowhere Boy, before vowing she was not going to make any more.

Each evening after Electra, Scott Thomas sits under the shower for a good 20 minutes to scrub all the grot out of her hair and body — on stage she rolls around on the dirty floor quite a bit. She has to psych herself up before the play, but afterwards she is euphoric rather than drained. So do you wind down with a couple of drinks? ‘Excuse me? Me?’ Oh, are you a ‘my body is my temple’ person? ‘No, not at all.’ So a nice couple of glasses of red? ‘Yeah, keep me pickled,’ she jokes. ‘Very often I have friends in, but I find, particularly towards the end of the week, that I just can’t cope — especially as I have to cook.’

Would she describe herself as a domestic goddess? ‘I’m the worst housekeeper in the world. My apartment in Paris is gorgeous but I have someone who keeps on top of it. Here it’s more chaotic.’ As for cooking: ‘I don’t particularly get into Christmas but I do make the best mincemeat and I’m very good at pastry. And at roasting. But generally my cooking is a bit hit and miss. I find it’s much easier to throw a good meal together in France than it is in England, simply because — and I hate to say this because it sounds a bit Grinchy — it’s much easier to get very good produce at a reasonable price in Paris than it is in London.’

Apparently single, she certainly has no problem with her own company. There have been references to her walking out with the philanthropic financier Arpad Busson and the actor Tobias Menzies since her break-up: ‘You can be lonely wherever but I love being on my own,’ she says. ‘I like pottering and time-wasting. Picking up a book, reading three sentences and putting it down — going and watering a plant…’ In London, she loves eating out at Spring (Skye Gyngell’s new Somerset House restaurant) and The Delaunay, but is not a night person: ‘I don’t enjoy clubs and darkness, but I love dancing and I love to sing. I’m loving London right now. I’m having the best possible time. I live in the most beautiful part — I love Little Venice — and I love going up to the Heath on Sunday mornings.’ Will she stay? ‘I don’t know. I’m here for… as long as it takes to make a decision.’

Christmas will be in Monmouthshire with her mother and dogs and the children. She’s funny about her younger sister Serena, who has just appeared in a Paul Thomas Anderson film, Inherent Vice: ‘Can you believe it? I’m so jealous. She’s with Joaquin Phoenix, my favourite actor, with one of my favourite directors — and [hisses through gritted teeth], my sister’s doing it!’

Why did she say she was not going to make any more films and yet she continues to appear on the big screen? ‘I said that once and I don’t regret it because it’s exactly what I felt at the time.’ Will she be allowed to change her mind? ‘If I’m allowed to or not, we shall see. It’s very funny when that article happened, a lot of people wrote to me saying, “Well done, fantastic…” Now I’m hearing a lot of people saying, “God, that’s just so biting the hand that feeds you… you’re so stupid to have done that.” ’

Her candour is appealing; I tell her she’s like the great diva-actresses, Shirley MacLaine and the late Elizabeth Taylor, above having to worry what people think. ‘Well, I’m not — but anyway, what’s done is done. But to go back to your question: do I want to make more films? And the short answer to that is: Yes but no!’ — a throaty laugh — ‘Because I will get out of bed to do something that I feel is worth it, but what is worth it has changed slightly for me.There have been one or two films I’ve done because people have persuaded me to do them and that I regret bitterly.’ Were you a complete bitch as a result? ‘Um — on one of them I was, but then I was being treated so badly. There has been an attitude towards me; treating me as if I am some sort of wild animal that has to be tamed by cajoling or charming or caressing — and I just find that deeply, deeply offensive.’

After Electra is over next month and before she starts rehearsing The Audience, Scott Thomas will take herself off on a break: ‘After a really taxing show, a really good thing is to go to one of those retreat places in Switzerland or Austria and get cleaned out, not really a spa — more like a hospital.’ Sounds hardcore: ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah — I love it. Because it’s like [you’re] a big bottle being shaken up and down for four months. It’s just a great idea to go and cut yourself off from other things and then… resettle.’

We agree that the interview has been unexpectedly lovely, held, at her suggestion, in the womb-like atmosphere of the cab. Her voice is mesmerisingly attractive on tape, partly because she was tired and sounded so languorous; the vocal equivalent of a feline stretch. Then it’s time for her to go off and be photographed, which she loathes — but needs must. Now that her daughter is a multimedia journalist for the International New York Times, I’m assuming her mother feels more tolerant of our profession. But she says that she’s always had journalist friends. Encourage her to be bold, I say. ‘In her questions? Well, yours are certainly bold enough,’ she says with a grin, and then whispers, ‘I’m so proud of her,’ as she picks up her empty coffee cup from the footwell.

Kristin Scott Thomas will make a brilliant Queen but it’s nice that she can play a commoner just as well.

ES magazine