It’s late afternoon inside a quiet London pub, and Kristin Scott Thomas has lost all track of time. She is recalling her big break in the business, playing Prince’s love interest in Under the Cherry Moon. She says this was back in 1983. I tell her it was 1986, and she insists that can’t be right – she ought to know because she was 24 at the time, and she was born in 1960. This, of course, only adds to our confusion. “Date discrepancies,” she concludes blithely. “Welcome to my world. I’m afraid I do that a lot.”
Scott Thomas is a precision instrument on screen, so it’s oddly reassuring to find her so wayward in person. The actor arrives bang on time, apologises for her lateness and then spends a good half-minute struggling to get her head through the neck of her tan woollen jumper. Liberated, she looks every inch the chic Nouvelle Vague heroine (cropped hair, round specs, vivid pink lipstick). But she carries a similarly restless, mercurial air.
The pub is her local, down the road from her home, except she now thinks she might move back to Paris. Or maybe not. She can’t decide. “It’s a funny feeling,” she says. “Never knowing where you belong.”
Mostly, I think, she fears the rut. Over the past three decades, she has carved an acting career on both sides of the Channel, switching between English and French, gliding in and out of the occasional Hollywood blockbuster. She juggled Gosford Park with Mission: Impossible. She bagged an Oscar nomination for The English Patient and a European film award for I’ve Loved You So Long. And yet the more established she became, the more stifled she felt. Directors kept asking her to perform the same old tricks. “Too much sighing and staring into the middle distance,” she says. “And that does get frustrating. Because you want to be asked to do something different, something strange, something off-the-chart bonkers. You want to feel as though you’re going on an adventure.”
Her new film, The Party, provided that opportunity. Written and directed by Sally Potter, it’s a spiky piece of filmed theatre, an acid drawing-room comedy, shot in expressionistic black-and-white and performed with zeal by its ensemble cast. Scott Thomas stars as Janet, the newly appointed shadow health minister, whose celebratory soiree becomes more akin to a wake. Marriages flounder, clandestine affairs are exposed and the traditional British left is embodied by hangdog Timothy Spall, who appears to be dying on the living-room floor. At one point in the film he says: “It looks like I’m done for – medically speaking.”
Scott Thomas says that the film was shot at speed: 12 days, flat out, which lent the experience the distinct whiff of danger. Along the way, she had to contend with noises-off in the land at large. “The EU referendum came right in the middle of the shoot,” she recalls. “A Thursday, if I’m not mistaken, although you’re probably going to tell me it was a Tuesday.” She shakes her head. “Bloody hell. It was awful. It was like somebody had died. I get quite emotional thinking about it.”
For bilingual Scott Thomas – the ultimate EU citizen – the result of the vote must have especially stung. “Oh, yeah. For me, it’s a disaster,” she snorts. “Talk about not knowing where you belong.”
She first landed in Paris at the age of 19, inspired by romantic notions of living in a garret, skipping around town like Anouk Aimée; maybe even securing an internship at Vogue magazine. Instead, she wound up working as an au pair for a French family. It was the mother, she recalls, who encouraged her to start acting. Later, she married François Olivennes, a successful gynaecologist. They set up a home and had three children together, who are now all but grown up.
She says: “The other day I bumped into someone on the street. This woman shouted ‘Kristin!’ and I said: ‘Yeah,’ rather warily. And it was the little girl I’d looked after all those years ago. Now a middle-aged woman with teenage daughters of her own.”
Scott Thomas initially envisaged a career in heavyweight theatre, or avant-garde French pictures. Then, out of nowhere, she was plucked to star in Under the Cherry Moon, a primped, silly peacock of a film in which her beautiful 80s heiress is pursued by Prince. “So there I was saying things like: ‘My life is a picture you’ve painted, but you’ve gilded the frame.’ Something like that, just appalling. But I had to have the trembling bottom lip. And I had to cry. The assistants would say: ‘If you stare really hard into the lamps, it will make your eyes water’ and so that’s what I would do. But then there was Prince. A year older than me, at the peak of his fame, an absolute genius, always on the go. So it was a strange, good experience, even if it was not a good film. And I was really not very good in it.”
It’s not your best, I say, but it’s not your fault.
“Ha,” she says. “I was worried you were going to say, ‘But it’s not your worst.’”
I ask which film roles she is especially proud of and she mentions Catherine Corsini’s Leaving (2010), in which she plays a woman who torches her comfortable bourgeois existence, and An Unforgettable Summer (1994), which she shot in Romania after the fall of Ceausescu. She loves some of the big ones, too: The English Patient; Four Weddings and a Funeral. “It’s not that I’m proud to have done them. I’m proud to have been a part of them. There’s a difference, I think.” She laughs. “I don’t know why people bother interviewing actors. We’re just paid to stand here, look there and read out the lines.”
Occasionally, we risk talking at cross-purposes. On screen she has always struck me as a cool, authoritative presence; coiled and complex, even when the movie falls short. But it seems Scott Thomas views herself less charitably – as some sad, wafty watercolour, struggling to make herself felt. “I think there are very few opportunities for women to be active and powerful – the stereotypical male role, if you like. And it’s usually Emma [Thompson] or Meryl Streep who get to bite down on those. So I’m sometimes called on to play these rather passive characters – a wistful sigh in the background; the occasional barbed comment. And, of course, I can do it. I can give the director what they want. But hopefully I give them something more as well; some bite and weight of my own.” She pulls a face. “Maybe I’m just fooling myself.”
Professionally and personally, she appears in a fascinating state of flux. To some degree, I suspect that this suits her nature; her sense of herself as somehow transient and unmoored. Her marriage ended 10 years ago. Since then, she has largely been bouncing between London and Paris, attempting to keep tabs on her kids who have become similarly mobile, scattering themselves across Europe. For a while, she thought she might quit film altogether and concentrate on stage work instead. But she has recently had another change of heart. She adores the technical aspects of film-making. She enjoys the fleeting camaraderie of the movie set; the experience of running into crew members she hasn’t worked with in years. “The old grip who’s still wearing the same pair of shorts.” She smiles. “They always wear shorts for some reason. It’s very strange.”
Our time together is up. I hand over my bank card to pay the bill for our drinks: coffee for me, a pot of tea for her. Scott Thomas watches this procedure with something close to wonder. “Isn’t that amazing?” she says. “One swipe of the card and it’s all bought and paid for.”
Swiping, I say, still makes me feel nervous. It makes me feel detached from my money.
“Feeling detached.” Scott Thomas laughs. “Oh, but you see, that’s just what I like.”
The Party is released in the UK on 13 October
