CHARLES MCGRATH

The New York Times

IN France, where she began acting and where she has lived for the last 28 years, Kristin Scott Thomas is known as “la plus Anglaise des Parisiennes ou la plus Parisienne des Anglaises”: the most English of the Parisians or the most Parisian of the English. She has said of herself that she is a Frenchwoman who happened to spend her childhood in England. In person, though, she sometimes seems less a citizen of either place than a refugee from an almost vanished show-business past. Now 48, she has the big, heavy-lidded eyes, the regal cheekbones, the Garbo-like self-possession of an old-fashioned star: so glamorous and mysterious that you wouldn’t in the least mind sitting out a sandstorm with her, the way Ralph Fiennes did in “The English Patient.”
Last year Ms. Scott Thomas won an Olivier Award (the British Tony) for playing just such a character — the stage diva Arkadina in Chekhov’s “Seagull” — and on Thursday she makes her Broadway debut in the role. The production, largely intact from the Royal Court Theater, is one that John Lahr, writing in The New Yorker, called “the finest British production of Chekhov in recent memory.” Meanwhile Ms. Scott Thomas, who juggles two careers more or less simultaneously — one in English, one in French — can be seen in two French movies that were huge hits in Europe. She is an even bigger deal over there right now than she was here in the late ’90s, before she more or less deliberately allowed herself to slip from the radar. “Tell No One,” a thriller based on a Harlan Coben novel, came out in America in July. “I’ve Loved You So Long,” in which Ms. Scott Thomas plays a woman who has been in prison for 15 years, opens in New York on Oct. 24; at the recent Toronto Film Festival people were already calling her performance Oscar-worthy.
“So far there hasn’t been much crossover between the French-language career and the English one, but maybe it will happen this time,” Ms. Scott Thomas said recently, sipping a cappuccino at a coffee shop in Chelsea. On her finger was an enormous chunk of rhinestone, one of Madame Arkadina’s baubles left over from a preview performance the night before. “People will now go to films with subtitles, you know,” she added. “They’re not afraid of them. It’s one of the upsides of text-messaging and e-mail.” She smiled. “Maybe the only good thing to come of it.”

Some critics have suggested that Ms. Scott Thomas is virtually two different actresses, and that she’s warmer in French, a theory she dismisses. “I suppose it’s a bit more difficult in French,” she said. “Sometimes I get nervous about pronunciation, or I used to. I think maybe I’ve conquered that now. The main difference is just that I get different roles in France. They don’t make films about the 1930s in country houses there.
“When I speak English, I’ve been told, I have this patrician way of speaking that’s very irritating. It’s the whole class thing. But the French they have no inkling. Another thing is that your first success tends to mark you. In England the first time I was ever on screen I was playing an Evelyn Waugh character in ‘A Handful of Dust,’ and people loved it. But that sort of thing just grows, and people want to see you reproduce your own work. In France, thank goodness, they don’t really get that.”
Ms. Scott Thomas neglected to mention — possibly she’s repressed it — that the first time she appeared in an American movie was as a spoiled, headstrong British heiress in Prince’s dismal “Under the Cherry Moon.” And it’s true that, in the American imagination anyway, she lingers as an alluring, slightly frosty aristocrat. She’s Fiona, Hugh Grant’s jaded, sardonic pal in “Four Weddings and a Funeral”; she’s the glittering Katharine Clifton, Ralph Fiennes’s love in “The English Patient”; and she’s Lady Sylvia, the bored, predatory hostess in “Gosford Park,” with her cigarette holder, marcelled hair and appetite for young houseboys. In everyday life she’s reserved but much less grand. It’s as if she had turned down the wattage so as not to appear rude.
Ms. Scott Thomas is distantly related to Robert F. Scott, the great Antarctic explorer, and an uncle, Admiral Richard Thomas, was a peer, but she claims not to be an aristo herself. “It’s so wrong, that image,” she said. “It’s bizarre, really.”
When she was 5, her father, a pilot in the Royal Navy, died in a crash and so, a few years later, did her stepfather. So she grew up in a single-parent family, one of five children in a household that she recalls as frequently “squabbling” and dependent on the kindness of friends and relatives for things like school fees. Nor did family connections further her career. She attended Cheltenham Ladies’ College, a secondary school for the brainy and well-bred, but never went to college.
She applied to the National Youth Theater of England and was rejected. She then enrolled in a teacher-training course at a London drama school, and when she tried to switch over to the acting program was rejected again. “They told me I had no talent, and that if I wanted to play Lady Macbeth, I’d have to join my local amateur dramatic society,” she said.
She moved to Paris, became an au pair and while there was encouraged to enroll in the École Nationale Supérieur des Arts et Techniques du Théâtre, where she caught the eye of Marcel Bozonnet, a distinguished French actor who later became the head of the Comédie-Française. “He was a proper teacher,” Ms. Scott Thomas said. “He was just a grown-up, very smart devourer of all things cultural, and I said to myself: ‘Yes, yes, I want to be like him! I don’t want to do kitchen-sink dramas, I don’t want to be on telly, I want to do what he does.’ ”
In “Tell No One” Ms. Scott Thomas again plays an aristocrat of sorts, but one who is a little louche and completely at ease in her own skin. She’s a wealthy cafe owner, the live-in girlfriend of the protagonist’s sister, with a roving eye for other women. In “I’ve Loved You So Long,” on the other hand, she’s a former doctor convicted of an unspeakable crime and now, reluctantly living with her sister and her family, stripped of almost everything. It’s a part that requires acting by subtraction, an emptying out of ego and mannerism.
For most of the film she wears no makeup, her hair is cut unflatteringly, and she speaks only grudgingly. And yet by doing almost nothing, by just sitting in an airport waiting lounge and staring out the window, she manages to suggest the character’s unutterable sadness and loneliness.
“I just tried to be as honest as I could,” Ms. Scott Thomas said. “I didn’t want people to like it particularly, and I didn’t want to have any emotion of my own. I would not think about it at all but just do it. It’s very difficult not to be affected yourself. It’s hard to pull away from that. But it was very important to me that the character didn’t have my self-pity. I didn’t want to go and meet real prisoners, for example. I was frightened of my own fear or pity, of being moved by their story. I was afraid of my own emotions getting in the way of the directness and the rawness.”
She filmed “I’ve Loved You So Long” right after the London run of “The Seagull,” she said, and the two roles couldn’t have been more different: “Arkadina never stops talking and always wants to be heard, while that other woman doesn’t want to be noticed and would just like to disappear. There’s no artifice and no guilt. She’s in agony about what she did, but she doesn’t feel guilty.”
Arkadina, Chekhov’s aging actress, feels guilty about a lot of things — her troubled son especially — and also uses every artifice at her disposal to make an impression and cling to her youth. As Ms. Scott Thomas plays her, she floats into the room, as if pretending to be weightless. Her hand flutters to her upswept hair, cupping her chignon, or hovers at her waist, to call attention to its narrowness. “The character is so well observed,” Ms. Scott Thomas said, laughing. “I told Ian Rickson, the director: ‘I don’t have to do any acting. It’s me.’ ”
She cocked her head, tilted her chin and waved an arm in grand diva fashion. Growing serious, she said: “What you have to be careful about is the showing-off quality, which I find quite cringe making. There’s the line between Arkadina’s showing off and me showing off. For a performer that’s quite difficult. But as long as you feel the absolute pain simmering underneath Arkadina, I think you can show off as much as you like.”
Mr. Rickson, who was in New York to supervise the transfer of the play, said: “I think she’s picked up where she left off in London, and built on that. That’s what’s wonderful about great actresses — they want to work. They have that wonderful searching quality.”
He said that before the London run he and Ms. Scott Thomas went to Russia together; they talked to actors there and visited all the Chekhov shrines. “She has the confidence now to do the part in a very Russian way,” he said. “In England there’s this tradition of poeticizing Chekhov. But in fact ‘The Seagull’ is savage. It’s uncompromising and direct, and Kristin gets that. She has the openness and courage for it.”
“I think her being an actress is just a condition,” Ms. Scott Thomas said of Arkadina. “She’s also a mother who loves her son but can’t cope with him. I think that’s a universal feeling. What are my children going to turn out like? What happens if I don’t admire them? What happens if one turns out to be a disappointment? All parents go through that.” She smiled and added: “My children are lovely. They’re perfect.”
Ms. Scott Thomas, who is separated from her husband, a French physician, has three children, 20, 17 and 8, and they partly explain her odd bilingual career. After earning an Academy Award nomination for “The English Patient,” she could have written her own ticket in Hollywood. But she starred in just two more big-budget movies — “The Horse Whisperer,” with Robert Redford, in which she was a Tina Brownish editor, and “Random Hearts,” with Harrison Ford, in which her American accent showed a few chinks — and then went back to Paris. She wanted another child, she said, and wanted to raise her family in France.
“My experience with these big, grown-up pictures is that they just keep you away from your family for too long,” she said. So she told her agent she wanted a year off and would just see what happened after that.
What happened was that in 2000 she got a call from a French touring company asking her to play the title role in Racine’s “Bérénice,” probably the most demanding role in classical French theater and not a part casually handed out to nonnative speakers. But Ms. Scott Thomas, who except for student productions had never been onstage before, was a hit, despite a few sniffs over her pronunciation. The French actor and director Lambert Wilson said, “We are witnessing the birth of a great tragedienne.”
Ms. Scott Thomas also discovered, or rediscovered, her love for the theater. “I’ve always really wanted to be onstage,” she said, “but movies kind of carry you along. You get swept away by them. And there’s this feeling sometimes of being a bit of a pawn and of other people channeling their ambition through you.” She added: “They make films, they make films, they make films. But theater — good theater — is rarer. If you see a really amazing production — there aren’t many, but if you see one — it stays with you forever and ever. Films are just consumables. The experience of living theater is more powerful.”
On the other hand, actors have to pay the bills, and movies are very useful for that. Ms. Scott Thomas has just finished making one, in English this time, called “Confessions of a Shopaholic.”
“I’m not complaining,” she said. “I love the teamwork of making films, and you get to go to the most beautiful places. It’s a very privileged life in that respect. And you live about eight different lives when you’re making a film — 12 hours a day for 6, 8, 10 weeks just pretending to be someone else. I find that very stimulating. And then every now and then I go to a film that just blows you away, and that encourages me to want to make another.”
Da The New York Times, 28 Settembre 2008

PRESSBOOK

Attualmente appare nella pellicola francese di Philippe Claudel Ti amerò sempre (Il ya longtemps que je t’aime), che le ha permesso di ricevere delle candidature ai Golden Globe e ai BAFTA Award. Recentemente, ha esordito a Broadway ne Il gabbiano (The Seagull), vincendo l’Olivier Award per la migliore attrice durante il periodo di rappresentazioni al Royal Court Theatre di Londra, mentre è anche comparsa in Matrimonio all’inglese (Easy Virtue) di Stephan Elliot, tratto dal testo teatrale di Sir Noel Coward e in cui recita al fianco di Jessica Biel, Ben Barnes e Colin Firth.