Coming Into Her Own
At 48, Kristin Scott Thomas Is Redefining Her Roles

By Ann Hornaday
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 17, 2008

TORONTO

You recognize it as soon as she walks into the room: a woman, late 40s, thin, stylish, her un-plasticized face aglow. Having long since passed proving herself, she radiates a secret kind of joy, propelled by a benevolent second wind. This is what a woman looks like when she's comfortable in her own skin, at once in charge and in bloom.

This is Kristin Scott Thomas.

Or at least that's the persona she conveyed within moments of meeting her at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, where she'd come to help promote the movie "I've Loved You So Long," written and directed by Philippe Claudel. The film, which opens Friday, emerged early on as a festival favorite, and by the time she plunged into the scrum of press and red-carpet promenades, the Oscar drumbeat was well underway.

There's no doubt that Scott Thomas, 48, seems finally to have found a role perfectly suited to talents that in recent years looked destined to be squandered on toothsome but too-brief supporting parts. Just days after Toronto, she made her triumphant Broadway debut in Ian Rickson's production of Anton Chekhov's "The Seagull." New York critics used words such as "glorious" and "perfect" to praise her portrayal of the vain actress Arkadina (a performance that already earned Scott Thomas raves -- and an Olivier Award -- in London).

And she has contentedly plunged into life as a singleton, having ended her 18-year marriage to a Paris physician three years ago. (She has three children, aged 20, 17 and 8.) So often typecast as the stereotypical Englishwoman at her most brittle and humorless, Scott Thomas seems, above all else, happy.

"I love where I am right now," she said in Toronto, settling into a restaurant banquette, the sun at her back. Dressed in a sheer blouse and skinny jeans, with coral-colored toenails peeking out from rope-soled wedge sandals, she was the picture of effortless chic. Her smile came easily and often, her mouth and eyes crinkling into what on other women would be wrinkles but on her are just the facial equivalent of a few grace notes. In a later phone conversation, she elaborated: "I'm independent. I'm able to do the things that I choose to do, because I've crossed that barrier where I don't feel the fear of never working again. I've become more confident as an actress. And thanks to Philippe, who gave me this role in this film and cast me against type, really, he has opened doors for me in all sorts of places."

So un-typecast is Scott Thomas in "I've Loved You So Long" that some audiences haven't recognized her at first. As the film opens, she appears in close-up, her face a tight, expressionless mask, devoid of the barest traces of warmth. It's a shock to see Scott Thomas -- so often cast because of her soft, delicate beauty -- looking so utterly blank and desiccated. (It turns out that her character, Juliette, has been in prison for several years and is reuniting with her little sister, played by Elsa Zylberstein, who is virtually unknown to her. As "I've Loved You So Long" unfolds, the sisters' relationship deepens, Juliette warily makes her way back into society, and the mystery of her crime is revealed.)

When Claudel told her she wouldn't be wearing any makeup for her role, Scott Thomas recalled, "I said, 'Great, I'll do it!' It's very exciting to do something where no artifice is required. The only artifice is going to be your pretending to be that person. You're not going to have any other physical props, nothing to make you more attractive. Because attractive isn't the issue here."

And for Scott Thomas, "attractive" has been the issue for most of her career. She made her feature film debut as a topless socialite in the Prince vehicle (and bomb) "Under the Cherry Moon." But it took nearly 10 years for her to become famous, first in the 1994 romantic comedy "Four Weddings and a Funeral," then in the 1996 World War II epic "The English Patient," for which she received an Oscar nomination. It was Scott Thomas's luminous portrayal of "The English Patient's" doomed adulteress, Katharine Clifton, a performance redolent of the ripe, slightly tragic glamour of Ingrid Bergman, that set her up as a go-to actress for romantic roles calling for a classically beautiful leading lady. Roles like Annie MacLean in "The Horse Whisperer," which Scott Thomas jumped at as a chance to work with her co-star and director, Robert Redford.

"I learned so much from Redford," she recalled. "He taught me how to be more generous with my character, to show a generosity of spirit. And to show the nice sides of the character as well as the grim side, because I'd always kind of gone for mean. I'd always tried to find the fault lines. He showed me you can make someone attractive and appealing, and it doesn't [suggest] you are in denial about anything in that character. He taught me how to be that attractive and appealing person."

By this time, the offers were flowing from Hollywood, but Scott Thomas resisted the pressure to move to Los Angeles. With a busy practice in Paris, her husband was "unmovable," she had two young children "and I wanted to raise them in Europe." By the time she made "Random Hearts" with Harrison Ford, released in 1999, "I'd spent longer in America than I had at home, which felt completely insane. So I went home."

Scott Thomas moved to France at 19, after drama teachers in London told her that she'd never become an actress. She did some plays in Paris in the early 1980s, but when she began acting in movies, she says, they took on "their own momentum." In 2001, having said no more often than yes to Hollywood scripts, she did a play in France ("I didn't just flit in and out, I toured").

Two years later, Scott Thomas made her London stage debut in a West End production of Chekhov's "Three Sisters." After 20 years, her return to the stage, not to mention its rapturous critical and popular reception, renewed her confidence. "It's amazing how quickly they evaporate," she said of the Hollywood offers she spurned. "Your agent's telling you, 'Oh, there's nothing around,' so you go off to do a play and the play is a huge success and it's a really fulfilling experience and you're playing wonderful words and acting with brilliant people."

Rickson, who directed her in "The Seagull," recalls how, after asking him if she could play Arkadina, Scott Thomas flew economy class from Paris to Moscow to see a group of "intense Russian actors" workshop the play. "She was so game for it," he says admiringly. "You know, the most exciting actors I've worked with are the hardest workers. They're searching. They keep going. Kristin's like that. She's a thoroughbred, so full of rigor and resolve and commitment."

Still, as far as mainstream moviegoers were concerned, Scott Thomas virtually disappeared, a "Gosford Park" here or an "Other Boleyn Girl" there notwithstanding. It was only this past summer, when the little French thriller "Tell No One" became a sleeper hit, that she seemed to reemerge -- in one of the small supporting turns that have defined her steady but largely unseen career in France.

Claudel says he cast Scott Thomas as Juliette precisely to give her the leading role she's long deserved. "She's a paradox in France," he says, "because she's lived in France for 28 years but, in my opinion, she's always been underemployed in French movies." For Claudel's part, he thinks Scott Thomas played Juliette with an intensity unusual even for her. "I think there was a strange connection between the part of Juliette and the life of Kristin. . . . I don't know exactly why, but I think it was the right part at the right moment."

Scott Thomas isn't quite buying it. "I'm not sure I agree with him about that," she said good-naturedly about Claudel's observation. "I do think that it's come at the right time for me because of the physicality of it. It's come at a time in my life when I'm willing to be looked at in a certain way, which I think comes with experience. When you've done the $100 million movies, you've tried everything and then you get back to doing this work of an instinctive quality, that's quite exciting. But I think a lot of other people would have done just as well as I have in that role."

For Rickson's part, he says there's no doubt Scott Thomas has come into her own, both on-screen and onstage. "And I think that's very moving," he says. "Because women in the business can become invisible when they're not young, sexualized, compliant and obedient. To have someone of her maturity being so brave and taking risks and putting herself out there, it's thrilling to me."

And not just to him. Scott Thomas is already on most handicappers' short lists of likely Oscar nominees. If it happens, it will be her first nod since being nominated 12 years ago for "The English Patient." She admitted that she finds the idea "thrilling" to contemplate, in large part because she's in a far better position to enjoy it. "My life's changed a lot in the past 12 years, and I've grown up," she said. "I'm able to see things as wonderful and not just, 'Oh, how am I going to do it?' "

It's easy to forget that baby bumps haven't always been the height of chic in Hollywood. "Now it's become very fashionable to have children," Scott Thomas said. "But by the time I was 30, I had two kids, which . . . in my age group was quite rare. When we were doing the Oscar thing, I remember Fran had a little boy, Fran McDormand. So we kind of compared notes about that."

And, as Scott Thomas remembered it, her notes probably said one thing: Help. "As a young mother with a career, I found juggling really, really, really hard," she explained. "Everyone always said, 'Oh, you've got everything, you're so clever and you keep it all together,' and actually it was such a huge fight. No one can say that enough, how hard it is when you do have a career. . . . So, okay, I was going off and being dressed for red carpets and getting bejeweled and bedecked and all the rest of it, and then I'd be dashing home and shoving on the mother hat again and trying to be a good mother. It was really, really tough."

If life is tough these days, it's only because Scott Thomas can't seem to stop working. She bought an apartment in Paris a year ago, but she's barely set foot in it. "It's all very well having a career on two fronts, but you have to be careful that you don't work twice as much as everybody else," she said a little ruefully. "I hate to break it to you, but there is more to life than work. Ideally, I'd make one English-language film, one French film and a play every 18 months." (Look for two upcoming comic turns, in the British film "Easy Virtue" and the novel adaptation "Confessions of a Shopaholic," both due in 2009.)

With the attention she's received for "I've Loved You So Long," the offers have begun to pile up again. "It's all great, but you can't rush into things," Scott Thomas said. "Hopefully I'll be working for quite a while. I'm not going to go off and get tons of Botox and a face-lift in the near future. I just I think I'll just be one of those old ladies that you wheel out. That's what I want to be."