Kristin Scott Thomas: ‘I suppose I’ve always been quite pro-conflict’

We’re halfway through our starters, when Dame Kristin Scott Thomas informs me that I must on no account refer to her in this article as an ice queen.

“Do not put that in!” she exclaims, helpfully clarifying that it’s not the queen part she objects to. I should not describe her as frosty or cold or even “warmer than expected”.

Such epithets, used liberally in the actress’s four-decade career, have made her “very angry”. She corrects herself. “‘Angry’ isn’t the right word. It just disappointed me. It’s just depressing. You think, surely it’s something else?”

She’s right. She is something else. For one thing, she may be the most facially expressive interviewee I’ve ever met. She chose this restaurant, a chic French bistro in St James’s, for its gentle acoustics: “I find London restaurants so loud. You have to yell.” But I soon realise that a clear audio recording is not enough; Scott Thomas is the first Lunch guest for whom I wish I had a video too.

She flicks expressions from one side of her face to the other, like a magician effortlessly throwing a deck of cards. Her eyes dart, they roll hypnotically and — when we discuss her disastrously reviewed play Lyonesse — her mouth curls in an appalled grimace.

The other thing — and you may have grasped this already — is that Scott Thomas is particular. When the waiter pours her still water, she freezes. “He did it the wrong way round. It’s terribly bad luck.” She tops up the glass in what she deems the right way: twisting the bottle clockwise at the end. I have a sinking feeling that my etiquette will mortally offend her, but I console myself with the thought that she will doubtless let me know.

“I suppose I’ve always been quite pro-conflict,” she says at one point. “I think a lot of people have found me very difficult. Me? Especially when I was a much angrier younger woman.”

For a scene in the 1996 film The English Patient, where she and Ralph Fiennes are caught in a sandstorm, director Anthony Minghella asked her to act writing the word “love” on a car window. “And I thought no, I’m not going to do that. So I didn’t.”

Scott Thomas became one of Britain’s most recognisable, most loved actors by playing neat, brittle aristocrats, with sharp vowels and blunt put-downs, from Four Weddings and a Funeral to Gosford Park. She still takes those roles, notably as Diana Taverner in the excellent Apple TV+ spy series Slow Horses — “They wheel me in from time to time to be an important person” — but she has long wanted to escape the pigeonhole. She is thoughtful and restless. She has made dozens of films in French and one in Romanian, a language she’d never spoken previously.

Her desire for novelty led to Lyonesse, Penelope Skinner’s play about how women’s claims of abuse are distorted by men. It bombed.

I want the people I admire to be faultless. They can’t be

At the mention of Lyonesse, Scott Thomas herself laughs unprompted. But she is defiant. “How can you be so simple-minded to think the play has to have a conclusion or give an answer? The whole point is: here are the problems, now you go away and talk about them.” She promises to be back on stage soon. “I want to do more things like this, that get people’s blood boiling.”

What she won’t do, aged 63, is keep being a muse for men. She has made her first film as a director, North Star, starring Scarlett Johansson and out in 2024. It explores the effect of her own childhood tragedy: her father was a navy pilot who died in an air crash when she was five, and her stepfather, also a navy pilot, died in a “terrifyingly similar” crash when she was 11. A private person, often hemmed into supporting roles, Scott Thomas is now putting her life story centre stage. At a cast screening the day before we meet, “I was literally shaking in my boots.”

Modern film sets do not stop for lunch. Scott Thomas, who moved to France aged 19 as an au pair and has spent much of her life there, objects. “It’s really miserable. You’re sitting there trying to play a romantic scene and you’ve got some rigger chomping away on his vindaloo.”

She insisted that the cast of North Star took a decent lunch, and she wants one today. She orders leeks followed by halibut. I choose celeriac, then pumpkin.

Her father’s tragic death has long been part of her public narrative. After she had acted in her first feature film, directed by Prince, a French TV interviewer asked, “‘So how does your daddy feel about you acting in a film with Prince?’ And something in my brain said, ‘Urgh, I hate you.’ I remember thinking, I’m going to fucking kill him with a situation he can’t get out of. I said, ‘He died.’”

In her hands, the story is even more haunting. Scott Thomas had suffered from traditional English coldness after her father’s death: she was told not to cry, and was sent to a girls’ boarding school, which she hated.

When she was aged around nine, her stepfather offered to adopt her. She would swap her father’s surname, Scott Thomas, for her stepfather’s, Idiens. She said no in an instant. “I felt it would be betraying my recently died father.” The name was “the last thing that remained of him”. In North Star, she plays with the idea of this moment as “a terrible secret”, which could tear siblings apart years afterwards.

She came to idolise her late father and stepfather. “I lost my father when I was five — peak father worship moment — and it’s taken a really long time to get over the idea that people aren’t perfect. Whether it’s a romantic involvement or a friendship or a work relationship, I want the people I admire to be faultless. They can’t be.”

So North Star is a counter both to her stiff-upper-lip upbringing and to the trauma-searching of the modern age. In one moving scene, the character who resembles Scott Thomas’s mother — played by Scott Thomas herself — urges her adult daughters to stop fantasising about the past and to become “women, not daughters”.

Scott Thomas has been through that process. Her mother — an “absolute warrior” who pushed her children through life even when money ran short — died last year. “You’re always your mother’s daughter until she’s not there any more. You’re always slightly in your mother’s wake. It’s a huge sadness, of course, but there’s something empowering about it as well. I do feel more grown-up now that she’s gone. But it breaks my heart that she’s gone.” She pauses theatrically: “I won’t weep in this interview.”

She doesn’t weep; she gathers pace. “I feel like there’s an authorised version of me, and this is it. I have some kind of relevance. I’m not just my mother’s daughter, I’m me now. Possibly because I’m the eldest in the family now. I also have grandchildren. My e­x-husband [a French obstetrician, François Olivennes] said this brilliant thing: he loves his grandchildren so much that the children are just a byproduct.” Grief is the price we pay for love, and children are the price we pay for grandchildren.

Scott Thomas has also moved beyond the loss of her father. Thirty-odd years ago, a bald, paunchy man approached her at a wedding. “He says, ‘I was a great friend of your father’s.’ [I thought], you can’t possibly be. Why would my dad be friends with a man twice his age?” Did she want to hear his memories? “If I’m really honest — this is a bit personal — if I were to meet somebody who would tell me about my father now, I would think the moment’s gone, because I don’t need him any more. I needed him when I was 11, 13, 20, 30.”

Not everyone will let the past lie. Amateur divers in Dorset plan to survey the site of her father’s crash next year. They say their work could publicise how navy planes were lost in night-flying exercises. “Oh, God, that’s gross,” says Scott Thomas. “Why would you want to do that? It’s like anyone going down to see the Titanic. I don’t understand that. And it. Doesn’t. End. Well.” 

Scott Thomas has swept up her leeks and hazelnuts, leaving the bed of green leaves. The main courses arrive. My chips are a temperature that my central heating can only dream of. 

She came to fame in Four Weddings. Should her character, lost soul Fiona, have ended up with her unrequited love, Hugh Grant’s Charles? “Yes.”

Another diner walks past our table on his way out. “Hi, how are you?” Scott Thomas says to him, before turning back to me, mischief on her face: “He was supposed to be at the screening yesterday. Said he had flu.”

Four Weddings was once a cultural landmark, but she now sees it as “kind of irrelevant . . . Don’t you think that what [young people] aspire to now is so different?” Partly it’s the lack of buying power. But also “desire is waning, because every need is fulfilled instantly in today’s age. People have stopped longing for things. It’s quite frightening that, isn’t it?”

Four Weddings also saw women mainly through men’s eyes. Here the zeitgeist has definitely changed. Which brings us to Lyonesse. Scott Thomas played a once famous actress who has turned into a recluse after suffering emotional abuse. The play asks whether she’ll be allowed to tell her tale. Critics found it muddled. The Times said Scott Thomas “exhibits no gift for comic timing, but simply raises her voice and hopes for the best”. It was the worst review of her career.

She insists she normally doesn’t read reviews: the bad ones because they “will freak me out”, the good ones “because every time you say that line, or be that funny, you’re going to think, ‘God, I hope I did it as well as I did yesterday.’” But one popped up on her “telephone” (she appears to be the last person in show business to call it a telephone). “It was a shocker going back into work the next day.”

If I had gone to America, I would have had a very, very different life . . . I’d be awful in LA

She protests that audiences appreciated the play. “Everybody leaves that theatre, saying, ‘Was Elaine smothered that much or is she just mad?’” Well, some left early, angry at having paid £140 or more for a ticket. “Theatre is too expensive, I agree. However, for some people, £140 is nothing.” Richer theatregoers subsidise cheap tickets; she argues that the West End can’t just be musicals, reruns and TV spin-offs. “Do we want the West End to become this huge corporate tanker? . . . I’m not ripping anyone off. The people who are spending £140 to buy a ticket — they can get one for much less or they can go and see another show.”

Lyonesse features Greg, a superficially modern man who cajoles his wife into getting pregnant again at the expense of her career. “I feel really sorry for Greg, because he hasn’t been brought up with the idea that her life is as important as his . . . I know people who have been denied childcare because the wife wouldn’t earn enough to merit it. It just drives me insane.” She hates the phrase “stay-at-home mum”: “Stay — like a dog.”

I ask if Scott Thomas was always a feminist. Not exactly. “I only went to all-girls schools. I never encountered any men, and I didn’t have one at home. The first time I ever sat next to a boy in a normal situation was at drama school.” Until then, “all I saw was the woman [her mother] who one minute would be mending the boiler — terrified because it might blow up — the next minute changing a tyre on the M1 in the dark, and taking me to music concerts . . . She didn’t seem to have any barriers.”

Her own children shaped her career. She wanted to give them a European education. “I didn’t want Europe to become an exoticism . . . If I had gone to America, I would have had a very, very different life. Because I’m very easily persuaded — the opposite of everything I’ve just told you — I’d be awful in LA.” But she loved motherhood. “Some people want to be top, top, top, top. I’ve never really wanted to be top, top, top, top. I want to be chosen. But I just want to have fun.”

The waitress offers dessert. “Not for me. Actress!” says Scott Thomas, ordering an espresso instead. She moved back to London a few years ago: “A lot of people in their fifties start really longing for their homeland . . . Shall I tell you what my ideal world is? My dream is to make French films and every couple of years come and do something in London on stage.”

In the TV comedy Fleabag, Scott Thomas had a show-stealing cameo as a power-woman who celebrates the menopause and tells co-star and the show’s creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge to “grab the night by its nipples”. In real life, she wouldn’t dare give such advice: “Who the hell am I?” Is she closer to embittered Elaine from Lyonesse or the liberated executive from Fleabag?

Luckily, I wasn’t a babe. They used to call me thinking man’s crumpet, which I quite enjoyed. But I was never pretty or sexy

“Getting older is a bummer. You can’t run around as much. Some people say [she mimics a high-pitched whine]: Of course you can, I took up running when I was 64. Give me a break. My knees hurt. [But] I’m less of an angry old woman.” Directing gave her confidence: for once, people did what she asked. “I can stand up for myself but not in a defensive way. I think I was very, very defensive.”

Artificial intelligence could probably allow her to appear in movies as her 30-year-old self. She recoils. “I just find it terrifying, because they can make you do what the hell they want.”

She doesn’t long for eternal youth. “Luckily, I wasn’t a babe.” Huh? “They used to call me thinking man’s crumpet, which I quite enjoyed. But I was never pretty or sexy. I didn’t have to become something else. Basically, I’ve just got wrinklier, but I’m still the same.” I wonder if she is trying to make me flustered, or if she doesn’t have to try.

Sienna Miller’s character in North Star is an actress who complains that, when you’re famous, “the only men who are brave enough to chase you are the assholes”. Is that Scott Thomas’s experience? “I thought she had a point.”

In the film, Scott Thomas’s mother remarries a bearded ornithologist. It is a paean to unglamorous, dependable men (Scott Thomas’s partner is John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg).

I ask if Micklethwait, a country squire type with whom she wrote the script, resembles Hugh Grant in Four Weddings. “I’m not going to talk about him. I’m talking about me,” she says, with a face that suggests she doesn’t intend to be talking about anything for much longer.  

How has she avoided her life becoming celebrity fodder? “I long to be cool, but that’s never going to happen,” she smiles. After she’s left, it strikes me that her directness and self-doubt are in fact cool — would she allow me to say cooler than expected?

Henry Mance is the FT’s chief features writer

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