When future generations ask about the golden age of Kristin Scott Thomas, some of us will be able to say: “I lived through it; I was there and it was bliss.” This week, the 54-year-old actor took on the ferocious title role in Frank McGuinness’s punchy take on Electra, to rave reviews.
There is a strong and invigorating sense in which the play, directed by her long-time collaborator Ian Rickson, represents a new beginning for her. This is not mere conjecture. In fact, Scott Thomas couldn’t really have put it any more plainly. At the start of this year, she was saying: “I cannot do another film. I can’t do it any more. I’m bored by it. So I’m stopping.”
To make good on this by sinking her teeth into the Greeks is quite the mission statement – and entirely her idea, it turns out. “Our relationship is based on trust,” says Rickson, who has directed her three times before, notably in her award-winning performance in The Seagull in 2007, as well as in a production last year of Pinter’s Old Times in which she and her co-star, Lia Williams, swapped roles on alternate performances. “I trust that if Kristin says she needs to do it, it is worth doing. We spent a week reading 10 plays out loud and Electra was the one that felt urgent and worthwhile.”
The 24-year-old actor Jack Lowden plays Electra’s brother, Orestes, whom she believes at first to be dead until he pitches up to avenge the death of their father. “Kristin’s nuts!” he says. “Nuts in the best way. Nothing’s out of bounds. If you read the play, all Electra seems to do on paper is lament. She’s got speech after speech. But Kristin manages to rattle through some of the speeches as though she’s having a conversation with herself, or with the ground. She’ll do anything, try anything, and it’s completely appropriate to the part because she’s a woman at her lowest ebb. She’s got nothing left to lose.”
So this is it. Welcome to Kristin Scott Thomas AC: After Cinema. Not that the preceding 20-odd years of her career need writing off. To do so would incur some unbearable sacrifices. Gone would be the jaunty heartbreak of her turn in Four Weddings and a Funeral, which provided cinema with one of its great enigmas: not “What’s in the suitcase in Pulp Fiction?” or “Is Leonardo DiCaprio still dreaming at the end of Inception?” but “How could Hugh Grant choose Andie MacDowell while Kristin Scott Thomas was present on the same planet, let alone while she was declaring her longstanding love for him?”
Gone too would be her electrifying chemistry with Ralph Fiennes in The English Patient, not to mention the quietly agonising moment halfway through that film when she turns her back on him, and their affair, only to bang her head on some scaffolding, pause, raise her hand to her temple, then walk on.
Words such as glacial and haughty are routinely deployed to describe Scott Thomas, but they obscure the quality that renders her truly special: the fragility beneath the frost.
Since making the bold decision to nip her Hollywood success in the bud about 15 years ago, she has amassed an entire film festival’s worth of poised performances in French-language cinema (including Leaving, I’ve Loved You So Long and In the House). Partly this was a response to the lack of juicy roles in Britain. “I’m still asked to do leading roles in France, never in the UK,” she noted last year. “Never ever. People will ask me why, and I don’t really know apart from this idea that in France people are less afraid of older women, or getting old. Why is it in Anglo-Saxon culture that age is a taboo?”
It’s a truism that bears repeating. Last month, Emma Thompson complained in these pages about an epidemic of infantilised adults: “People wanting to be 35 when they’re 50 makes me think: why? Why don’t you be 50 and be good at that?”
It would be underselling Scott Thomas to say simply that she is good at it. She wears experience lightly and yet still succeeds in expressing with each cocked eyebrow or withering look the profound relief that she wasn’t born yesterday. Not for her the endless jobs as stepping stones to other jobs, the clambering up the career ladder or the loneliness of life on a film set. “She loves theatre because it’s collaborative,” Rickson says. “She can be, in the case of Electra, in a company of nine rather than surrounded by assistants or isolated in a massive Winnebago. She enjoys that because she’s really open, fun and hardworking.”
Though she was not slow to identify the shortcomings of the jobbing film actor’s life, she seemed to get mired in that world. Fresh out of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Techniques du Théâtre, she was picked by Prince in 1986 to star opposite him in Under the Cherry Moon. “It was like a fairytale. When I got the call, I’d been doing a Marguerite Duras play. In a field. In the rain.” The roles kept coming, but unfortunately this period of her career is best encapsulated by a remark she overheard in a restaurant in the early 1990s. Rising from her seat to leave, she said to her friend: “See you in a couple of months.” A man at a nearby table muttered to his companion: “See you in your next obscure European film.”
Four Weddings came soon after, followed by a period of stultifying Hollywood success, in which she was accepted a brace of parts that were among the most boring ever written: the younger love interest to ageing heart-throbs Robert Redford (in The Horse Whisperer) and Harrison Ford (in Random Hearts).
“I felt very out of place on those sets; everyone was so much older than me. Of course, I wanted to be top of people’s lists. But I thought: what is the point of this?” She wanted a third child anyway with her then-husband, the obstetrician François Olivennes, so she decided to take a break, despite a warning from her agents that her Hollywood prospects would suffer. She scoffed at the idea. “And, of course, it all dried up horribly. Within five minutes, you’re nothing. Gone. It’s so brutal. I love it!”
After that artistic estrangement, in which she and Hollywood decided it wasn’t working out and chose to go their separate ways, came a personal one: she and Olivennes separated in 2006. (Scott Thomas had begun a relationship with Tobias Menzies, who was then her co-star in a London production of Pirandello’s As You Desire Me. Her current partner is the financier Arpad Busson.)
Interviewers who trespass on her personal life can expect a curt answer. But there is no disputing that artistically she has experienced a renaissance since the divorce from Hollywood.
Aside from occasional eye-catching anomalies, such as her devilish turn last year as Ryan Gosling’s monstrous mother in Only God Forgives, her films have tended to be divided into two camps. There are the mutually nutritious French triumphs such as I’ve Loved You So Long, where she wore a pinched, resentful smile and relished some joyfully prickly moments: refusing to peruse her niece’s poetry, or puncturing the ego of a young stud following a mid-afternoon tryst.
Then there are smaller British projects (Bel Ami, Nowhere Boy) in which the nourishment flowed one way – and she knew it. “I’m often asked to do something because I’m going to be a sort of weight to their otherwise flimsy production. They need me for production purposes, basically.”
The schism was not lost on her. “The problem is that I’ve basically got two careers on the boil, both of which I have to keep ticking over,” she said last year. “Bizarrely the French one doesn’t work without the English-language one, and vice versa. The more you work, the more you work. And I keep the theatre as sort of my aqualung.”
Perhaps it was only to be expected that she would eventually come to the surface for air. “She has this fantastic economy that she’s developed from being a great screen actor,” says Rickson. “But unlike some screen actors she is really three-dimensional on stage. She’s highly sophisticated; she can journey into pain without sentiment.”
The early signs from Electra are that the play has had a restorative effect on her. “Kristin skips off stage at the end of the night,” observes Lowden. “She must be absolutely knackered but you wouldn’t be able to tell. She’s euphoric.”
Potted profile
Born 24 May 1960, Redruth, Cornwall.
Career After leaving the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, where her request to switch from teaching to acting was refused, she had a period of depression. She was an au pair in Paris, where her employer encouraged her to apply to the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Techniques du Théâtre. After graduating, she starred in the 1986 Prince drama Under the Cherry Moon.
High point Winning the Olivier award for best actress for The Seagull in 2008.
Low point Getting lost in the late-90s in the mediocre Hollywood films The Horse Whisperer and Random Hearts.
What she says “I’m sort of, as the French would say, ‘stuck between two chairs’, because I’m no longer 40 and sort of a seductress, and I’m not yet a granny.”
What they say “When my casting director suggested Kristin, we met for lunch, and I realised this woman had no problem turning on the bitch-switch. You can just feel it … a volcano of emotions waiting to explode, and I thought we should do something about it. I’ve just exposed her for what she really is. She’s been hiding for all these years.” Nicolas Winding Refn,director of Only God Forgives).
Electra is at the Old Vic, London SE1, until 20 December
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