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THE CV: KRISTIN SCOTT THOMAS

She has one career in Britain, and another in France. Nicholas Barber traces a career that is not all cut glass ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Summer 2010

1986:  Under the Cherry Moon
The rock star Prince directs a black-and-white screwball caper starring himself as a Riviera gigolo who woos a wild-child heiress—what could possibly go wrong? The answer, as shown by Golden Raspberry nominations for Worst New Star and Worst Supporting Actress, is: “Even more than you’d expect.” Scott Thomas, 25, and just out of drama school, makes her film debut flashing a terrace full of party guests (“How do you like my birthday suit?”), and showing off her funky drumming. It’s the role Elizabeth Hurley was born to play.

1988:  A Handful of Dust    
This is more like it. A literary source, a period setting, a country estate, and a woman who’s unfaithful to her stuffed-shirt husband (James Wilby): two or three of these elements would recur in most of Scott Thomas’s best work. What isn’t seen so often later on is the fresh-faced sweetness she radiates here. Her character is so wide-eyed and twinkly, you can’t pinpoint the moment when she switches from adoring spouse to heartless swindler.

1994:  Four Weddings and a Funeral
It could be a thankless role—the pining friend rejected by the hero in favour of his one true love, and forced to wear a series of hats—but Richard Curtis’s polished script lets Scott Thomas retain her dignity, and she confesses her feelings with such poise that audiences side with her, rather than the bed-hopping flirt who snares Hugh Grant by...errr...marrying someone else. Andie MacDowell got the boy, but Scott Thomas got the laughs, the Bafta, and the interesting career.

1996:  The English Patient
A decade after her debut, she is at last the leading lady in a lavish blockbuster, captivating every male round a desert campfire—and in the stalls—by reciting Herodotus. Up against her frank intelligence, the other explorers are just kids in a sandpit. She earned an Oscar nomination and a lead role in Robert Redford’s turgid “Horse Whisperer”, but not a lasting berth on the A-list. With her Celia Johnson vowels and Katharine Hepburn cheekbones, she was born 50 years too late.

2001:  Gosford Park
Robert Altman and Julian Fellowes’s murder mystery is a feast of great actors in great roles, but only Maggie Smith matches Scott Thomas’s delicious comic performance as the house party’s regal hostess, whose put-downs float through the air like butterflies and yet land with the force of a grand piano dropped from a fifth-storey window. Having played a part that suited her talents so exquisitely, where could she go next? Luckily for her, and for us, there was the French connection.

2008:  Il y a longtemps que je t’aime (I’ve Loved You So Long)
Scott Thomas may seem the archetypal English rose—in “Absolutely Fabulous”, she played one Plum Berkeley—but she has lived in Paris since going there to study drama 30 years ago, and France is now giving her one juicy role after another. In “Tell No One” (2006) she was a no-nonsense restaurateur who ogles her waitresses, and in “I’ve Loved You So Long” she was pale and drawn after a stretch in jail, barely speaking yet holding the eye with every half-frown. Would a British or American casting director have thought of her for either role?

2009:  Nowhere Boy
Scott Thomas’s second rock’n’roll film turned out far more happily. The part of John Lennon’s flinty Aunt Mimi may strum a few familiar chords—she is, again, an indignant snob let down by a man (or boy)—but she convinces in rollers and an apron, and without a maid or butler in sight. The Liverpool accent comes and goes, but her ramrod authority wins through—and brought her customary slew of awards nominations.

2010:  Partir (Leaving)
Off screen, she is now 50 and a divorced mother of three. On screen, in “Partir”, she zaps her husband with a glare of blood-chilling frostiness, but the delight of Catherine Corsini’s domestic drama is in seeing how quickly and thoroughly she thaws. As a doctor’s wife who runs off with a brawny Catalan builder (Sergi Lopez), she giggles like a teenager, hums with pleasure as she sips red wine, and, mon dieu, grins in triumph as she lies naked beside her lover. Only in the land of the chic and reserved is she allowed to play someone who isn’t.

Partir  British release July 9th

(Nicholas Barber is a film critic for the Independent on Sunday.)

Picture Credit: dreamsjung (via Flickr)