Kristin Scott Thomas on her directorial debut and the importance of authenticity
PHOTOGRAPHY KATE MARTIN
STYLING SASA THOMANN
Kristin Scott Thomas’s self-penned directorial debut is the latest accomplishment in an elegant career that’s just getting better. Charlotte Sinclair meets her at her London home.
If, like me, you watched The English Patient at a formative age, there’s nothing quite like meeting the actor who embodied Katharine Clifton, one of cinema’s great romantic heroes, a woman capable of commanding the Saharan winds with the coolness of her gray gaze and who made unhappy mincemeat of her lover, Ralph Fiennes’s Count Almásy. Kristin Scott Thomas, at 66, still owns one of the most captivating faces, and enviable careers, in film. Her long- running role as MI5’s unflappable “second desk” Diana Taverner, in Apple TV+’s brilliant adaptation of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, has introduced a fresh generation to Scott Thomas’s inimitable brand of on-screen sophistication. Her scenes opposite Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb — her: steely, him: flatulent — are a delight. (See, also, her barnstorming cri de coeur for the post-menopausal woman in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag). Her directorial debut, My Mother’s Wedding, was released in the U.S. last year, and is now out in the UK. The film, which Scott Thomas also co-wrote, co-stars Scarlett Johansson. Later this year, she will feature at London’s Harold Pinter Theatre, in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, directed by Ian Rickson. Meanwhile, Scott Thomas’s natural elegance and exquisite bone structure are currently being parlayed into fashion campaigns for both Erdem and Burberry. Last year, she made her catwalk debut, walking for Miu Miu.
At her mansion flat in London, the actor sits in her basement spare room having her hair and makeup done. More diminutive than the grandeur suggested by her cinematic presence, the arresting effect of her deep-set eyes, high cheekbones and sharp jawline are undiminished. The voice, too, is unmistakable, its deep, patrician tones conveying the hauteur that played so beautifully in Four Weddings and a Funeral against Hugh Grant’s mumbling, capitulating Charles. Even chiding her dog, a little scrappy, barky thing called Pickle — “Don’t you dare! No! Not on there!” — her tone has the effect of making everyone in earshot stand up an inch taller. Scott Thomas lives between London and Paris, maintaining a film career and a life in two languages. But London, she says, has been her home since the COVID-19 pandemic. “Before, I used to spend a third of the year in the UK and a third in France,” she says. “And then a third on set or wherever. That all changed with the pandemic and then I just stayed.” When we speak over Zoom, a few days after the shoot, she’s in her Paris apartment, a light bright space with walls decorated with art. She wears a loose, striped shirt, pushed up at the sleeves, and a string of red beads. Her short, silver bob is pushed back behind her ears. When I compliment her style, she twists uncomfortably in her chair and demurs. “Well, thank you. I don’t know what to say to that.”
DENIM JACKET AND PANTS, AND GOLD-TONE AND CRYSTAL CUFF (ON RIGHT HAND), AND GOLD-TONE AND CUBIC ZIRCON CUFF (ON LEFT HAND), ALL DIOR
KRISTIN WEARS NYLON COAT, PATENT-LEATHER SHOES, AND NYLON SUNGLASSES, ALL SAINT LAURENT. RINGS, ALL KRISTIN’S OWN, ALL WORN THROUGHOUT. VISCOSE TIGHTS, FALKE
The London home that Scott Thomas shares with her husband of nearly two years, Bloomberg editor-in-chief, John Micklethwait, is similarly discerning. Blond parquet floors lead into a sitting room filled to the reaches by a bright bubble of spring sunshine. The room’s atmosphere is of calm, considered refinement, the colors a muted wash of watery blues, grays and green, pale yellows, golds and pinks, the whole lifted by Indian block textile lampshades. An antique pendant with a dish of rippled metal hangs over an octagonal Arts & Crafts table. Its geometry was chosen deliberately. “I love to cook,” she declares. “But I think eight is as many as I can handle in my kitchen.” Excellent antiques abound, the result of, “an enormous amount of time trawling through antique market websites.” Favorites include a pair of 1920s chinoiserie mirrors positioned above Perspex console tables. “Aren’t they brilliant?,” she says, delighted. “They have little owls perched on top. I found them in a sale.” Twentieth-century oil paintings and line drawings contrast with large-scale contemporary photographs and a graphic print by Bridget Riley. A series of black- and-white photographs depict the artist Lucio Fontana slashing at a canvas with a knife, while propped on the marble fireplace is a perfectly captured study of Scott Thomas by the portrait artist Jonathan Yeo.
A galley kitchen is small but perfectly formed, with Corian worktops and a William Morris patterned breakfast banquette. “I designed the table there,” she says. “I was very specific. It had to have a linoleum top and a bistro foot. I’m very proud of it.” Open shelves are painted in racing green; the units are a snow-melt blue. “I worked with an interior designer called Malcolm Winyard,” says Scott Thomas. “Jasper Conran recommended him. Because it’s all very well saying, ‘Oh, I know what I like. I know what I want.’ But somebody’s got to go out and source it. It felt incredibly grown-up to be working with somebody who took me to all these places that didn’t start with an ‘I’ and end with an ‘a’”, she laughs. For someone who appears so well-defended and vigilant of her privacy, (certain features of the flat are off-limits for reporting), one might imagine the intimacy of the designer-client relationship challenging. “It’s a really wild thing,” she says. “Because it’s so personal. You really have to get into the nitty-gritty of things.” Scott Thomas raises her eyebrows. “Like, which side of the bed do you sleep on?”
KRISTIN WEARS RAYON SHIRT AND CREPE PANTS, BOTH EMPORIO ARMANI
The result is a home that’s refined but unpretentious. “When I bought this place, I thought, ‘This time I’m going to go sophisticated and very grown up’”, says Scott Thomas. “But I’m 66. Those days are gone. Now I just get to be who I am. There’s no point trying to squeeze myself into any form that doesn’t come naturally.” Shelves in the green-carpeted study are propped with family photographs – Scott Thomas has two sons and a daughter — and there’s a large, flat-screen TV. “You know,” she says, smiling wryly, “that is one advantage of having a football-fan partner. You do get the big screen.” Books of fiction, poetry, philosophy, art and history, in French and English, line the walls. Tucked between volumes by Jan Morris and Richard Yates is a copy of the play, The Audience, by Peter Morgan, in which Scott Thomas played Queen Elizabeth II. “I love art and music and words,” she says. “I love traveling in my head.” Unlike in the sitting room, the shelves are filled with trinkets and mementos. “I’m a magpie,” she admits. “Minimalism is not happening.” Recent finds include a wooden hand “dismembered” from a religious sculpture. “I found it in a junk shop and gave it to my husband for his first Christmas present when we were together.
I’m also fond of a tiny little piece of ceramic with a bird on it, from when we went to Japan.” Her taste, she says, is probably inherited from her mother. “She was incredibly creative and a jeweler by trade. She could make, paint, build, absolutely anything. A very practical woman. Hers was a more romantic eye than mine. I have two sisters and they have incredible taste. I think we all inherited a certain form of an idea of what we like to have around us.”
Now I just get to be who I am. There’s
no point trying to squeeze myself into
any form that doesn’t come naturally.
KRISTIN SCOTT THOMAS
KRISTIN WEARS SATIN DRESS, DAVID KOMA
Scott Thomas’s own childhood forms a part of the script, co- written with her husband, John Micklethwait, of her new movie, My Mother’s Wedding, a drama-comedy, in which three sisters — Johansson is joined by Sienna Miller and Emily Beecham — descend upon their childhood home for their mother’s third nuptials. “The sisters are in romantic disarray,” she says. “Their mother is deliriously happy and they’re all a bit cross.” Scott Thomas borrowed part of her personal history for the character of the eldest daughter, played by Johansson. “She’s affected by what affected me. Which is, my memories of my father and stepfather.”
The eldest of five siblings, Scott Thomas was five when she lost her father, a Royal Navy pilot, in a plane crash, and 11 when she lost her stepfather, also a Royal Navy pilot, also to a plane crash. She continues, “My stepfather had wanted to adopt us, and I had said I didn’t want to change my name. And then he died. So it’s about identity and what your name means.” Was it difficult to use her own experiences as material? She bristles slightly. “Not really because everyone else has been using it. Every single article ever written about me, every single profile, there’s always a little paragraph about my tragic childhood. And I suddenly thought, ‘Well, hang on a minute. I should be the one talking about that!’”
ECOVERO DRESS, PATRICK MCDOWELL. PATENT-LEATHER SHOES, CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN
In the movie, the memories form an animated sequence. “I didn’t want a child in an ill-fitting wig and misty lighting,” she says, baulking at the idea. The sequence also serves a double purpose of giving her brothers a sense of their own history. “My brothers and littlest sister have zero recognition—”, she falters, slipping into French before summoning the word. “Recollection! — of my father, their father, and only a little bit of their stepfather, my stepfather.” The rest of the movie, she’s keen to emphasize, is fiction. “These aren’t my sisters. This isn’t me. This is not my mother. But the heart of the story is my story.” Directing while acting was a challenge. “Really, really hard,” she says. “You’ve got to divide yourself up into the person watching the scene and the person pretending to be someone else. But I feel extraordinarily lucky to have done it.” Would she like to do more? “Definitely. I’ll be better at it because I won’t have the actor’s worry about hurting feelings.” She quickly clarifies: “It’s not that they weren’t doing what I asked. I just wasted so much energy pussyfooting around stuff because I was worried about upsetting them. I could have spent that energy worrying about other things.”
KRISTIN WEARS COTTON SHIRT AND TROUSERS, AND TULLE CORSET DRESS (WORN UNDERNEATH), ALL DOLCE & GABBANA. PATENT-LEATHER SHOES, CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN
Meanwhile, she has The Cherry Orchard to contend with. She retreats to her husband’s house in the country to learn her lines. “There’s a room right up at the top, under the eaves, where no one can get me. That’s where I go to shout my lines. I’m a pacer. Movement gets it under the skin.” Despite only beginning her stage career at 40, she has acquired an adroit understanding of the contract between actor and audience. “The audience might have its own intentions, but [in the theater] you are the boss,” she says with no little glee. “You’ve got to tell them the story that you want to tell them, not the one that they necessarily think they want to hear. Sometimes, on a Thursday night, everyone’s had a couple of drinks so the moment anyone says anything with a hint of humor, they’re all roaring. You think, OK, laugh. But I’m going to really hurt you in a minute.” She smiles. “That’s so fun.”
PHOTOGRAPHY KATE MARTIN.
STYLING SASA THOMANN.
HAIR NEIL MOODIE AT BRYANT ARTISTS.
MAKEUP ADAM DE CRUZ AT ONE REPRESENTS.
PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANT AND DIGITECH ANDRAS BARTOK.
LIGHTING DIRECTOR GUY ISHERWOOD
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