Kristin Scott Thomas finds acting 'vulgar and a fraud'. Now Hollywood wants her, will three sessions of analysis a week be enough?

by Amanda Mitchison

The first surprise is her appearance. Kristin Scott Thomas is, of course, beautiful -- the cheekbones, the big, glaucous eyes, the faintly consumptive air -- but, like many models, in the flesh she seems strangely reduced. You would miss her on the street -- and she says nobody ever recognises her.

For this we must thank the haircut -- very short, just like Mia Farrow's in Rosemary's Baby -- and the clothes, electric-blue T-shirt and baggy, baggy army fatigues, just like those worn by Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. That is the lovely egalitarian trickle-down effect of adventurous sophisticated styles -- they add a little ugliness to the very beautiful and so bring them down a little nearer to our level.

And the second surprise comes when Kristin Scott Thomas opens her mouth. Of course we are used to seeing her play inhibited upper-class English women -- she was Lady Brenda in A Handful of Dust and the unrequited Fiona in Four Weddings and a Funeral -- but in real life she has the same accent.

It is not just a posh voice -- ridiculously posh for someone so clever -- but it also comes with all the other upper-class ticks -- the gasps, the stumbling sounds, the silly hyperbole, the little clickings of the tongue, the ubiquitous use of the word "thingie", all set in a dense verbal undergrowth of mmmms, ummhs, haaaahs, and uhuuhs.

Kristin Scott Thomas, to do her justice, fights the tendency. She uses ironic overlay, periodically plops in some French, she does the policemen in different voices ... But it is all to no avail. The poor little inchoate thoughts are like frogs stuck at the bottom of a tub of lard, desperately scrabbling upwards towards the air and sliding relentlessly down again: "I am terribly inarticulate. I find it very difficult to say what I think, which is why I am an actress ... If you are inarticulate you can either become a painter, or a musician or an actor, and the laziest of these three is becoming an actor because somebody else writes it ... you just put the hat on and say the words."

Kristin Scott Thomas hates being interviewed. She certainly hates having it inflicted on her at home, which for her is a posh Parisian flat in a building also occupied, God help the poor actress, by her psychoanalyst mother-in-law. So instead we meet in a nearby café, a café which is all mirrors, and consequently seems to be filled up with reflections of that fine face and those lovely cheekbones. Scott Thomas, much to her credit and my surprise, hardly seems to notice that her face has been multiplied all over the walls.

Scott Thomas has other hatreds. She hates spiders -- "Spiders really freak me out. I really hate spiders. If a spider comes in here ..." This isn't much of a surprise -- she has always been billed as a sensitive soul, a fine English porcelain type. And yet in Ian McKellen and Richard Loncraine's film of Richard III, which comes out this month, wasn't there that final shot of her, the dead Lady Anne, with a great long-legged arachnid making its way down the middle of her face? No, says Scott Thomas. That was a life mask.

She hates life masks -- having them done is "a pretty horrible experience". Still more does she hate body masks, "the most humiliating horrible, desperate, ghastly experience ... It's hell. It's hell ..." She also doesn't, she says, like actors very much. And she hates being an actress. (Hands in hair: "I can't really do anything else, that is what is so frustrating. I wish I could but I can't ...") But, what Scott Thomas hates above all, what she most loathes and reviles, are feelings.

Scott Thomas's performances have always been distinctive for their understatement and restraint. This, and the fact that she has lived in France since the age of 19, may account for why, until now, she has only really been known to British audiences as a character actress, normally a brittle upper-class character, though she has played other emotionally restricted women -- a nun in the ITV production Body and Soul and the bluestocking Matty Compton in the feature film Angels & Insects.

But now her fate could be about to change. Scott Thomas is appearing alongside Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible and earlier this year she finished filming the leading female rôle in Anthony Minghella's adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient. And as Lady Anne in the film of Richard III, she will be seen tackling one of the greatest set pieces in Shakespearean theatre. In Act I, Scene II, Richard, who has just killed Edward the Prince of Wales, persuades his widow, Lady Anne, to marry him.

Lady Anne's change of heart -- she must begin the scene weeping over the corpse of her dead husband and end it accepting Richard's ring -- is one of the hardest transformations to carry off convincingly. And in Ian McKellen and Richard Loncraine's film, where the scene has been cut to a fraction of its original length, it becomes all the more difficult.

Ask Scott Thomas about the scene and down comes a torrent of self-deprecation. How inexperienced she was at Shakespeare, her problems with intonation and phrasing. "I tend to downplay everything ... But you can't say these lines as if you were waiting for the bus."

Yet she plays the part with extraordinary poise and intensity of feeling. Her Lady Anne is fearful, angry, and confused. This is a finely judged and moving performance and also, rare thing for Scott Thomas, includes a moment of total breakdown.

Scott Thomas had a difficult, disjointed childhood. Her father, a Royal Navy officer, was killed in a flying accident when she was five. Six years later Scott Thomas's step-father was killed in eerily similar circumstances.

I ask about this, and Scott Thomas, staring down at her plate because she is too angry to look me in the eye, replies: "Oh listen, I just hate that so much because it is ... that's life. And I think that it was difficult. It was complicated. People live through a lot worse ... But you ... you just deal with it ..."

She pauses, draws breath: "And I'm sure that it has given me a sort of ... battery in my work. I think it is the source. It is very, very easy for me to plug into all that sort of tragic stuff inside. And I hate it because it is easy. And it feels like a trickster's way out. It is not acting. It is fraud. It is vulgar and it is a fraud."

After their father's death, Scott Thomas and her sister Serena (the model-turned-actress who played the title role in the mini-series Diana: Her True Story) were dispatched to Cheltenham Ladies College. At 16 she left, went to a convent for two years and then entered the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, where she says she was told she couldn't act, became sad and fat, and soon dropped out.

Then she bolted to Paris, and after a period of au pair-ing, she studied at the Ecole National de Théâtre and met her husband François Oliviennes, who is now an obstetrician. The couple have two children aged five and seven.

Scott Thomas likes to portray her life today as very humdrum: "It is like home, school, market, home." But minutes later we discover that she is just back from a hideously expensive health farm. Similarly, in one breath she will insist: "I don't have any friends who are actors." Then in the next, it'll be "my friend Isabelle Huppert"; meanwhile Tom Cruise, and probably any other actor you care to mention, will be described as "Great. Lovely man, sweet man. Incredibly professional."

In some areas a conversation is a game of veils. She is, she says, "no longer troubled, thank you." And today, like any good French intellectual, she sees her psychoanalyst three times a week. Nevertheless she also mentions panic attacks, waves of melancholia, heart-rending anguish over the conflicting demands of work and children. Recently, a cruel but very funny BBC2 documentary on nannies mysteriously reduced her to tears. And she has, she claims, sobbed her way through days of filming away from home.

Why don't beautiful people just lie back and enjoy? There is also some extraordinary nonsense about "definitely not being anorexic" and being a "fake thin person". She also has "one of my little things" about not wanting ever to know her weight or her measurements. "I find figures so, so ... Have you ever seen your measurements? It is the most frightening thing -- you think, my God, this can't be real. It is the proportions. Just try it. You might have less on top than you have on the bottom and the middle [she makes a the-fish-was-this-big gesture] is out here."

"When I came to Paris it was to avoid wanting to be an actress." But the move, unlike most acts of escapism, has proved to be her saving grace. Not only has she been able to avoid typecasting -- in France, which is a less obviously class-bound culture, she has not had to play an interminable series of upper-crust neurasthenics. But also, importantly, working and living abroad in a radically different environment from her background in Britain, has permitted the actress to mature and develop, without in other ways feeling pressurised to have to reinvent herself.

It is as if her quintessential Englishness -- the accent, the mannerism, the restraint -- had all been so perfectly preserved, precisely because, through her twenties and early thirties, that part of her was put on ice.

Much has been made of the Anglo-French split in Scott Thomas. She herself talks about having a different personality in French (she is unable to elaborate this point). But it would be facile to see the French part of her as the "feeling, emotional side" -- in fact one of the things she most enjoys about Paris is the cool bracing snottiness of its citizens.

Now, perhaps through the mollifying effects of age or motherhood, or psychoanalysis, she is beginning, she says, to reconcile the two sides of her life. "I spend more and more time in England because of work. And I am finding it a lot more acceptable. I spent 24 hours in London the other day just for pleasure!" What did she do? "I shopped. What else I there to do in London? Have lunch with girlfriends, hang out in 'pubs'." She pronounces "pub" as if the word were a quirky neologism.

I ask about the future. She says she doesn't fancy Hollywood and she won't do any more cameo parts, although she goes on to say that of course if something really exciting came along ...

Then, hands in hair again: "You know I suppose the sort of ultimate goal is to produce or direct or something." She adds that there are a couple of books she thinks would make fantastic adaptations, only she won't tell me the titles. Then, gleam in her eyes: "My sort of niggling thing at the back of my head, is that, as soon as my husband becomes a professor, I am going to stop and I am going to become 'the professor and his wife. They are coming to dinner'. [Offstage whisper] 'She used to be an actress, you know.'"

Scott Thomas gets up to leave, wrapping a genteely grubby Gucci scarf round her neck.

"By the way, my husband is not baggy and balding!"

Sorry?

"Somebody wrote it on one of the pieces. It was horrible, horrible, horrible."

Well, he must have looked a bit baggy, a bit balding. No?

The mistress of ambivalence raises her eyebrows in a pained furrow, makes a little pouting expression and coos: "Tch, tch, tch, just a little."

Yet I notice her lips are curled in a slight smile.