"I mean, what's wrong with being middle-class? I'm middle-class! However, I've got over it now. I'll be an aristocrat now if they want me to be. I suppose having an image as a brainy upper-class beauty is better than the alternative."

"The English Patient has changed my life in that, for once, I've really set out to get something, and achieved it. Until then I had so much restraint in my characters, and I really needed to play someone who could let go."

Kristin Unleashed
by James Servin

Onscreen, the typical Kristin Scott Thomas look is polished-to-perfection, blue eyes twinkling subversively. As Lady Brenda Last in Charles Sturridge's 1988 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, she had a smart wardrobe to offset her wicked personality. Ditto her part in Bitter Moon, directed by Roman Polanski. Aside from last summer's take-the-money-and-run outing in Mission: Impossible, Scott Thomas is perhaps best known here for her turn as the picture-hat-wearing, chain-smoking Fiona, the woman with the immaculate bob and the mixed-up heart in Four Weddings and a Funeral.

If it seemed to be Scott Thomas's destiny to forever play the chic ice queen, her career takes a new turn this month with the release of The English Patient, the big-screen adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel. Written and directed by Anthony Minghella, the love-across-the continents epic features Scott Thomas as you've never seen her before. Playing Katharine Clifton, the socialite who has an adulterous affair with a leader of an international desert expedition (Ralph Fiennes) just prior to World War II, she's passionate, she's blonde, and she's Oscar-worthy in a juicy leading role.

The Kristin Scott Thomas who appears in the lobby of Manhattan's Four Seasons Hotel wearing a baby-blue cardigan buttoned over a rumpled olive linen jumpsuit is someone else altogether. She's instantly familiar, this cordial and forthright person with warm eyes, short-clipped blonde hair, and a slightly manic air. It's Julie Andrews from The Sound of Music -- with her roots showing.

"Shall we get some tea?" Scott Thomas asks, playfully frowning in the direction of the lobby, where piano music pours forth. As "Memory" segues to "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina", Scott Thomas says, "Well, it sounds like tea anyway."

Seated at a table in the back of the room, she curls up in the brown leather chair and gazes out at the traffic and shops on 57th Street. The camera loves certain features, and Kristin Scott Thomas has them: high forehead, strong nose and chin, generous mouth. Fresh-faced yet moody, she brings a radiant langour to her role in The English Patient. In person as on film, her pale-blue eyes are mesmerizing to watch.

She sends the waitress away with an order of dainty sandwiches and orange pekoe tea -- much-needed props to recover from the last 24 hours, a killer night-into-day schedule that has seen her through a transatlantic flight, an immigraiton delay, and a photo shoot. "It was a disastrous trip," she says. "They sent me over first-class, and I was really enjoying it." She moves her eyebrows up and down as she says the words really and enjoying. "I thought I'd get some sleep, but then a group of businessmen proceeded to get loud and drunk the whole flight over."

She may have lost some beauty-rest last night, but you get the idea tha vanity is not a huge issue with Kristin Scott Thomas. The Paris-based mother of two exudes a bohemian air, as though she had just left her easel and brush before popping down to tea. "I managed to get on one of those best-dressed lists last year," she says, pretending to be embarassed as she appraises today's attire. "You know ... unironed, the rest of it ... slovenly!"

Imagine people assuming you're well-dressed, intelligent, and aristocratic before they've even met you. That, readers, is the hell of being Kristin Scott Thomas. "I got a real bee in my bonnet about that a year ago," she says, genuine irritation seeping through the jocular tone. "I mean, what's wrong with being middle-class? I'm middle-class! However, I've got over it now. I'll be an aristocrat now if they want me to be. I suppose having an image as a brainy upper-class beauty is better than the alternative."

The eldest of five children, Scott Thomas, now 36, was raised in Dorset, England, in a rural village she describes as "the middle of nowhere. We spent our lives in the fields.... We were quite isolated." She quickly explains that her father, a pilot for the Royal Navy, died in a crash when she was five, and that, six years later, her stepfather died the same way. "I resent articles that have described my childhood as tragic," she says. "It wasn't a bed of roses and it wasn't a hellhole. You just get on with it."

At 18 she left the sticks for London and drama school. She continued her studies in Paris, where she met her husband, François Oliviennes, an obstetrician. She also met the artist now formerly known as Prince: Trying out for a small role in his movie Under the Cherry Moon, Scott Thomas was given the lead, a trust-fund rebel. "His Highness was at the audition," she reports. "Working on the film was fun -- party all the time. There were all these limousines and handlers and managers, all kinds of glitzy stuff, but it wasn't my thing, and I was terribly disappointed in myself for not being able to get into it...." Her overwhelmed, exasperated expression says it all. "What was I supposed to do? Sit there like a potted plant?"

Scott Thomas's first scene in Under the Cherry Moon has her flashing a crowd gathered for her birthday, saying, "How do you like my birthday suit? I designed it myself." It marks the beginning of a filmography in which her sex appeal is consistently, and often curiously, explored. In Philip Haas's Angels & Insects, she plays a demure intellectual, a flash of whose wrist sends a potential suitor into flights of erotic obsession. Wrist-worshipping also occurs in The English Patient, in a brief moment of homage by Ralph Fiennes. Even more obsessed by the hollow of her neck, Fiennes's character comes up iwth a special name for it, the Almásy Bosphorus.

Acknowledging that a few men have asked to see her wrists since Angels & Insects (I myself request a wrist-flashing moment, and she shyly offers a half-flash), Scott Thomas says she's thought a bit about this attention to the sum of her parts. "I seem to do films about joints and elbows," she muses. In an even more erotic moment, The English Patient cameras seem to focus on her erect nipples during a love scene -- a candid, audacious piece of filming that peels away the defensive irony characteristic of Scott Thomas's style. Just mentioning this to her produces a slightly alarmed look. "Really?" she asks, seemingly horrified that someone noticed. "It must have been chilly," she says briskly. Then: "Oh, dear. Am I going to get lots of questions about that?"

Maybe not, but the blonde angle will be big. Hitting the bottle of peroxide for The English Patient, she put an end to her reign as a sardonic brunette, offering a Technicolor turning point for a more mellow, natural, confident, and accomplished leading lady to shine through. Two years ago she was reading the novel in Romania, on the set of yet another brunette film, Lucien Pintilie's An Unforgettable Summer. She loved the poetic writing of The English Patient so much that she didn't want it to end, so she read the book again, then a third time. "It was too beautiful to stop," she says. "I wanted to" -- and now she catches herself with a laugh -- "have another go." For the first time in her career, Scott Thomas went after a part like a barracuda.

"I've always thought she was accomplished," says Anthony Minghella, "and I especially admired her work in Four Weddings and a Funeral. In that one pivotal scene she has with Hugh Grant, in which she confesses her love for him, she acts like a lightning conductor of truth. But if you had asked me a year ago who would have played the part of Katharine, I would not have put her at the top of the list."

Scott Thomas knew Minghella because he and the producer of Four Weddings, Duncan Kenworthy, are good friends. At first she thought this connection gave her the part, end of story. Learning that every major actress in Hollywood also coveted the role stepped up her determination. "I felt sure that I must play this character," Scott Thomas says. "I've never felt like that about anything else before. I wrote to Anthony, I bullied him, really, into having an audition for me."

Minghella wasn't entirely convinced, but he wasn't completely dissuaded, either. "She stayed in my mind sufficiently," he says. "Wonderful actresses fell by the wayside, but she never went away." It wasn't until she attended a read-through of the script with Ralph Fiennes that Minghella reports feeling "almost evangelical about casting her. Some kind of alchemy went on between them that was irresistible. They're very similar creatures. They're both thoroughbreds, slightly dangerous racehorses." Forgoing a more bankable leading lady, says Minghella, was a move "that nearly cost us the film. But now I feel so vindicated. Kristin's performance is faultless."

When Scott Thomas listens to the praise, she seems simultaneously pleased and slightly removed, as though she's been around long enough to take such talk with a grain of salt, and as though she's still adjusting to people responding to the intimacy she's shown.

"People seem to be jumping up and down," she says. "The English Patient has changed my life in that, for once, I've really set out to get something, and achieved it. Until then I had so much restraint in my characters, and I really needed to play someone who could let go. I was a joy, and I'm sure some of the joy you see on the screen is my own. But now I'm thinking, Ohhh, did I want to show them that much?"

Judging from the look of detached amusement she often displays in her films, I hadn't been sure how comfortable speaking with Scott Thomas would be. As it happens, I feel like I'm meeting less a crafty player of mind games than a performer who has stretched herself so far artistically that she's in a new emotional sphere altogether, almost a different person. One senses her being still in the trying-on stage of this new self, concurrently delighted and frightened by it, and curious about what happens next.

"Seeing The English Patient is wonderfully draining," she says, "but imagine acting in it for six months. By the end of the shoot, I felt like I'd had it. I said to my agent, 'Don't talk to me about films. I think we might as well stop.' My agent said, 'Don't worry, in six months it will all come back.'" And it did. Next up, Scott Thomas gets to chill out on familiar ground, opposite Sam Neill and Helena Bonham Carter in the film version of Alan Ayckbourn's The Revengers' Comedies. "I play a very frustrated, very bad-tempered lady named Imogen," Scott Thomas says. Is she an aristocrat? "Yeah."

With another flash of the wrist, Kristin Scott Thomas checks the time. Two hours have flown by. As she says goodbye, she smiles her trademark merry-eyed, mischievous smile, and you feel sure she has a few more wild cards up that sleeve.