"People are always saying, English, English, English rose, and I just feel so completely different."

Audrey Hepburn had the same knack, which suggests an exact correlation between dramatic dominance and perfection of bone structure.

"The English Patient" offers, among other things, an almost criminal array of good looks. There is Juliette Binoche, and, as Scott Thomas's lover, Ralph Fiennes -- "far too beautiful," she says. "I'm never making a film with him again."

Foreign Accents
by Anthony Lane

"I wanted to be a saint." Such was the ambition of Kristin Scott Thomas, a good Catholic girl, at the age of four. For some reason, she has yet to be canonized, although a series of performances has made her the object of widespread worship. She played Brenda Last, brittle with boredom, in "A Handful of Dust"; she was wound into the viscous web of "Bitter Moon" for Roman Polanski; and she went to the far reaches of Romania for "An Unforgettable Summer", where she learned her lines phonetically. All these roles involve wives in varying degrees of adventurous distress: excellent preparation for "The English Patient", which opens on November 15th. Scott Thomas stars as a well-bred blonde who betrays her husband in -- or for -- the sands of North Africa.

"People are always saying, English, English, English rose," Scott Thomas says, "and I just feel so completely different." To encounter her in Paris, where she lives with her French husband and their two children, is to realize that she is not simply bilingual; the figure who converses over a café crème -- jeans and loafers, minimum makeup, boyish crop -- is, to all intents and purposes, a Frenchwoman. If there is something unpredictable, a dash of impatience, in the angle at which she confronts the world, so much the better: a rose without thorns is a drag. Hence her infuriating habit of stealing a scene, or an entire movie, without appearing to make a grab for the goods. Audrey Hepburn had the same knack, which suggests an exact correlation between dramatic dominance and perfection of bone structure. "The English Patient" offers, among other things, an almost criminal array of good looks. There is Juliette Binoche, and, as Scott Thomas's lover, Ralph Fiennes -- "far too beautiful," she says. "I'm never making a film with him again." If this principle were applied across the industry, of course, Kristin Scott Thomas would be out of work.