She has spied with Tom Cruise and pined for Hugh Grant. But her romance with Ralph Fiennes in The English Patient has turned up the heat for this newly blonde Brit.

by Chris Smith

Kristin Scott Thomas is upset. Her face, ordinarily creamy white, turns crimson as she begins to talk about filming the crucial opening sequence -- a plane crash -- of The English Patient. When the day came for her to climb into a 1940s-style biplane built especially for the film, she found herself shaking.

There is a painful element of her past that Scott Thomas has in common with her character, Katharine Clifton, whose life is dramatically altered by an airplane tragedy: The actress lost her father, a British Royal Navy pilot, in a flying accident in 1964 and her stepfather, also a pilot, under similar circumstances six years later.

"It suddenly freaked me out," Scott Thomas says about shooting the crash scene. "I got very angry about having to be there -- 'Why are we doing this f---king film, anyway? This bloody film is terrible!' -- sort of ranting and raving and behaving rather badly. It was cold, and I just didn't like having a parachute strapped on to me. I found it very, very difficult to let go of that. Because I knew if I let go completely, I would just become a blob of jellified Kristin. And I wouldn't be Katharine anymore."

A curtain seems to descend. Scott Thomas retreats into glacial British reserve. "I'm not very proud of that, actually," she says. "I let my own personality become too important in that film."

No matter the source of her motivation, Scott Thomas has nothing to be embarrassed about. Her Katharine is a complex mix of beauty and intelligence -- a well-born, passionate Brit who joins an Egyptian archeological expedition with her feckless husband, played by Colin Firth (Mr Darcy in last year's Pride and Prejudice). Leading the fossil hunters is the mysterious, icy Hungarian Count Laszlo de Almásy, played by Ralph Fiennes. Katharine and the count spend their days searching for ancient cave paintings. What they find are their hearts.

In the film, Scott Thomas, her dark brown hair dyed honey blonde, looks stunning hip deep in North African desert sand and dressed in a brown leather bomber jacket and a gauzy white transparent shift. Opposite Fiennes, she has to. "Having a leading man who is actually prettier than you are is quite upsetting," she says with a wide, ivory smile.

Scott Thomas stumbled upon The English Patient, the Booker Prize-winning Michael Ondaatje novel, in a Paris bookstore three years ago. When she heard a film was in the works, the actress wrote Anthony Minghella, the screenwriter and director of the film, explaining why she should play the part of Katharine.

"I remember one great line," says Minghella. "Just after Katharine has peeked at Almásy's journal, there's a scene where they're marooned in the desert. He's just fired a flare, and she says to him, 'Am I "K" in your book? I think I must be.' In Kristin's letter, she wrote, 'I am"K" in your film.'" Minghella laughs. "And indeed she is."

"It was such hard work getting them to accept me," Scott Thomas says, "because they wanted a famous actress -- 'they' being the people with the money. The people with the talent backed me to the hilt. I was madly in love with my character. I want to be her when I grow up."

Scott Thomas, 37, fled her childhood home of Dorset, England, when she was 19 to work in Paris as an au pair. Drama school, a French boyfriend -- Scott Thomas forgot to ever go home.

Until recently, getting a look at Scott Thomas's talent took a bit of effort. Art-house hits like A Handful of Dust and Angels & Insects were widely praised but not widely seen. Mention her big debut, Prince's 1986 vanity production Under the Cherry Moon, and she winces. "I'd never done a film before, and it was like, here I am with the leading-lady role opposite a superstar -- hello! It was such fun. I can't watch the film anymore, though. Embarrassing." Casting directors finally began paying attention with Scott Thomas's supporting parts in Four Weddings and a Funeral and Mission: Impossible. The English Patient should raise her stock in Hollywood even more. She has as much camera time as Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, and Willem Dafoe.

It seems that Joseph, Scott Thomas's 5-year-old son, who is back home in Paris, isn't particularly impressed by Mom's nuanced work in indie hits like Richard III. That movie in which she pined for Hugh Grant, Four Weddings? Yeah, that was OK. Joseph would be absolutely thrilled, however, with a pair of phosphorescent sneakers, says his mom.

Scott Thomas's time in Manhattan is running out, so she's elbowing her way through tourists and peddlers in pursuit of a prize she cares more about than any talk of an Oscar nomination: sneakers. And not just any sneakers. When Scott Thomas describes exactly what shoes she's after in her plummy, proper British accent suggesting the Queen Mum and the Upstairs contingent of that famous Masterpiece Theatre serial, the words sound deliciously absurd. "Ones with flashing lights at the back," she says to the salesperson.

"Try a delightful new fragrance?"

Scott Thomas has popped into Bloomingdale's and dodges an involuntary perfume sample. "Buy, buy, buy, buy!" she says. "They want to grab you and trap you and turn you into little Elizabeth Hurleys."

Like Hurley, Scott Thomas could make just about anything look elegant. Today, she turns heads by wearing chunky lime-green Nina Ricci sunglasses and a blue-striped men's oxford shirt, untucked ("It was my husband's, but he's grown rather since then"). When she's puzzled, the actress pulls at her short-cropped hair and it stands straight up, making her look like a more refined sister of the Cranberries' Dolores O'Riordan.

Darting through the bed-linens department, Scott Thomas picks out a mattress pad ("one of those squidgy things") for her 19th-century country house (her husband, François Oliviennes, is a French obstetrician, and they have a daughter, 8-year-old Hannah, as well as young Joseph) but can't find any sneakers and strides out in search of a purveyor known as Raspberry Street.

A happy ending: The tiny store has sneakers the sides and heels of which glow.

Finally sated, Scott Thomas totes her hard-won prize back to the Four Seasons Hotel. "The thing that sticks with me most about [The English Patient] is this idea of boundaries," she says, reflective now, "this idea of limits, that we should all be able to move freely with each other, not only physically -- this idea of freedom, ultimate freedom."

As she tosses the shopping bag over her shoulder and glides up a flight of cool marble steps and disappears, Kristin Scott Thomas seems to have escaped the pull of earthly gravity. There's nowhere for her to go but up. And no danger of crashing.