Best Known As: The beautiful, brooding star of The English Patient
Proud, fine-boned and just a bit remote, Kristin Scott Thomas jumped to international stardom as the gorgeous-but-doomed lover in 1996 Oscar champ The English Patient (also starring Juliette Binoche and Naveen Andrews). Her Oscar nomination from that film led to bigger Hollywood roles, including as Robert Redford's co-star in The Horse Whisperer (1998, with Scarlett Johansson) and Harrison Ford's co-star in Random Hearts (1999). British by birth but a long-time resident of France, Scott has since appeared as frequently in French films as in British or American projects. Her other films include Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994, with Hugh Grant), Richard III (1995, starring Ian McKellen), Gosford Park (2001), Petites coupures (2003), Keeping Mum (2005, with Rowan Atkinson) and I've Loved You So Long (2008).
According to a 2008 New York Times profile, Scott Thomas "is distantly related to Robert F. Scott, the great Antarctic explorer"... She was awarded the French Legion of Honor in 2005... She married French physician Francois Olivennes in 1991; they separated in 2006. They have three children: Hannah (b. 1988), Joseph (b. 1991) and Georges (b. 2000).
Career Highlights: The English Patient, A Handful of Dust, Angels & Insects
First Major Screen Credit: Under the Cherry Moon (1986)
Biography
Early in her career, it looked as though actress Kristin Scott Thomas was going to be relegated to playing the kind of elegantly bloodless British women she portrayed in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), but with her role as the aristocratic but passionate Katharine Clifton in The English Patient (1996), Scott Thomas broke the mold, proving herself capable of projecting a good deal of sensuality and heat as her character embarked on a tragic affair with a Hungarian adventurer (Ralph Fiennes).
The daughter of a Royal Navy pilot who died in an air crash when she was five, Scott Thomas was born the eldest of five children, in Cornwall, on May 24, 1960. When she was 11, tragedy struck again when her stepfather, also a military pilot, met a demise identical to her father's. Scott Thomas was left to help her mother look after the family and -- in contrast to what her film roles would suggest -- her situation was far from aristocratic. Although she had an interest in acting, her mother loathed the idea and sent her daughter to the Cheltenham Ladies College. Scott Thomas dropped out at age 16, spent some time in a convent, and eventually enrolled at London's Central School of Speech and Drama to take a teacher training course. Unable to resist the call of the stage, however, Scott Thomas quietly began studying drama. Unfortunately, the school's drama department advised her to pursue other professions. Scott Thomas was 18 at the time and in addition to being hurt by the drama department's rejection, she was also fed up with school. Seeking to gain perspective on her life, she went to visit some friends in Paris. What originally began as a two-week vacation ended in a permanent change of residence, after Scott Thomas took an au pair job and then fell in love with a Frenchman (she eventually married obstetrician François Olivennes, with whom she has two sons and a daughter).
Though her new French friends teased her for being a funny little English girl, Scott Thomas found herself at home in Paris and decided to try acting again. At the encouragement of her friends, she enrolled in L'Ecole Nationale des Arts et Techniques de Theatres, honing her skills and finding the French school to be more supportive than its English counterpart. She gained experience playing small roles on-stage and soon went on to do some television work. After an inauspicious debut playing a headstrong heiress in Prince's Under the Cherry Moon (1986), she worked in a number of French films. In 1988, she was given her first lead in an English film, playing a cool-blooded aristocrat in A Handful of Dust.
It wasn't until the 1990s that Scott Thomas began to attain recognition outside of Europe. Two years after starring as Hugh Grant's wife in Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon (1992), she came to the attention of an international audience in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Her second outing with Grant, the film was a sleeper hit, becoming the highest-grossing British film in the country's history. Following the film's success, Scott Thomas applied her talents to smaller films, appearing as Alfred Hitchcock's thorny assistant in the French-Canadian Le Confessionnal (1994) and a plain-Jane entomologist who finds herself embroiled in family dysfunction in Angels & Insects (1995). In 1996, the year of The English Patient, Scott Thomas fully stepped into the glare of the international spotlight, earning a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her role in the widely acclaimed film. That same year, she did less-heralded but no less respectable work in Richard III, in which she played the enigmatic Lady Anne, and Mission: Impossible, her first truly big-budget film.
With Hollywood now taking full notice, Scott Thomas was cast in a coveted lead role in Robert Redford's 1998 adaptation of Nicholas Evans' The Horse Whisperer. The film proved something of a disappointment, although the actress was praised for her strong performance. The following year, she found herself involved in another high-profile project, starring opposite Harrison Ford in Random Hearts. Playing a woman who discovers that her husband, who died in a plane crash, was having an affair with Ford's wife, who also died in the crash, Scott Thomas again got to demonstrate her ability at embracing roles that went far beyond the confines of the tea-sipping British aristocracy. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
She has recently gravitated toward French cinema in works such as the thriller Tell No One and Philippe Claudel's I've Loved You So Long. She has lived in France since she was nineteen, has raised her three children in Paris, and says she considers herself more French than English. She has been a member of the Légion d'honneur since 2005.
Scott Thomas' childhood home was in Nether Compton, Dorset, England. Her mother remarried, to another Royal Navy pilot, who also died in a flying accident six years after the death of her father. Scott Thomas was educated at private schools, Cheltenham Ladies' College and St. Antony's Leweston School for Girls, in Sherborne, Dorset, and on leaving school, she moved to Hampstead, London, and worked in a department store. She then began training to be a drama teacher at the Central School of Speech and Drama. On being told she would never be a good enough actress, she left at the age of 19 to work as an au pair in Paris.[6] Speaking French fluently, she studied acting at the École nationale supérieure des arts et techniques du théâtre (ENSATT) in Paris, and at age 25 on graduation, was cast opposite pop star Prince as Mary Sharon, a French heiress, in the 1986 film Under The Cherry Moon. On his 2009 3-CD set LOtUSFLOW3R, the album MPLSoUND has a song titled "Better With Time", which Prince has said is an ode to Kristin.
Career
Thomas is perhaps best-known for her central role as an unfaithful wife in The English Patient, one of the biggest screen hits of 1996. During the 1990s, she also appeared opposite Hugh Grant in Bitter Moon and the global box office success Four Weddings and a Funeral. She has also appeared on TV (in the 2003 Book Clubbin' episode of Absolutely Fabulous, she played a character called Plum Berkeley) and in the theatre.
Scott Thomas is a frequent subject on the British motoring programme Top Gear. She was used as a standard of reference for "good taste," such as during the "Cool Wall" segment of the programme. Presenter Jeremy Clarkson would rate a car's coolness based mostly on what he thinks Scott Thomas' level of distaste for it would be. She made her long-awaited appearance as the "Star in a Reasonably Priced Car" on the episode broadcast on 25 February 2007. On this episode, amid excessive kowtowing from Clarkson and joking from Richard Hammond and James May because Clarkson has shown much affection for her in the past, she proceeded to rubbish most of the decisions Clarkson had made over the past years of the Cool Wall. She also ridiculed the car that he had just ordered, a Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder. She completed her lap in a time of 1min 54secs, placing her just above Phillip Glenister, although still near the bottom of the leaderboard. It has also been mentioned on Top Gear that Jeremy Clarkson owns a donkey called "Kristin Scott Donkey", named after Kristin Scott Thomas.
In early 2007, she played Arkadina in a London production of Chekhov's The Seagull, for which she won a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress on 9 March 2008.[7] She reprised the role in New York in September 2008.[8]
In 2006, she played the lead role of Hélène, in French, in Ne le dis à personne (Tell No One), by French director Guillaume Canet. In 2008, Scott Thomas received many accolades for her performance in another French film, Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I've Loved You So Long), including BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for Best Actress.
In 2009, she played the role of a fashion magazine creator and editor in the film Confessions of a Shopaholic.
Personal life
Scott Thomas is divorced from Frenchgynaecologist François Olivennes, by whom she has three children: Hannah (born in 1988), Joseph (1991), and George (2000). They had been together 18 years. She supposedly had a brief romance with Prince while making 1986's, Under The Cherry Moon.[citation needed]
The separation was reportedly precipitated by her romantic involvement with English actor Tobias Menzies, whom she met while appearing in Chekhov's play Three Sisters in London's West End.[9] Menzies was also her costar in a London production of Pirandello's As You Desire Me in 2006.[10]
I never go straight to the point if I can go the most difficult way. Why be simple when you can be complicated? - (Graham Fuller, The Cover Interview: Kristin Scott Thomas, originally published in Interview Magazine, November 1996)
