ON casting Kristin Scott Thomas as Katharine Clifton in his film of The English Patient, director, Anthony Minghella comments: "Kristin's screen presence has true stillness and she has elegance and poise which underpin Katharine's unvarnished candour, and which seem to belong to another age."
That elegance and poise was abundantly in evidence when I met Kristin Scott Thomas for her first interview of the day, in London early last Monday. And there was evidence of that "true stillness" too, even if much of it was the result of her hectic globe-trotting schedule promoting The English Patient. Entering a bedroom at the Dorchester hotel, she looks longingly at the twin beds and sighs. It's the morning after the smart London premiere of the movie and there's a long day ahead, culminating in another premiere, this time on the Isle of Wight. There was no way out of that one - it was organised by the director's mother.
Despite all the travelling, the interviews and she photo opportunities, Kristin Scott Thomas looks, if anything, more radiant than she ever has on screen and she is dressed in a light, chic black suit and matching roll-neck sweater, around which hangs a long, bright-red scarf which is her plaything during the interview.
As for Anthony Minghella's "true stillness" description, she's not so sure. "Well, I take it as a compliment," she says, "but I worked with another director recently - he shall remain nameless - and he said I had to move my face more because there was no expression there. So I think it's a question of taste."
Now 37, Kristin Scott Thomas has had a circuitous journey into movies. Playing Katharine Clifton in The English Patient is the plum role in her career to date and has earned her an Oscar nomination as best actress.
Clearly following the advice proffered to Mrs Worthington Kristin's mother firmly advised her against going on stage or screen. Then, as it happened Kristin's sister Serena, followed her into acting and recently starred in the BBC serialisation of Nostromo.
Kristin was born in Redruth in Cornwall and was brought up in Dorset. Her father, a pilot, was killed when she was five; six years later her mother married another pilot: he too was killed. "I was the eldest of five," she says, "and I don't think my mother thought acting was a safe job, not like working in a bank, although that's probably not too safe a job either these days. I think, in that case, it's probably better to discourage than encourage because then, if you really want to take up acting, you will just go on and do it anyway. It is an uncomfortable career - you have such highs and such lows."
Having studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, Kristin went to stay with a friend in Paris for two weeks. She stayed, and she continues to live there, in the Left Bank home she shares with her husband Francois Olivennes, an obstetrician, and their two children. In her early days in Pars as an au pair, she went to drama school and had done some theatre and television work when she landed her first movie role in 1986.
The movie was Under The Cherry Moon, a slight and pretentious monochrome musical shot on the French Riviera and essentially a vanity exercise for its star, composer, singer and director, The Artist Formerly Known As Prince But Now Known Simply As The Artist.
She was invited to audition for a minor role and ended up being offered the female lead. "It was strange, but very enjoyable making the film," says Kristin Scott Thomas. "But it felt extraordinary to be suddenly put in that position - to be picked for the lead in a film with and by this living, legend. At the time he was at his peak. Unbelievable! It was a real baptism of fire. I'd never come across anything like this before. When we were shooting, I got a phone call in the middle of the night saying the director wouldn't be there the next day. Prince was taking over as the director."
Her "first real acting job", as she puts it, came a year later when Charles Sturridge cast her in his compelling Evelyn Waugh adaptation, A Handful Of Dust, as Lady Brenda Last, who appears to be in a perfect marriage until her husband (James Wilby) invites a penniless socialite (Rupert Graves) to stay and she drifts into an affair with him, leading to disastrous consequences.
"All I had to do on the Prince film was a lot of stalking around and showing off, but not a lot of acting," she says. "It was like all I knew was being in showbiz and getting out of limousines. I was just at limbo. So I was quite nervous at the beginning of A Handful Of Dust. Suddenly I was acting with these hot young English actors like James Wilby and Rupert Graves.
"You're always terrified that it will be found out that you're a fraud and not really a good adore at all and that it's just a question of camera angles and good editing. I think if you stop being scared that you're going to be found out, there's no point in going to work anymore. You've got to keep slightly on the edge."
She co-starred with Hugh Grant - before he was a hot young English actor - in Roman Polanski's kinky and black-humoured Bitter Moon, a movie which would keep anyone on edge. "I think it's a very cruel, film," she says. "It's very dark. There's a lot of humour in it and a lot of people just didn't get it. It made them very uncomfortable because they didn't know if they should be laughing or not, which is great. Torture the audience!"
Kristin Scott Thomas was reunited on screen with Hugh Grant in the movie that did make him hot, Four Weddings And A Funeral, in which his character inexplicably passed hers over for the one played by Andie McDowell. "I've been really lucky with my leading men," she says. "I've always got these devastatingly handsome heart-throb good actors. It would be awful to have to work with a devastatingly handsome heart-throb bad actor. And there are plenty of them! Working with Hugh was a scream - really, really funny.
"We all just worked hard on Four Weddings, constantly striving to do our best. Yet there was this feeling of us just being an etat de grace. It just seemed to work. The dialogue was so brilliantly written, anyone could have done those parts. There was no acting feat in any of it - just read the words."
Her international career expanded and grew as she worked in England on the Philip Haas film of A.S. Byatt's Angels And Insects went to Romania to star in Lucien Pintail's An Unforgettable Summer, which was selected for competition at Cannes, then to Canada, playing Alfred Hitchcock's secretary in Robert Lepage's The Confessional - "that was truly brave, to use something so theatrical and make it truly cinematic," she says.
Back in England, she was thrilled to be among the stellar cast - and, she says, in awe of many of them - in Ian McKellen's adventurous Richard III, in which she played Lady Anne. Then, for something completely different, appeared in her first Hollywood blockbuster Mission Impossible. "That was such fun and it really put it all back into perspective," she says. "In films like Bitter Moon, Angels And Insects, Unforgettable Summer you are investing a lot of your own imagination and your own emotions, and your experiences of life and your observations of it. You have to be constantly collecting stuff as an actor - which doesn't mean to say I go and watch the gorillas in the zoo! And Mission Impossible was just games, pure pretending, like playing at school and so different from making something intense and personal. I'd love to do more films like that."
Nevertheless, the intensity and passion of The English Patient attracted Kristin Scott Thomas more than any other film project. Three years ago, on her way to Romania to film An Unforgettable Summer she bought the Michael Ondaatje novel and took it on the set with her. "I became really passionate about it," she says. "Obsessed, I would say. So many other people I met felt the same way about the novel. The only difference being that, as an actress, I'm allowed to join in, and I got the great luxury of being able to walk into that world and be there for three months.
"Having read the book and wanted to be involved in that universe, that story, I got home from Romania add learned that Anthony Minghella was making the film of it. I asked if I could have a copy of the script and if he could meet me. At the time I wasn't particularly thinking of playing Katharine Clifton because when you read the novel, you don't really think of her as being such a central character. She's a memory, a shadow, a ghost.
"When I read Anthony's screenplay he had managed to bring her forward. I simply had to do it. I can't explain that feeling but I felt if I didn't do it, I might as well give up. I felt so right for the part, so ready in terms of my acting experience to play someone open and related unlike the dark, reserved characters I had been, playing, who had been hiding their light under a bushel the whole time."
In The English Patient, Katharine Clifton is an aristocrat who arrives in the Sahara in the late 1930s with her aviator husband (Colin Firth) as members of a Royal Geographical Society expedition. Meeting the linguist and explorer Count Laszlo de Almasy (Ralph Fiennes), she becomes irresistibly involved with him.
WHEN Anthony Minghella and producer Saul Zaentz, negotiating the project with 20th Century Fox, proposed a cast led by Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott Thomas and Juliette Binoche, the Hollywood studio blanched. But Minghella refused to capitulate and he eventually made the movie with the backing of another film company, Miramax. The movie's critical and commercial success to date and its raft of nominations - 12 in the Oscars and 13 for the BAFTA awards - have vindicated Minghella's doggedness.
"I think that, for business purposes, Fox would have preferred an all-star cast," says Kristin Scott Thomas. "I know they felt the story needed that. It's great to have proved them to the contrary - that less well-known actors, apart from Ralph, can carry a picture and make it work. It's not a question of who's more important. It's about good story-telling."
How does she feel as Oscar night, March 24th, approaches? "I'm ridiculously excited," she beams. "Of course, I don't have anything to wear!" When I express disbelief at that statement, she smiles and shrugs her shoulders. "But I'm so impressed with the other actresses who are nominated. There is no one there I'm not amazed by. It's wonderful that this film has got so many nominations because it's not an easy film. It's not instant gratification. You have to get involved with it."