When the American film-maker, Philip Haas, was casting a romantic period adventure-movie based on Somerset Maugham's novella, Up At the Villa, he had no doubt about who should play the pivotal role of Mary Panton, a young British widow pursued by several suitors in the pre-war Florence of 1938. Haas, who describes the film as "the flipside of A Room With A View", called Kristin Scott Thomas, who had played the impoverished Matty Crompton in an earlier film of his (the distinctly offbeat Angels And Insects, which was shown by Network 2 last Saturday night). One of the most sought-after actresses in cinema today after her Oscar-nominated performance as Katharine Clifton in The English Patient, Kristin Scott Thomas readily accepted the role, she said when we met in New York recently, just before she went to Italy to work on the Maugham story.
"She's a very interesting woman, this widow I'm going to play," she says. "She's been married to this absolutely terrible, hard-drinking gambler - a complete disaster area. He has just died and she's stuck in Italy, being cared for by some people who've got a villa. And then she gets herself caught up in a bit of a sticky situation, with three men trying to get her." One of those men is played by James Fox, a stalwart of British costume drama; another, a young Austrian refugee, is played by Jeremy Davies, the young star of Spanking The Monkey who features in Steven Spielberg's imminent Saving Private Ryan. The third man, a seductive American, is played by Sean Penn in a rare excursion outside contemporary American roles. When I suggest that Penn seems unlikely casting for a Somerset Maugham story, Scott Thomas responds: "Yes, but it's a Philip Haas movie. All sorts of things can happen. I'm really looking forward to working with him. He's always been one of my favourite actors." Philip Haas observes: "Whatever Kristin does, the acting is incredibly real. Her roles have all been very different, but you always feel there is no difference between the person she's playing and herself.
"There are a number of elements in Up At The Villa which appealed to me," he says. "It's a terrific story about a woman who makes a decision that has quite the opposite result to what she intended."
While Up At The Villa continues shooting in Florence, Kristin Scott Thomas has signed up to costar with Harrison Ford in Sydney Pollack's movie, Random Hearts, which goes before the cameras in the autumn. Before either of those movies is released next year, Scott Thomas could well find herself among the Oscar nominees again - for her sensitive and striking performance in Robert Redford's film, The Horse Whisperer, a visually breathtaking and emotionally involving drama adapted from the best-selling novel by Nicholas Evans.
The mention of the O-word gives Scott Thomas an abrupt shock. "What!" she exclaims. "Not for me, I don't think. I haven't even thought about the Oscars."
The drama of The Horse Whisperer is triggered by a shocking accident when a truck hits two 14-year-old girls on horseback. One of the girls dies; the other, her closest friend, Grace MacLean, is distraught at the loss of her friend, the amputation of her own leg and the severe mental and physical injuries suffered by her beloved horse, Pilgrim.
Grace's mother, Annie, a high-powered New York magazine editor, believes the only way Grace will recover emotionally will be if Pilgrim can be healed. Ignoring the advice of their vet, who believes Pilgrim should be put down, Annie approaches Tom Booker, a Montana farmer renowned for his skill with horses.
The inevitable culture clash between the laid-back farmer and the uptight city editor is never overplayed and the chemistry between Redford (as Tom Booker) and Kristin Scott Thomas (as Annie MacLean) builds palpably. More radiant than ever before (which is really saying something), Scott Thomas is quite superb, and the fine cast also features Sam Neill, Dianne Wiest, Chris Cooper, and as Grace, the very promising young Scarlett Johansson.
"Annie is a woman who has always been used to being in complete control," says Kristin Scott Thomas. "It has been her driving force, to gain control and get to the top. As the story goes on, and especially when she gets to Montana, little by little she kind of surrenders and starts to move with life. It's really an extraordinary luxury for an actress to be able to take a character and have her change completely within a film."
When she heard that Robert Redford was going to make the film, she went out and bought the book. "I read it, and I enjoyed it enormously," she says. "Then I just put myself up for the role. I imagine I was pretty well down the list of actresses who were up for it - this was well before The English Patient ever came out. And then, luckily for me, the film was postponed when the actress who was going to play Annie wasn't able to do it any more. Then I got my chance."
Wasn't it Emma Thompson who was first cast in the role?, I ask. "I don't know," she says, diplomatically. "People never tell you because they think you're going to burst into floods of tears and get terribly upset about it. I think it was her, but I'm not sure."
So what was it about Kristin Scott Thomas that persuaded Robert Redford to cast her as Annie MacLean? "Well . . ." she pauses for a few moments, stroking a strand of pearls. "I know for me, but I don't know if I should tell you what I think - but I just think I was the right choice. I just offered my services, and then sat and waited and waited. It was quite an Annie thing to do. It was either going to happen for me, or if it wasn't, then, tough, it wouldn't matter.
"It took Redford ages to decide he was going to make the film with me - almost a year. But then it took him ages to decide about Sam Neill, too. In fact, Sam went home to New Zealand, thinking he hadn't got the part. Then Redford called him up on the phone and said, `Please come back". The screen adaptation of The Horse Whisperer, by Eric Roth and Richard LaGravenese, takes some radical liberties with its source, particularly in the later stages when it tones down the melodramatic excesses of Evans's novel.
"I think the novel works very successfully as a novel," says Scott Thomas. "But film is very different and what works on the page in the book doesn't necessarily work within the film. What happens in the film is more sophisticated and leaves more up to the audience about what happens. I think Redford has made an incredibly beautiful film. It's very moving and it's inspiring. I'm very pleased with it."
Working with a movie icon such as Redford - who she first admired in Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid back when she was nine years old - was "kind of weird to begin with", she says, "but only for the first couple of shots. Thank God, these things evaporate quite quickly. After all, he's just an actor. But it's true - if you're sitting on the set and the monitor's in front of you and Robert Redford walks in front of it, then you're at the movies. It's fascinating the power he has. And you never know what he's thinking. He's very mysterious."
This is Redford's first time to double as an actor and director on the same movie, and the first time for Scott Thomas to have a co-star who is also her director. "That was very hard," she says. "Because you can't have the special link you have with an actor - and you can't play off being the director's favourite, for example. So there's no manipulation going on at all. Nevertheless, it worked very successfully. "Redford is such a good actor - we all know about his acting talents and being directed by him was such a joy. It was a completely different experience for me, because he makes you do things that you wouldn't dare do with any other director. He encourages you to really show feelings without the fear of being indiscreet. He made me a braver actor."
The long summer spent shooting in Montana proved a great relief after the intensity of the New York sequences. "There was such tension in those early scenes," she says. "The hospital scene was one of the longest days I had on a film. We shot for 23 hours. We just kept going." For the workplace of her magazine-editor character, the producers commandeered the office of Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair. Perhaps because she has been showcased in the magazine more than once, Kristin Scott Thomas found nothing special about sitting in the editor's chair. "I never really took much notice of that," she says. "People were going, `Oh, you're in his office', but I felt an office is an office. It's probably more interesting to people like you, as a journalist yourself."
She describes the Montana locations as a revelation. Because they were shooting in summer, she could have her two children - 10-year-old Hannah and seven-year-old Joseph - with her for much of the shoot, although professional commitments kept her doctor husband, Francois Oliviennes, a fertility specialist, back home in Paris. "I'd never been anywhere like Montana and it was just breathtaking and awe-inspiring," she says. "I was looking forward to that element in the film. When you take on a film you decide for all kinds of reasons, most of them artistic. In this case, I really wanted to go there and do that journey, which I did - and I absolutely loved it.
"We were in Montana for a long time, almost four months, from early June to mid-September. We all rented houses. The people of the town moved out to live with their grannies or whatever and make some money renting out their homes. I think they were fairly fed up of us by the end."
The Horse Whisperer will have its Irish premiere in Dublin on August 26th, in aid of the Rape Crisis Centre (information, on 01 6614911). It will be released nationwide from August 28th.