Kristin Scott Thomas

0:05Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which some of the world's leading artistic figures choose the influences and experiences that have most inspired their own creative lives. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is the actor Kristin Scott Thomas. After a breakthrough role in the film A Handful of Dust, she became a global star with four weddings and a funeral in 1994 and, two years later, was Oscar-nominated for The English Patient. Her screen roles in the years since have included Gosford Park, The Horse Whisperer, more recently Rebecca, and on television, Slow Horses. She's just made her debut as a director and screenwriter with My Mother's Wedding.

0:45Her extensive theatre credits include Chekhov's The Seagull, for which she won an Olivier Award, and she played the Queen in Peter Morgan's drama The Audience. Kristin Scott Thomas has also enjoyed a distinguished stage and film career in France, where she was awarded the Légion d 'honneur in 2005. In 2014, she was made a Dame for services to drama. Kristin Scott Thomas, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you very much. You were born in Cornwall and you were educated in Cheltenham at the Ladies' College. Yes. And grew up in a military family, But your childhood was shaped by a double tragedy.

1:23Two air crashes, five years apart, that killed both your father and then your stepfather. Tell me about your father, first of all. Who was he? Well, I wish I knew. That's part of the issue, part of the motor. The mystery of what is half of me is something that I'll never really know. I just never discover any more about it. It was very weird growing up, particularly when I was a sort of teenager or young adult. I'd go to weddings and these funny old men would come towards me and they were sort of balding and slightly portly and say, I was a great friend of your father's. And I said, well, you can't possibly.

2:01My father was devastatingly good looking and only 30. And you were five when he was killed. I was, yeah, five. Yeah. What were the circumstances? He was in the Royal Navy. and he was flying and at the time flying was a very, very dangerous job. I think it still is but I think then they had one particular aircraft called a Sea Vixen which was really a huge thing and they used to do these training exercises and the accident rate was really, really high and he succumbed to one of those. And yeah, he just died and my mother was pregnant And I had two little sisters and another person on the way. And do you have no memories of being told?

2:47Oh, I have lots of memories of being told. Yeah, they lurk. They lurk forever. I mean, that sort of event will inform who you become. I think nowadays, thanks to the sort of awakening of the idea of mental health not being something hideously embarrassing and sort of... I think trauma has become slightly overclaimed, but I think there's enormous progress being made. This was a long time ago. It was 60 years ago. So it was the time when people thought that children could take knocks and just get over them. And we do. I mean, here I am, you know. But it was unnecessarily difficult, I think. But it's trauma and grief in response not only to the loss of your father, but also the fact that your mother remarried, had more children, and then her new husband, your stepfather, was killed in, I mean, from what I understand, almost identical circumstances, also flying with the Royal Navy, the fleece air arm.

3:50Absolutely. I think that was possibly more damaging to me because I was only 11 and I just got my head around this new person who was in our lives. And, you know, then this thing happens again. I remember thinking and it's still, you know, sort of hurts to think about it, but thinking, how can this be happening again? I cannot believe that this is happening again. And the repetition of it was so devastating and unfair that I felt that really did actually damage me, I think. Possibly more than the first time. The word triggering wouldn't have been used at the time. But I'm wondering whether you were, in the way that we understand it now, triggered about the loss of your father when you're...

4:38Well, I think if we could go back in time and examine this child that has suffered one loss and then another loss, I think, you know, we would see a lot of things that we can now recognize and put names to. But at the time, you know, there was no pastoral care. There was no there was nothing. You know, my housemistress told me and that was that. And then I next saw my mother sort of six weeks later because she was a wreck and she had five small children. At least I was safe in a school somewhere and being looked after. You know, I really feel for her now. I mean, at the time, that's all we were told to feel for, was think about your mother, how awful it is for her.

5:14Nobody ever said, are you OK? Nobody ever did that. But do you think there was an expectation that you wouldn't talk about it? There was an expectation that we don't talk about these things because it's uncomfortable for everyone. That sort of thing has gone now. People kind of overshare. Here I am oversharing. You know, it's currency now. Whereas before it was a private event. And it's particularly when you come from a naval family where you know what the risks are. But I think nowadays there's far more attention paid to the families. In fact, I know there is because I help the charity called the Naval Children's Charity, which looks after people who are in trouble because they've lost a parent.

5:57because, of course, nowadays it's women and men, mothers and fathers, who are at risk. But I think in those days there was a very much a kind of culture of just don't mention it, keep going. And I think that was probably left over from the Second World War and, you know, you just keep going. But it's also the fact that it was a military family, so there's an expectation of a sort of stoicism, isn't there? Yes, absolutely. I mean, my mother was completely not from that world at all. How did she cope? Well, I don't really know. Did you never talk about it with her later? Yeah, we did, but it was always a bit fraught because it was the sort of conversation you'd have in the car, you know.

6:37And I would always be riding shotgun because I was a very good navigator and we'd have all the other children in the back. And so it was the sort of thing you'd talk about on long journeys, but it always got a bit, you don't want to dig too far. And she would get very upset and she was very, very emotional and would be triggered, as you say. You know, she'd watch television and suddenly burst into tears and we'd get a bit irritated by it, you know, sort of, oh, for God, I can't she just grow up, you know? But poor thing. I mean, I think now, having heard all my life, oh, just think about your mother.

7:10At the time, I was a bit fed up with thinking about my mother. But now looking back, I thank God, you know. And what about you? How do you think that experience of grief, loss, of trauma, how has that affected your personality and maybe the way that you project yourself and the sort of characters that you play? Well, it's given me something to work with. I think that it has certainly made me quite good at telling stories about people who have a secret suffering and have to keep the stiff upper lip and keep going. I was thinking, I mean, Fiona in Four Weddings, who is the sort of epitome of that.

7:49She has this secret that she keeps under wraps and won't tell anyone and then it all comes out. And I think I've been quite expert at that because there was very little acting required because I had all this sort of built up information. Repressed emotion. Repressed emotion, perhaps, but also things that children aren't supposed to know about. And funnily enough, I've always been cast as older people. Even when I was a very young woman, they wanted me, you know, I was 23 and they wanted me to play 35, you know, grownups. So I obviously had something within me that said knows too much or something.

8:24And after playing dozens of roles on stage and screen over the last 40 years or so, you've just made your debut as a writer-director in a film called My Mother's Wedding. Yes. And it's about three sisters whose mother is about to marry for the third time, having lost two previous husbands, both in air accidents. What made you want to fictionalise such a personal story? What do you think? Catharsis? Catharsis. No, not really catharsis, because that happened earlier when I did Electra. That was totally cathartic. No, what made me want to do it was that I realised that one of my brothers, in fact, both my brothers, have absolutely no idea about who their father was, no image in their heads.

9:10So I thought that I would make some little short films about what I remembered about Daddy and my stepfather, Simon. I got talking to somebody about this and they said, well, why don't you turn it into a fiction? I said, no, well, I don't want to tell the story of my life. You know, that's not it. No, but what you do is you take that and you use it as a sort of seed for telling another story. And that's what I did. Your fathers were not the perfect men you imagine that you've fantasised about all these years. Yes, they were brave young men who gave their lives for their country, but they were still just young men doing all the things that young men do.

9:53It didn't stop me from loving them desperately. And by God, did they love you. But you lot have never, ever let go of them. You are all still little girls, madly enough with your daddies. separate from them, just as you did with me. No, we didn't. That's what you're supposed to do. And what was the experience like of writing that story, of using those very personal experiences and first putting pen to paper? Well, I was very excited about being able to claim it as mine rather than seeing that dreaded paragraph in every profile, you know, tragic childhood, blah, blah, blah. I was actually quite happy to be able to say, no, this is what happened, and to describe the feeling of guilt that a child can have, even though they're completely innocent.

10:45The feelings of confusion, the feelings of having to just carry on, having to put one foot in front of another. It was actually very exciting to be able to explore that. And you have multiple roles on this film as writer, director, co-star, because you're playing the matriarch. What was it like being on the other side of the camera? It was the biggest thrill I've ever had. No, I mean, look at the cast I've got. I mean, it was like being given a fleet of Ferraris. It was absolutely amazing to have these incredible actors around me. Scarlett Johansson, Sienna Miller, Emily Beecham. Emily Beecham, James Fleet, Frida Pinto.

11:27But did you suddenly feel a different kind of agency on set, you know, a different sense of power, the dynamic of the way a film is made? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I can't recommend being an actor in one's own film when it's one's first film, because it is very, very difficult to sort of separate and sort of observe the other actor while you're acting with them. I find that incredibly difficult. And when you headed to set, did you have any particular directors in mind, anybody that you wanted to emulate their style, their approach? Not really. I mean, I've been incredibly lucky in my career, particularly in film, where I've worked with such a variety from Nicholas Winding Refn to Sidney Pollack to Anthony Minghella.

12:12Robert Redford. Robert Redford to Robert Lepage, you know, and various French films with less well-known directors, but completely accomplished and brilliant and specific and needling and difficult. So I think it was a great big soup of all of that, if I can say that without sounding too dismissive. And making the film, you know, because I said, why did you want to fictionalise that such a personal story? Has it helped you make sense of those early years? Not as much as you might think, because I think that my work on that had been completed. You know, I've had to do a lot of personal work, as they say, you know, with a psychoanalyst and then therapy later.

12:54and I've done a lot of that to avoid deep and dark and debilitating depression. I've really had to work on that and come out of that, and it's taken a long time. And I think the culmination of that was working on Elektra, which is the ultimate sort of story of daughters and fathers and was written 2 ,600 years ago and is so unbelievably on it as far as emotion is concerned. It's extraordinary. She and Aegisthus split him open with an axe. A tree fell. And, Father, I am left to dwell alone in your house, my back against the wall, weeping for my father dead, mourning my dead father. But I swear, while my eyes see the sun or stars in the sky, I will never cease to cry out my pain and my complaint.

14:03Just doing that play really put it to bed. And actually, funnily enough, after doing that play, I decided, right, no more tragedies. I've spent it all. Now I want to tell happy stories and not stories about pent up rage or grief. so I don't want to tell those stories anymore I want to tell stories that make people feel warm and fuzzy basically instead of leaving the place in floods of tears

14:38What sort of cultural upbringing did you have as a child and cultural education? We lived in the depths of Dorset and with very little access to anything apart from television and my mother was really good at sort of taking us to places and she would take me to shows that she wanted to see, maybe in Bath or in Bournemouth or wherever. When did you first start thinking that acting might be something you could do? I think I was about four. Right, OK. And I would go down to the village shop when I was about eight, convinced that the lady running the village shop, Mrs Vendiback, wouldn't recognise me because I had a headscarf on and dressed as the Queen or something.

15:16And I was going down to the village shop. You were already playing characters? Yeah, already playing characters. I must have been insufferable, actually. Did you, when you started thinking, actually, I want to act, were there particular actors that you emulated or who were your favourites? I mean, who were the role models? I remember seeing French films. I don't know how. It must have been very late at night. I shouldn't have been awake. On television and seeing Anouk et me in A Nommé infame and thinking, oh, that is what I want to do. I want to run along beaches in Mackintoshes and look like Anoukéme and be, you know.

15:51But you've had such a lifelong association with France. Do you think it goes back to seeing those early films, Anoukéme? Yeah, I do. Did your mother introduce you to those French films, do you think? She certainly introduced us to French. I mean, it was packed off to French lessons with the nuns at seven. Oh, so she was a Francophile. She was a Francophile. She was an everythingophile. She was a very, very curious, greedy for knowledge, greedy for experience. I think it must have been very difficult for her stuck in the country with five small children. But, you know, she learned Greek. She learned French.

16:23She spoke Italian. She was interested in words and the musicality of words. I mean, obviously, I'm talking about her nonstop. So she must have been a very big cultural influence in my life. And I'm proud of that. You know, she was a great person. After school, you enrolled at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Yeah. But you left from what I understand, you left before the end of the course. I did. What happened? Well, what happened was that when I declared that I wanted to be an actress, it was deemed a very unwise decision and that I needed to get a degree. So the next best thing would be to get a teaching degree and become a frustrated actor teaching small children.

17:06No, that would be awful. Anyway, I enrolled in this audition and miraculously got in. And then it became evident that this was not for me and that I really needed to man up and try and become an actress. So I did try and get onto the acting course. But then I was told that if I put one foot in the acting director's office, I would be out of the school. So I didn't. So and then I went to France. So you went to France to work as an au pair. I did. But enrolled in a drama school there instead. Yeah. And that was also a miracle. And that was also always due to these really brilliant adults who I was surrounded by.

17:45And this was another woman who was my boss. And she said to me one day, what are you going to do? And I said, well, I really want to be an actress, but I know I can't because I'd just been told I can't. And she said, well, why? Because it's too hard, blah, blah, blah. And she said, no, no, no, absolutely not. Here, go here. And she sent me off to this acting class, which is an evening thing. where I met the man I married. And I enrolled in this very difficult to get into school. I mean, there were sort of 2 ,000 applicants from 20 places. And I got through the first round and I couldn't believe it.

18:19And the morning of the second round of auditions, I was in the kitchen doing the washing up, as all good au pair girls do. And she comes in and said, what are you doing? I said, well, there's no point in me going. I'm never going to get in. There's no point. And she was furious. She grabbed my wrist, pulled me downstairs, hailed a cab, gave the man 50 francs, said, take her to the whatever the theatre was. And I got in. I couldn't believe it. Something that I'd managed to do. But also your life could have been so different if she hadn't grabbed you by the scruff of the neck and thrown you towards that audition.

18:52I think that was a very, I mean, a total turning point. Yeah.

19:00Your next choice for this cultural life, Kristin Scott Thomas, is the musician Prince, who, in 1986, cast you in the lead role of a film that he directed and starred in, called Under the Cherry Moon. I'll die in your arms, under the cherry moon How did you land a lead role in a Prince film? Well, I was actually doing something which was I was much more drawn to. I was theatre and I didn't really want to be a film actress. I wanted to carry on in the theatre and I was doing a play by Marguerite Duras in a field in Burgundy. I got my first review, which was the best review I've ever had. Downhill since then.

19:43And then I listened to my aunt's phone and said, they want local actresses who live in France to play bit parts in the Prince movie Do You Want to Do It? of course I wanted to do it. You know, I was listening to Prince on repeat all summer. So I trotted along to that and suddenly there was a sort of kerfuffle around the camera and they said, would you like to audition for the lead? And I, you know, I nearly fell over. Of course I would audition to the lead. So I auditioned, did a little bit of the lead bit and they said, and would you like to meet Prince this evening? So, yeah, but I mean, it was sort of unbelievable.

20:17Another kind of enormous turning point. and I went off and did the film and learnt so much. I didn't even know you had to do the same thing twice when you did a close-up or a wide shot or a close-up. I didn't know you had to match things. Under Cherry Moon, Prince plays one of a pair of brothers who are sort of... They're kind of doing cocktail bar, pianist, and they're taking out old ladies. They're kind of on the make, aren't they? They're on the make, and I'm a very rich girl. They're sort of grifters in a way. Yeah, you've got it. So what did you make of the role, or did you not care? I didn't really care that much.

20:49I mean, it was it was it was no I did care at the time. I did care, absolutely did care, because I knew it was a sort of important thing for me to do. Don't forget, this was just after Purple Rain, which was a huge hit. But I still couldn't quite believe that I was actually there. And I knew that some of the lines were a little bit dodged. But you have to kind of just grit your teeth and get through them and just do my best and try and cry at the right point. and try and laugh at the right point and just be as good as you can and learn it as you're doing it. Were you a Prince fan at the time? A huge Prince fan.

21:26All the time when I was doing this very serious Marguerite Dioras play, I was listening to Around the World in a Day on repeat. I mean, I hope you won't mind me saying that Under a Cherry Moon is probably not the greatest film on your CV in terms of quality. No, but it's one of the most interesting. And at the time, he was 24, I was 23, and he was allowed to do whatever he liked, which is a bit odd, really. No, he was a massive star. He was a massive star, but at 24. What was your relationship with Prince like? It was great. I mean, we stayed in touch for years. Until he died. Yeah. Absolutely blown away when he died because I had nobody to kind of...

22:07I mean, often when you go to funerals and things like that and somebody stands up to say something, they will very often not talk about the other person, but they'll talk about themselves and their relationship with that person. And that's what I'm about to do because it was very hard when he died because he'd been so important to me as a sort of setting me off on my path and had enormous faith in my talent, which I was flattered by. And I had no one to kind of share the sort of grief with because all the people who worked for him and knew him best were all in America. And then I kept getting people who I knew were Prince fans ringing up and saying how sad it was.

22:47And yes, the fan in me is sad, but the person who was a friend is even sadder. Didn't he write a song about you once? Yes, he did. Did you know at the time? Because it was years later, I think, wasn't it? Yes, it was. It was much later. He came to see The Seagull on Broadway and a film called I've Loved You So Long, which is a French film that I made, came out at the same time. And he wrote this wonderful song called Better With Time. Which was really, really kind. Like fine wine. Like fine wine. Age is not a cage. Like one, you get better with time. So young and so naive That I never once believed I believe that the memory of you will go through me Like a wind going through the tree I mean, God, what a privilege.

23:55Yeah. Sometimes I have to pinch myself and think, you know, things have been pretty extraordinary.

24:05Your next choice, Kristen Scott Thomas, is French theatre and some of the directors that you've worked with in France. And you've always had this dual career in France, the French dramas alongside some of the big Hollywood parts, even Mission Impossible or Gosford Park. Was it always important for you to maintain that French connection that you started with? Well, my Frenchness was, for 42 years, the first thing that came out because I lived there, my children were there, my whole life was there. I mean, it's only recently that I've moved to the UK. all the nourishment I was getting as a young adult was all coming from France.

24:44In the 1980s and 90s, it was a wonderful period for French theatre. You had people like Patrice Chéreau. You had Luc Bondy, who's in fact Swiss. You had this great conversation going between the German theatre, the French theatre, the Italians a little bit. I would come back to England and I'd go to the theatre and everything would be so beautiful and completely precise and for an audience. and you go to France and as an audience member, you better keep up. You're being after a lot more. And you found that exciting? I found that really thrilling. And stimulating as an actor as well because it offers you a different kind of channel.

25:21Yeah, I mean, I didn't work that much in the theatre in France before. I mean, Prince basically put a stop to that. But then when I really went back to the theatre, when I was 40 the first thing I did was Berenice which is a Racine play in Alexandrin. I absolutely loved it I probably murdered it I was probably disastrous but it was an extraordinary thing to do and it opened of course it opened the door for the theatre here so I was able to come back to England and the first thing I did on stage in England was a check-off which was the three sisters with Michael Blakemore. The Racine that you did, which in effect is your introduction to the stage, in French, how did that go down with the French critics?

26:08Oh, I don't think it went down at all well. I mean, the first night there were like seven people from one newspaper. I think the person in Le Monde was very happy, but I genuinely don't read reviews because there's no point because it's always going to be a nightmare. If they're good, you're going to be waiting for the moment they all loved and I know I'm going to mess it up this time or if they're bad, you're just too miserable. Anyway, don't do that. However, people around you will always let you know whether they're good or bad somehow. It's the way they can't quite look at you or they come in with a beaming face.