Virginielle
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She looks great in The Other Boleyn Girl. Fantastic skin.
Kristin Scott Thomas
- Thread starter helena
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justlooking
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omg, she's in that?! that's it, i'm going to see it.
Virginielle
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She plays Lady Elizabeth Boleyn (the girls' mother).
MissMagAddict
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CINEMA VERITE
The New York Times T Style Magazine Women's Fall Fashion 2009
Hair: Christoph Hasenbein
Makeup: Max Delorme
Stylist: Anne Christensen
Photographer: Solve Sundsbo
source | screencaps by MMA from nytimes.com
The New York Times T Style Magazine Women's Fall Fashion 2009
Hair: Christoph Hasenbein
Makeup: Max Delorme
Stylist: Anne Christensen
Photographer: Solve Sundsbo
source | screencaps by MMA from nytimes.com
I love her - she is my dream woman if we speak of how i want to age gracefully. She is like wine - seriously , she is AMAZING. I only feel sorry that she is so unknown - i mean of course ppl who loves movie and cinema art know her well and critics but she really deserved more. On the other hand she is not somebody who will ever scream for attention.
^This is months later, but I love the T editorial. She's so elegant.
I really enjoyed this interview with Kristin.
guardian.co.uk
Kristin Scott Thomas: 'I've been a very sad person, but I'm not any more'
Kristin Scott Thomas on self-belief, not being on the right list in Hollywood and playing John Lennon's Aunt Mimi in her latest film
Kira Cochrane
The Guardian, Monday 21 December 2009
The moment that Kristin Scott Thomas knew she didn't want to be a typical movie star, the moment it seems she switched from playing romantic leads to infinitely more interesting roles, was when a director told her she should make her character more appealing. The idea didn't grab her. "I just thought, I don't want to do that," she says. "I don't want to have to be pretty. I don't want to have to be adorable. Because if I'm watching that on screen I get irritated." She sits back with a sigh. "I can't bear it."
It was an astute response. After all, Scott Thomas's best work is not about looking doe-eyed and flicking her hair; instead it's defined by froideur, then thaw. There is a toughness in her performances, a distance, that also worms its way into interviews. Much has been made of her silences, her tendency to stonewall questions she finds idiotic; she has been called tart, brittle, arrogant and, perhaps most often, an ice queen. And so, before we meet, as I wait for her in Claridge's dining room – with its beautiful but poisonous-looking plants – I brace myself. Maybe she will dislike me, or I her, or both. There's the chance of an hour of problematic pauses, of nothing turning up on my Dictaphone but unholy hushes and the clink of silver on porcelain.
When Scott Thomas arrives, she slips into the booth, and fixes me with an expression that's not scary, but wary, eyes framed with a frown. She is here to talk about her latest film, Nowhere Boy, in which she plays John Lennon's Aunt Mimi, a woman defined by her repression, her stiffness; for much of the film it is not clear whether she has her nephew's best interests at heart at all, though you warm to her by the end. When I ask what attracted Scott Thomas to the part, her great feeling for the underdog – for the person whose shyness translates, quite wrongly, as coldness – becomes clear. It was an opportunity to reappraise Mimi, she says, because "she got a bad rap, really. People say she was mean, so you think, I want to show a person underneath that. Because she did have an abrasive nature, but there's so much love in that woman."
The film follows Lennon through his mid to late teens, when he was living with Mimi, and re-establishing a relationship with his freewheeling mother, Julia. Anne-Marie Duff plays the latter, and while Mimi represents the old order of rigidity and stiff upper lip, Julia is the coming age of wildness and irresponsibility. "Just the way that we look is such a brilliant piece of casting," says Scott Thomas, who is now 49, "because you get my really sharp, thin, papery kind of face, and Anne-Marie's luscious, fecund face."
The comment is typical of Scott Thomas: modest to the point of masochism. When she can't remember a word she is reaching for she groans, "I'm an actress and have no brain." She has a nervous, self-conscious habit of appending her own comments with "she says", as in "you're too young to have seen A Handful of Dust – she says in a very grand dame kind of way". Anxiety pulses through our conversation. "I just get really worried about things. I think it's my stage of life, isn't it?" she asks. "Is it middle age? I'm just worried about people. I have a kind of Rolodex of worries." She mimes flicking through it. "Which one shall we have today? It's my nature. But then I worry about that too. It upsets me."
The insecurity is a surprise in the woman whom the producer Harvey Weinstein described as one of the greatest actresses of her generation; who has been nominated for an Oscar and won a Bafta; who has the sculpted, refined beauty of a Klimt or De Lempicka, and is also warm and funny.
It doesn't matter to her that she stole the show in Four Weddings and a Funeral as the frosty Fiona, who smokes and b*tches her way, black-clad, through everyone else's nuptials. Or that she seared through the screen as Juliette in I've Loved You So Long, as a child-killer just released from prison. Or that she has won superlative reviews for pretty much all her films, from the very good (The English Patient, Gosford Park) to the rather bad (Bitter Moon, Confessions of a Shopaholic, Easy Virtue). Still, there are these nerves.
Scott Thomas can remember the exact moment that she decided to become an actor, "because I was about four, and I was playing cowboys and Indians. My neighbour pretended to shoot me and I fell to the ground and, as a good Catholic, I tried to fall in the shape of Jesus [on the cross]. As I fell, trying to get my arms and feet into the right position, I thought, hang on a minute – I don't think it would really happen like this, and that was the start of it."
She and her four younger siblings, "lived in the middle of the country, we were completely free and wild but, you know, **** happened". She's referring to the death of her father when she was four, and that of her stepfather six years later. Both men were Royal Navy pilots; both were killed in plane crashes. I wonder whether the experience gave her a strong sense of her own mortality, of a need to achieve as much as she could, as quickly as possible, and she says "No, funnily enough, it's given me a huge distrust. That's something that I've had to really fight with, is not being able to trust people, because they keep dying," she laughs, "which is a tough one to deal with. And also, I feel pretty certain that if I'd had a father figure, or a father, I wouldn't have suffered so badly from such debilitatingly low self-esteem . . . I think that's really typical of children who grow up with only one parent."
She went to board at Cheltenham Ladies College when she was eight – she didn't particularly enjoy the academic side of it, and wasn't won over by single-sex education. "When you go from the age of eight to 18, just girls, that's enough, thank you. If anyone says 'Let's have a girls' night out', I will run in the opposite direction." At school, she did a few house productions, played Tootles, one of the Lost Boys, in Peter Pan, but there wasn't much acting to speak of. All the while, she was finding ways to make sense of her grief, thinking of "advantages" to what had happened to her, such as "at least I never saw my parents argue, and at least it was quick, and at least there was no thinking, is he going to die, is he going to die, is he going to die? He just died."
At 18 she was living above a fish and chip shop in London and attending the Central School of Speech and Drama, on a teacher-training course. She wanted to cross over to the acting course, but was told that she wasn't talented enough; if she wanted to play Lady Macbeth, they said, she'd have to join an amateur dramatics group. "Lumpily fluent" in French, she ditched the course and headed for Paris, where she became an au pair to a couple who worked in the opera. She was encouraged to apply to drama school, and won a place at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Techniques du Théâtre, where she met "a really great teacher-mentor, a very eccentric actor, who sang a lot, and liked wacky things", as well as François Olivennes, the then-medical student who would become her husband, and father to her three children.
After graduation, her first big break was at 26 in the film Under the Cherry Moon, in which she was cast as a French heiress opposite Prince. The film was a disaster. Did this dent her confidence? "Yeah. But I had no confidence anyway. You know," she starts talking through the side of her mouth, "it's all a fluke, what am I doing here, they're going to find out in a minute." Her usual voice resumes: "That actor thing, the fraud thing, the fear of being found out. I had that in spades. So, well, this was just proof that I was rubbish, basically."
What kept her going? "I think my masochistic streak just kept pushing me on. I just thought, well, one day I'll get it right – even though when I watch Under the Cherry Moon, it is the most hideous performance."
After playing an heiress in that film and an aristocrat in A Handful of Dust, her big breakthrough came in Four Weddings and a Funeral – as an aristocratic heiress. She then had to fight for her role as Katharine Clifton in The English Patient ("I really put my neck on the block for that one – I mean, I didn't make them cast me, but I persuaded them that I could do it, which no one believed"), but having been Oscar-nominated for the performance, the parts in big-budget films began rolling in. She played the romantic foil to Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer, to Harrison Ford in Sydney Pollack's Random Hearts – and then she dropped it all and did a tour of Racine's drama Bérénice around France.
Was it a conscious decision to step away from her film career? "Yes," she says. "I really felt I'd burned out . . . They were very long shoots. Robert Redford's took six months, Sydney Pollack's took five months, and I'd been asked to do this Bérénice, and I was off. I just wanted to be at home. I wanted to have a real life, rather than a pretend life. Because it's all very well, telling stories, but unless you can fuel them with some proper experience . . . unless you can sit on a bus and know what it feels like to sit on a bus, then you develop a weird take on life."
Did she find it boring playing love interests? "Now," she is scrupulously kind about everyone she's ever worked with, "playing a love interest can be really thrilling, if you're working opposite thrilling people. I was extremely lucky to be working with Sydney Pollack and Harrison Ford and Robert Redford . . . But [in general] I don't want to just be a kind of bouncing board for men to flex their muscles and look brave and courageous and understanding, while I just look bleary-eyed in the background. No, I don't want to do that. You can also do leading roles that are riveting, but they tend to be – well, certainly in my world – they're the lower-budget, more arthouse films, because I'm not on the right list to be asked to do those really great meaty roles that you see Meryl Streep or Cate Blanchett doing."
She has made a brilliant career for herself in France, where she isn't so typecast, plays far fewer aristocrats, and "can let rip a bit". By working there, she seems to have avoided the mid-life canyon that many Hollywood actresses fall into, because the French film industry "loves middle-aged women. They love us! They think we're sexy." I suggest that other actresses need to learn French. "No!" she says. "Keep away. Not on my patch. There are quite a lot of actresses who can speak really good French. Emma Thompson. Jodie Foster. Cate Blanchett. Keep out."
She separated from her husband in 2005 and is now divorced, but there was a time, years back, when they toyed with moving to Los Angeles. "François was going to get a job at UCLA, but then we didn't want to do that, because we wanted to bring our children up in Europe, rather than America." She thinks she "would be a basket case" if she had moved there, partly because of the pressure to have cosmetic surgery. Is she surprised by how popular Botox is among actors, a group of people who do, after all, need to be able to move their faces? She grimaces, before saying that what she "can't bear is seeing [people who look] like photocopies. And there's that strange waxy look that I find disturbing."
Has she ever been tempted down that route? "Well, I keep looking at myself in the mirror, or I look at pictures, and people say 'You're so brave to play "old women"', and I think Oh God, should I ring the surgeon right now? What should I do? Listen, it's my job, I use my face, it's there, it exists, and it's going to get older. I don't know if anyone's understood that. But you can still look fabulous."
She certainly does, and she seems settled too. There was a flurry of tabloid stories when she split up with Olivennes and was briefly linked with a "toyboy" actor some years her junior, but if she has a romance at the moment, she's not telling. Her two older children – Hannah, in her early 20s, and Joseph, in his late teens – have moved to Britain, and she lives in Paris with her youngest son, George, who is nine, and enjoys taking him to school, and walking their dog, and seeing friends. For someone who has spoken openly about having suffered with depression, and attended psychoanalysis, she seems in great shape. I ask whether she is a happy person, and she says, "I think I am now, yeah. At the moment things are pretty fantastic. Who knows, when you write this, I may be down in the doldrums again. I have been a very, very sad person in my life, but I'm not any more."
There's one more thing that intrigues me: for someone so riven by nerves, what drives her? What enables her to make such big leaps – moving from Britain to Paris at 18, leaving Hollywood for the stage? She is performing in A Little Night Music in France next spring, her first musical, and pronounces herself "terrified, completely terrified". So why does she do it?
"The first time I went on stage in London, I have never been so scared in my life," she says. "It was Three Sisters, and I thought I was going to die, I just had so little faith in, in – myself, I suppose. But every time you do something, and it works, you're getting braver and braver. Because the one thing I am is brave. I mean, I may have been terrified, but I still did it. I didn't run out. I didn't fall over. I didn't pretend I was sick! All of these things that were going through my head. What if I faint right now?" She laughs. "I am quite a worried person. But the braver you get, the more interesting it becomes, and the possibilities become wider, and," she pauses, "well, you're less afraid of making a complete fool of yourself, I suppose."
I really enjoyed this interview with Kristin.
guardian.co.uk
Kristin Scott Thomas: 'I've been a very sad person, but I'm not any more'
Kristin Scott Thomas on self-belief, not being on the right list in Hollywood and playing John Lennon's Aunt Mimi in her latest film
Kira Cochrane
The Guardian, Monday 21 December 2009
The moment that Kristin Scott Thomas knew she didn't want to be a typical movie star, the moment it seems she switched from playing romantic leads to infinitely more interesting roles, was when a director told her she should make her character more appealing. The idea didn't grab her. "I just thought, I don't want to do that," she says. "I don't want to have to be pretty. I don't want to have to be adorable. Because if I'm watching that on screen I get irritated." She sits back with a sigh. "I can't bear it."
It was an astute response. After all, Scott Thomas's best work is not about looking doe-eyed and flicking her hair; instead it's defined by froideur, then thaw. There is a toughness in her performances, a distance, that also worms its way into interviews. Much has been made of her silences, her tendency to stonewall questions she finds idiotic; she has been called tart, brittle, arrogant and, perhaps most often, an ice queen. And so, before we meet, as I wait for her in Claridge's dining room – with its beautiful but poisonous-looking plants – I brace myself. Maybe she will dislike me, or I her, or both. There's the chance of an hour of problematic pauses, of nothing turning up on my Dictaphone but unholy hushes and the clink of silver on porcelain.
When Scott Thomas arrives, she slips into the booth, and fixes me with an expression that's not scary, but wary, eyes framed with a frown. She is here to talk about her latest film, Nowhere Boy, in which she plays John Lennon's Aunt Mimi, a woman defined by her repression, her stiffness; for much of the film it is not clear whether she has her nephew's best interests at heart at all, though you warm to her by the end. When I ask what attracted Scott Thomas to the part, her great feeling for the underdog – for the person whose shyness translates, quite wrongly, as coldness – becomes clear. It was an opportunity to reappraise Mimi, she says, because "she got a bad rap, really. People say she was mean, so you think, I want to show a person underneath that. Because she did have an abrasive nature, but there's so much love in that woman."
The film follows Lennon through his mid to late teens, when he was living with Mimi, and re-establishing a relationship with his freewheeling mother, Julia. Anne-Marie Duff plays the latter, and while Mimi represents the old order of rigidity and stiff upper lip, Julia is the coming age of wildness and irresponsibility. "Just the way that we look is such a brilliant piece of casting," says Scott Thomas, who is now 49, "because you get my really sharp, thin, papery kind of face, and Anne-Marie's luscious, fecund face."
The comment is typical of Scott Thomas: modest to the point of masochism. When she can't remember a word she is reaching for she groans, "I'm an actress and have no brain." She has a nervous, self-conscious habit of appending her own comments with "she says", as in "you're too young to have seen A Handful of Dust – she says in a very grand dame kind of way". Anxiety pulses through our conversation. "I just get really worried about things. I think it's my stage of life, isn't it?" she asks. "Is it middle age? I'm just worried about people. I have a kind of Rolodex of worries." She mimes flicking through it. "Which one shall we have today? It's my nature. But then I worry about that too. It upsets me."
The insecurity is a surprise in the woman whom the producer Harvey Weinstein described as one of the greatest actresses of her generation; who has been nominated for an Oscar and won a Bafta; who has the sculpted, refined beauty of a Klimt or De Lempicka, and is also warm and funny.
It doesn't matter to her that she stole the show in Four Weddings and a Funeral as the frosty Fiona, who smokes and b*tches her way, black-clad, through everyone else's nuptials. Or that she seared through the screen as Juliette in I've Loved You So Long, as a child-killer just released from prison. Or that she has won superlative reviews for pretty much all her films, from the very good (The English Patient, Gosford Park) to the rather bad (Bitter Moon, Confessions of a Shopaholic, Easy Virtue). Still, there are these nerves.
Scott Thomas can remember the exact moment that she decided to become an actor, "because I was about four, and I was playing cowboys and Indians. My neighbour pretended to shoot me and I fell to the ground and, as a good Catholic, I tried to fall in the shape of Jesus [on the cross]. As I fell, trying to get my arms and feet into the right position, I thought, hang on a minute – I don't think it would really happen like this, and that was the start of it."
She and her four younger siblings, "lived in the middle of the country, we were completely free and wild but, you know, **** happened". She's referring to the death of her father when she was four, and that of her stepfather six years later. Both men were Royal Navy pilots; both were killed in plane crashes. I wonder whether the experience gave her a strong sense of her own mortality, of a need to achieve as much as she could, as quickly as possible, and she says "No, funnily enough, it's given me a huge distrust. That's something that I've had to really fight with, is not being able to trust people, because they keep dying," she laughs, "which is a tough one to deal with. And also, I feel pretty certain that if I'd had a father figure, or a father, I wouldn't have suffered so badly from such debilitatingly low self-esteem . . . I think that's really typical of children who grow up with only one parent."
She went to board at Cheltenham Ladies College when she was eight – she didn't particularly enjoy the academic side of it, and wasn't won over by single-sex education. "When you go from the age of eight to 18, just girls, that's enough, thank you. If anyone says 'Let's have a girls' night out', I will run in the opposite direction." At school, she did a few house productions, played Tootles, one of the Lost Boys, in Peter Pan, but there wasn't much acting to speak of. All the while, she was finding ways to make sense of her grief, thinking of "advantages" to what had happened to her, such as "at least I never saw my parents argue, and at least it was quick, and at least there was no thinking, is he going to die, is he going to die, is he going to die? He just died."
At 18 she was living above a fish and chip shop in London and attending the Central School of Speech and Drama, on a teacher-training course. She wanted to cross over to the acting course, but was told that she wasn't talented enough; if she wanted to play Lady Macbeth, they said, she'd have to join an amateur dramatics group. "Lumpily fluent" in French, she ditched the course and headed for Paris, where she became an au pair to a couple who worked in the opera. She was encouraged to apply to drama school, and won a place at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Techniques du Théâtre, where she met "a really great teacher-mentor, a very eccentric actor, who sang a lot, and liked wacky things", as well as François Olivennes, the then-medical student who would become her husband, and father to her three children.
After graduation, her first big break was at 26 in the film Under the Cherry Moon, in which she was cast as a French heiress opposite Prince. The film was a disaster. Did this dent her confidence? "Yeah. But I had no confidence anyway. You know," she starts talking through the side of her mouth, "it's all a fluke, what am I doing here, they're going to find out in a minute." Her usual voice resumes: "That actor thing, the fraud thing, the fear of being found out. I had that in spades. So, well, this was just proof that I was rubbish, basically."
What kept her going? "I think my masochistic streak just kept pushing me on. I just thought, well, one day I'll get it right – even though when I watch Under the Cherry Moon, it is the most hideous performance."
After playing an heiress in that film and an aristocrat in A Handful of Dust, her big breakthrough came in Four Weddings and a Funeral – as an aristocratic heiress. She then had to fight for her role as Katharine Clifton in The English Patient ("I really put my neck on the block for that one – I mean, I didn't make them cast me, but I persuaded them that I could do it, which no one believed"), but having been Oscar-nominated for the performance, the parts in big-budget films began rolling in. She played the romantic foil to Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer, to Harrison Ford in Sydney Pollack's Random Hearts – and then she dropped it all and did a tour of Racine's drama Bérénice around France.
Was it a conscious decision to step away from her film career? "Yes," she says. "I really felt I'd burned out . . . They were very long shoots. Robert Redford's took six months, Sydney Pollack's took five months, and I'd been asked to do this Bérénice, and I was off. I just wanted to be at home. I wanted to have a real life, rather than a pretend life. Because it's all very well, telling stories, but unless you can fuel them with some proper experience . . . unless you can sit on a bus and know what it feels like to sit on a bus, then you develop a weird take on life."
Did she find it boring playing love interests? "Now," she is scrupulously kind about everyone she's ever worked with, "playing a love interest can be really thrilling, if you're working opposite thrilling people. I was extremely lucky to be working with Sydney Pollack and Harrison Ford and Robert Redford . . . But [in general] I don't want to just be a kind of bouncing board for men to flex their muscles and look brave and courageous and understanding, while I just look bleary-eyed in the background. No, I don't want to do that. You can also do leading roles that are riveting, but they tend to be – well, certainly in my world – they're the lower-budget, more arthouse films, because I'm not on the right list to be asked to do those really great meaty roles that you see Meryl Streep or Cate Blanchett doing."
She has made a brilliant career for herself in France, where she isn't so typecast, plays far fewer aristocrats, and "can let rip a bit". By working there, she seems to have avoided the mid-life canyon that many Hollywood actresses fall into, because the French film industry "loves middle-aged women. They love us! They think we're sexy." I suggest that other actresses need to learn French. "No!" she says. "Keep away. Not on my patch. There are quite a lot of actresses who can speak really good French. Emma Thompson. Jodie Foster. Cate Blanchett. Keep out."
She separated from her husband in 2005 and is now divorced, but there was a time, years back, when they toyed with moving to Los Angeles. "François was going to get a job at UCLA, but then we didn't want to do that, because we wanted to bring our children up in Europe, rather than America." She thinks she "would be a basket case" if she had moved there, partly because of the pressure to have cosmetic surgery. Is she surprised by how popular Botox is among actors, a group of people who do, after all, need to be able to move their faces? She grimaces, before saying that what she "can't bear is seeing [people who look] like photocopies. And there's that strange waxy look that I find disturbing."
Has she ever been tempted down that route? "Well, I keep looking at myself in the mirror, or I look at pictures, and people say 'You're so brave to play "old women"', and I think Oh God, should I ring the surgeon right now? What should I do? Listen, it's my job, I use my face, it's there, it exists, and it's going to get older. I don't know if anyone's understood that. But you can still look fabulous."
She certainly does, and she seems settled too. There was a flurry of tabloid stories when she split up with Olivennes and was briefly linked with a "toyboy" actor some years her junior, but if she has a romance at the moment, she's not telling. Her two older children – Hannah, in her early 20s, and Joseph, in his late teens – have moved to Britain, and she lives in Paris with her youngest son, George, who is nine, and enjoys taking him to school, and walking their dog, and seeing friends. For someone who has spoken openly about having suffered with depression, and attended psychoanalysis, she seems in great shape. I ask whether she is a happy person, and she says, "I think I am now, yeah. At the moment things are pretty fantastic. Who knows, when you write this, I may be down in the doldrums again. I have been a very, very sad person in my life, but I'm not any more."
There's one more thing that intrigues me: for someone so riven by nerves, what drives her? What enables her to make such big leaps – moving from Britain to Paris at 18, leaving Hollywood for the stage? She is performing in A Little Night Music in France next spring, her first musical, and pronounces herself "terrified, completely terrified". So why does she do it?
"The first time I went on stage in London, I have never been so scared in my life," she says. "It was Three Sisters, and I thought I was going to die, I just had so little faith in, in – myself, I suppose. But every time you do something, and it works, you're getting braver and braver. Because the one thing I am is brave. I mean, I may have been terrified, but I still did it. I didn't run out. I didn't fall over. I didn't pretend I was sick! All of these things that were going through my head. What if I faint right now?" She laughs. "I am quite a worried person. But the braver you get, the more interesting it becomes, and the possibilities become wider, and," she pauses, "well, you're less afraid of making a complete fool of yourself, I suppose."
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tigerrouge
don't look down
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At Cannes Film Festival (dailymail.co.uk
adorefaith
i'm almost ready..
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Amazing at Cannes....dark and mysterious, but not too dark...she got it just right imo 
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