Kristin Scott Thomas

[jexxica]

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[jexxica]

TORONTO, ON - SEPTEMBER 09: Actress Kristin Scott Thomas attends Entertainment Weekly's Must List Party during the Toronto International Film Festival 2017 at the Thompson Hotel on September 9, 2017 in Toronto, Canada. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Entertainment Weekly)

 

[jexxica]

Kristin Scott Thomas attends the "Darkest Hour" premiere during the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival at Roy Thomson Hall on September 11, 2017 in Toronto, Canada.

zimbio​

 

[jexxica]

Actress Kristin Scott Thomas attends "Darkest Hour" press conference during 2017 Toronto International Film Festival at TIFF Bell Lightbox on September 11, 2017 in Toronto, Canada.

zimbio​

 

[Yohji]

Kristin Scott Thomas attends the UK Premiere of "The Party" during the 61st BFI London Film Festival on October 10, 2017 in London, England.

zimbio.com
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[Yohji]

(L-R) Screenwriter Anthony McCarten, actors Ben Mendelsohn and Kristin Scott Thomas, and director Joe Wright visit Build Studio to discuss the movie "Darkest Hour" on November 14, 2017 in New York City.

Actress Kristin Scott Thomas attends the 'Darkest Hour' New York Premiere at Paris Theatre on November 15, 2017 in New York City.

zimbio.com, gotceleb.com​

 

[jexxica]

Darkest Hour premiere on Monday (December 11) at the Odeon Leicester Square in London, England

justjared​

 

[Yohji]

^Exquisite in Dior.

Kristin Scott Thomas and Gary Oldman attend the British Independent Film Awards held at Old Billingsgate on December 10, 2017 in London, England.

celebmafia.com​

 

[Yohji]

Dame Kristin Scott Thomas arrives at the London Evening Standard British Film Awards 2018 at Claridge's Hotel on February 8, 2018 in London, England.

Stephen Mangan and Dame Kristin Scott Thomas attend the press night after party for 'The Birthday Party' at Mint Leaf on January 18, 2018 in London, England.

Kristin Scott Thomas attends 'The Grinning Man' press night at Trafalgar Studios on December 18, 2017 in London, England.

Dame Kristin Scott Thomas attends the PORTER & Lionsgate UK screening of 'Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool' at Cineworld Leicester Square on October 12, 2017 in London, England.

Kristin Scott Thomas attends the 'The Party' Paris Premiere at UGC Cine Cite des Halles on September 5, 2017 in Paris, France

wireimage.co.uk, hawtcelebs.com​

 

[jexxica]

Actress Kristin Scott Thomas attends the EE British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) held at Royal Albert Hall on February 18, 2018 in London, England.

zimbio​

 

[Yohji]

Kristin Scott Thomas attends the British Academy Film Awards Nominees Party at Kensington Palace on February 17, 2018 in London, England.

hawtcelebs.com​

 

[Lily Jo]

I am LOVING her event style! She's so elegant and classy..... well maybe not the above dress because but everything else!

 

[Yohji]

Kristin Scott Thomas attends the "Tomb Raider" European premiere at the Vue West End on March 6, 2018 in London, England.

Kristin Scott Thomas and Isabelle Huppert attend the Stella McCartney show as part of the Paris Fashion Week Womenswear Fall/Winter 2018/2019 on March 5, 2018 in Paris, France.

Kristin Scott Thomas attends the Valentino show as part of the Paris Fashion Week Womenswear Fall/Winter 2018/2019 on March 4, 2018 in Paris, France.

zimbio.com, gotceleb.com​

 

[Yohji]

Wearing Erdem.

Kristin Scott Thomas attends Heavenly Bodies: Fashion & The Catholic Imagination Costume Institute Gala a the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Dame Kristin Scott Thomas attends a screening of 'A Quiet Place' at Curzon Soho on April 5, 2018 in London, England.

telegraph.co.uk, celebmafia.com, twitter.com/renerussso​

 

[Yohji]

Kristin Scott Thomas attends the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition Preview Party at Burlington House on June 6, 2018 in London, England.

Kristin Scott Thomas poses at a photocall prior the Chanel Opening Party for the Exhibition "Dans les Champs de Chanel" at Jardin des Tuileries on May 30, 2018 in Paris, France.

zimbio.com​

 

[Yohji]

Kristin Scott Thomas attends the 3rd annual 'End The Silence' charity gala in aid of 'Hope and Homes for Children with live performances by Snow Patrol, Tom Odell & The Fun Lovin' Criminals at Abbey Road Studios on June 13, 2018 in London, England.

Dame Kristin Scott Thomas attends a VIP dinner celebrating the launch of London Fashion Week Men's June 2018 hosted by David Furnish, Dylan Jones and Caroline Rush at the Moet Summer House on June 8, 2018 in London, England.

hawtcelebs.com, wireimage.co.uk​

 

[Not Plain Jane]

pretty, the black embroidered.
loved the erdem too!

 

[Yohji]

Kristin Scott Thomas attends the Giorgio Armani Prive Haute Couture Fall Winter 2018/2019 show as part of Paris Fashion Week on July 3, 2018 in Paris, France.

zimbio.com​

 

[Yohji]

Dame Kristin Scott Thomas attends the ERDEM show during London Fashion Week September 2018 at the National Portrait Gallery on September 17, 2018 in London, England.

wireimage.co.uk​

 

[Yohji]

Women of the Year 2018: Kristin Scott Thomas on her directional debut

The actress is taking on a new challenge

For more than three decades, Kristin Scott Thomas has lit up the screen, from her unforgettable performance in the Oscar-winning The English Patient to her powerful role as Clementine Churchill in Darkest Hour. Now she is taking on a new challenge with her directorial debut.

Kristin Scott Thomas is late for our breakfast at the Quo Vadis club in Soho. She apologies profusely when she dashes in at last, pulls off her sunglasses, settles into the booth. The delightfully unglamorous reason for her tardiness is one I can understand, since she and I both have sons the same age: 18, just-post-exams, the age when you sleep until 10.30 and then wake up to ask your mother for cash. Said mother must then scramble to a cashpoint before meeting a journalist for an interview. Scott Thomas rolls her eyes, smiling, pushing her short dark hair back from her forehead

I could say that she looks ‘impossibly chic’ – as mentioned in a dozen articles on Dame Kristin, a title she acquired in the New Year’s Honours of 2015. But in her loose dress (perfect for the sweltering weather in which we meet), her face nearly bare of make-up and with a simple gold bangle on her wrist, she looks anything but impossible. Elegant, yes. Beautiful, of course. But I’ve been expecting a kind of other-worldly creature: the person I meet is wonderfully down-to-earth, full of laughter – and absolutely real.

When I remind her that we are here because Bazaar has named her British Icon in our Women of the Year awards, she rolls her eyes again, and breaks out laughing. "It’s very
weird to be told that," she says. That’s a different Kristin Scott Thomas, it seems. "I feel like I have a sort of shadow walking behind me." She’s very gracious, of course, when I say how extraordinary I think her work is. "Thank you,"she says simply, looking right at me, making me think briefly of how rare it is for people – women especially, I venture to say– to simply accept a sincere compliment. But she really does see the public ‘Kristin’, the one who’s the subject of profiles like this, as separate from herself. "I haven't really connected the two. I don't think I ever will."

That is what I’ll take away from the hour I spend with her: the idea of the two KSTs, the one that exists in the public imagination, and the woman drinking coffee opposite me. Of course, anyone with her level of fame will have a private and a public self, but Scott Thomas – with her crystalline beauty, her cut-glass vowels, the fact that she’s lived in France, and had a career there, for much of her adult life – seems particularly aware of the divide. Born in Cornwall in 1960, she is the eldest of five siblings; her father died in a plane crash when she was a little girl. Her mother scraped together the money to send her to Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and from there she went on to the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. She moved to Paris, worked as an au pair, and in 1986 was cast in Under the Cherry Moon – Prince’s directorial debut. It was widely derided as, well, a turkey, but the film was the making of her: and she has nothing but praise for the artist who saw her potential.

"Prince was amazing," she says. "He’s someone to miss. He was extraordinary, really extraordinary. I was thinking about how, when I made that film, it was a love story between a white girl and a black guy, and that is something that’s still really difficult to do now: that was 30 years ago. No, it didn’t do well. It was not a good film." She casts her glance upwards, as if to the heavens, where surely Prince resides. "Sorry!" she says to him, smiling. "But it was adventurous," she goes on, emphatically. "It was brave, it was completely its own thing."

And that’s what makes Scott Thomas an icon, though she’d dispute it: she’s brave, and she’s completely her own thing. It is the way she has been willing to show audiences her heart that has entranced us. Consider the wounded vulnerability on display in Four Weddings and a Funeral (for which she won a Bafta) or the haunting romance of her portrayal of Katherine Clifton in the film of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient; but there is her wickedly funny streak too, on vibrant display in Sally Potter’s black comedy of 2017, The Party. She brought soul and steel to her characterisation of Clementine Churchill in Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour, her performance a demonstration that Clementine was more than a match for Winston. And there have been her vivid and electrifying appearances on stage – she won an Olivier in 2008 for her role as Arkadina in Chekhov’s The Seagull, directed by Ian Rickson; she was nominated for the award again in 2015 for her title role in Sophocles’ tragedy Electra, also directed by Rickson.

And now she will be adding another string to her bow by moving behind the camera. The Sea Change, with a script by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Disobedience, Ida), is adapted from a novel by Elizabeth Jane Howard. When I ask Scott Thomas what has moved her to turn to directing, she tells me that she first read the novel when she was 17 – the book has been in her thoughts for a long time. It is about a long-married couple who have never recovered from the death of their daughter; but Scott Thomas is clear that the adaptation has left the novel behind. "We’ve come away with a sort of stain" of the book, she says: a rather wonderful description. But getting the film off the ground has been slow. "It’s very, very frustrating. You have to have nerves of steel." It’s been going on so long, she says, laughing, that the whole idea "became a bit of a joke – “Kristin’s directing this film”, ha ha." But she remains deeply committed to the project, saying simply: "It’s a life’s work."

Part of the problem was finding the right way to adapt the novel. "Which sticks to my theory that really good books are really difficult to make into films." The remark brings up the subject of The English Patient. The film won nine Oscars in 1997; Ondaatje’s novel, published in 1992 and winner of that year’s Booker Prize, had just been awarded the Golden Man Booker when Scott Thomas and I spoke – the best work of fiction from the past five decades of the Man Booker Prize. Scott Thomas is thrilled by the news. "The book is just extraordinary," she says.

She was in love with it from her first sight of the cover; "and then of course I completely fell in love with Michael Ondaatje and had to read everything." (She has just finished Warlight, his new novel; her recommendation moves it to the very top of my own pile.) Her appreciation of the film has only grown since she has been working on The Sea Change. "Now I know how difficult it is to do an adaptation of a brilliant novel. The adaptation of The English Patient is just so beautiful – it’s like a cousin, it flows alongside the book."

Having been based in Paris for many years, she now moves between there and London. "I don’t seem to be able to stay in one place for more than – well, it used to be three weeks," she says, practically counting the days on her fingers. "Now it’s 10 days. It’s really hard." Her complicated schedule means that not every plan works out. "I wanted to do The Cherry Orchard really badly, and I had to pull out," she tells me. The invitation came from Ian Rickson, with whom she’s worked so closely, and successfully, before."I’m absolutely heartbroken about it. In fact, I’m so heartbroken about it I must stop talking about it..." and her voice trails off a little, and she does, indeed, look absolutely heartbroken, glancing down at her coffee cup. "It was going to clash with my movie," she says, gathering herself together. "And I’ve got to put that first, otherwise I’ll never get it done."

She rhapsodises about working with Rickson on Electra. "I just find it so exciting to do a play that’s 2,000 years old. Two thousand years old! And this play says so much about everything that we’re still suffering from today – still, today! The human being has not changed."

The production, she admits, "knocked the stuffing out of me. It took me for ever to get over it. As I get older, I realise how utterly exhausting it is to keep seven or eight hundred people there in the room with me eight times a week: that’s your job, to keep everybody absolutely engaged, even if you’re sitting still, apparently not doing anything. You have to be really fit to be able to do that."

She looks pretty fit to me, to say the least. She has a trainer; she does a lot of Pilates. I could say that she doesn’t look 58: but I think of Gloria Steinem being told she didn’t look 40: "This is what 40 looks like," Steinem said. Scott Thomas looks fabulous. She looks like a grown-up. And yes, she looks like an icon, albeit one you can gossip with over a good cup of coffee.

Time is marching on. She glances at her watch and apologises once again; she’s going to have to dash. "I hope you’re able to unravel some sense from what I’ve been saying!" she says, a flash of vulnerability underneath her beauty and confidence. We part on the pavement and she strides away from me, vivid as the sun in her bright yellow dress.

harpersbazaar.com

Dame Kristin Scott Thomas attends the Harper's Bazaar Women Of The Year Awards 2018, in partnership with Michael Kors and Mercedes-Benz, at Claridge's Hotel on October 30, 2018 in London, England.

Dame Kristin Scott Thomas and Barbara Broccoli attend a screening of Alfonso Cuaron's 'Roma' hosted by Netflix & David Heyman at The Ham Yard Hotel on October 12, 2018 in London, England.

Dame Kristin Scott Thomas attends an after party for 'Happy Birthday, Harold', a charity gala celebrating the life and work of Harold Pinter and the press night performance of 'Pinter At The Pinter', at Brasserie Zedel on October 10, 2018 in London, England.

Kristin Scott Thomas attends the Valentino show as part of the Paris Fashion Week Womenswear Spring/Summer 2019 on September 30, 2018 in Paris, France.

harpersbazaar.com, wireimage.com, zimbio.com​