Whenever a film director needed an actress to portray the date from hell they could rely on Kristin Scott Thomas.
The actress built a career on being faintly rebarbative, rising to prominence as a coldly repressed character in Four Weddings and a Funeral and blooming into a peroxide-blonde villain in Only God Forgives. In her most famous role, in The English Patient, her repressed character finally breaks free, only to die soon afterwards.
Now she has cited her continuous casting as ice-maiden as the reason she forsook cinema for a career on stage.
“I got fed up with being asked to do the same thing, playing cold, wicked bitches,” she told the Radio Times. “I felt like the camera was stealing bits of me and the end product was a mosaic, just snippets. If I cried on film, they weren’t my tears.”
Her rejection of frosty roles comes after her Bafta-nominated performance as John Lennon’s strict Aunt Mimi in Nowhere Boy in 2009 and a hard-bitten prime minister’s press secretary in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen in 2012. It is an abrupt shift from her attitude in 2013, when she claimed to relish playing the callous matriarch Crystal in Only God Forgives, a brutal drama by Nicolas Winding Refn. “She is actually unimaginably bad, and that is what drew me to the project,” she said. “She is just beastly. It’s nice to be asked to do something with the underworld and not in a country house or to sit weeping in my kitchen.”
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The actress, who was appointed a dame in the new year’s honours list, decided in September that she would wind up a 30-year career in film and make theatre her “main job”.
Her final cinema performance, shot before her change of heart, requires her to play a wealthy, embittered widow in Suite Francaise, a story set during the Second World War.
She denied that her character was another bitch. “Madame Angellier is in agony not knowing if her only son is dead or alive. She is also very conscious of her status in the town and is trying to maintain her dignity. I met women like her when I first moved to Paris in the 1970s. Bourgeois women, always impeccably dressed in navy blue but cold and tough.”
The actress said that people often take her to be superior because she sometimes likes to be alone with her thoughts.
“I know that when I’m unhappy I don’t want to be in contact with people because it just reminds you of how miserable you are, so you cut yourself off and that can be mistaken for being distant or aloof. In my case it’s also to do with being shy when I was young. People often take it the wrong way.”
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In May she will take over from Dame Helen Mirren as the Queen in a new London run of The Audience, Peter Morgan’s play about the weekly meetings between the monarch and her prime ministers from Winston Churchill to David Cameron. Dame Kristin said that she was scared “because of Helen — she has so much more experience of playing her than I do”. She recently moved to London in part to be near her son, who is at a British school, but also because of the lamentable state of theatre in France, where she had lived since she was 19. She said that French directors were not interested in her.
“They won’t have me. Anyway, there’s much more going on here creatively. The theatre in Paris is very inaccessible. They don’t really care about what audiences want.”
Her role in Suite Francaise brings up the thorny issue of French collaboration with the Nazis and the national sense of guilt in failing to prevent the deportation of 76,000 Jews to the death camps.
She suggested that Britain had historically been less tolerant of anti-semitism than France, although both countries have deteriorated recently.
“Anti-semitism has always existed in France but I do think it’s more open now, more accepted,” she said. “[In Britain] I think people are pointing fingers at certain communities in a way that didn’t happen so much before.
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“Whether it’s a lunatic talking about a march against the ‘Jewification of Stamford Hill’, or others accusing mosques of not doing their jobs. We didn’t have that before, or maybe I’m just getting older and hearing it whereas in my 20s I didn’t notice.”
Since moving to London last year to perform in the title role of Electra at the Old Vic she has also discovered another British virtue — Gogglebox, the fly-on-the-wall programme that records people’s reactions to television.
“It’s genius. Watching it makes you feel part of some kind of community. I would come home from doing Electra on stage at the Old Vic and watch back-to-back episodes. It made me feel connected. I love those three Asian guys, the two women in Brixton and the lady vicar, she’s lovely.”