Kristen Scott Thomas

Biography:

Even 30 years into her career, Kristin Scott Thomas remains a mystery. This is partly because for three decades she's lived in Paris where gossip journalism and the cult of celebrity are strictly controlled, and partly due to her reticence with interviewers when they do occasionally catch up with her. Mostly, though, it's because she is not and has never been quite what people wanted her to be. In Britain, her career path would be seen as follows. She makes her breakthrough as the beautiful, aristocratic Brenda Last in A Handful Of Dust. She becomes a star as the beautiful, aristocratic Fiona in Four Weddings And A Funeral and as the beautiful, aristocratic Katharine Clifton in The English Patient. She makes a comeback as the beautiful, aristocratic Sylvia McCordle in Gosford Park. She becomes a celebrated stage actress as the beautiful, aristocratic Masha in Three Sisters and the beautiful, aristocratic Arkadina in The Seagull. Beautiful and aristocratic, she's proved herself to be one of the nation's finest thespians.

Under these terms, in Britain, Scott Thomas is not beloved of the people. She appears too sharp, too icy for that. She is liked, she is respected, she is even lusted after by a certain class of male, but she is not loved. Not yet anyway. It is clear that like her heroine, the beautiful, aristocratic Maggie Smith, she will have to wait until time and familiarity allow her to be loved for that same sharpness, that iciness. Then, in Britain, she will be a national institution.

Elsewhere, Scott Thomas is seen very differently. Elsewhere note is taken of her crazy debut as Prince's wild child love interest in Under The Cherry Moon, of her regular onscreen nudity, of her work with such controversial directors as Marie-France Pisier, Paul Schrader and Roman Polanski. Elsewhere, she's remembered as the neglected housewife beginning an affair with a 17-year-old in Bille En Tete, as the haughty traveller released from sexually repression in Bitter Moon, as the nun facing life and desire for the first time in Body & Soul, as the junkie queen embracing her husband's murderer in Richard III, as the sinister, seductive femme fatale in Arsene Lupin, as the confident, no-nonsense lesbian lover in Tell No One, and as the emotionally estranged child killer in I've Loved You So Long. Elsewhere she is considered an international actress of wide range and experience, only sharp and icy when the work requires it.

Blended together, these two separate pictures of Scott Thomas give a clearer idea of her past and her worth. Having filmed in several languages, having tested herself in fraught art pieces and mainstream blockbusters, in comedies, dramas and thrillers, having begun a successful stage career at such a late date, Kristin Scott Thomas deserves to be lauded as one of the bravest and greatest actresses of recent times.

She was born in Redruth, Cornwall, on the 24th of May, 1960, and would be the eldest of five children, three girls and two boys. Her sister Serena would be born in September of the next year, in Nether Compton, Dorset. This is where the family would be raised, Nether Compton being just five miles from Yeovilton, a base comprising 1,400 acres of airfield sites, and Kristin's father being Lieutenant Commander Simon Scott Thomas, a devout Catholic and a pilot with the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy.

There was plenty of military derring-do in the family background. Kristin was distantly related to Robert Falcon Scott, who famously died returning from the South Pole. Her grandfather was Commander William Scott Thomas, also of the Royal Navy, who'd won the Distinguished Service Cross in 1941while standing as commanding officer on the I Class destroyer HMS Impulsive. Throughout the early years of WW2, Impulsive would serve as convoy cover in the Med and the northern seas, then toil laying minefields. In 1940, she'd be involved in the Dunkirk disaster, making four trips between Dover and France and rescuing 2,917 troops. In May, 1941, he'd rescue a further 278 survivors from the cruiser Salopian. William would marry one Mary Hilda Bertha Hemelryk.

William's sons would follow him into the Navy. As well as Simon there'd be William Richard Scott Thomas who'd become Admiral Richard Thomas. Though he'd not see military action, he'd be involved in skirmishes in the Cod Wars, would command HMS Fearless, be appointed the UK's military representative to NATO and receive a Papal knighthood. After his retirement he'd serve as the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod in the House of Lords. Known simply as Black Rod, this was a position created in 1361, each appointee having to be "a gentleman famous in arms and in blood". Marrying Paddy Cullinan in 1959, Admiral Richard would have four sons and four daughters, plenty of well-to-do cousins for young Kristin, considerig that Richard and Simon's sister Elizabeth would bear two sons and a daughter.

Being raised in Nether Compton, a small village on the Dorset border with Somerset that had been burned back in 1066 by the rampaging William the Conqueror, might have been idyllic. Later Kristin would recall spending much time in the fields, as well as being taught to sew by her grandmother, and dressing up and putting on plays in the garden and tap-dancing under the watchful eye of her mother, Deborah (nee Hurlbatt), a trained actress.

She'd even take her performances into the village, visiting shops while togged up as an ancient spinster. Of course, she'd learn to ride from the age of seven. But Kristin's childhood ease would be short-lived as, on the night of the 17th of March, 1966, her father would be killed in an air crash. With 890 Squadron, he'd be flying Sea Vixen XS581, a high level day and night fighter interceptor, in a mock Glow Worm attack, a firing sortie over Lyme Bay, accompanied by HMS Zulu. About 10 miles south-west of Portland Bill he and his observer, Lieutenant John Harvey, would suffer the same fate as several Sea Vixen crews using this method of attack, when their plane would fail to pull out of a dive at 500 feet and continue into the sea, giving the crew no opportunity to eject. Young Kristin would be encouraged not to cry so as not to upset the youngsters. Deborah was pregnant with her fourth child.

It was a shocking blow, of course, but there was emotional stability at hand when Kristin's mother fell for and married her husband's best friend, another pilot, Commander Simon Idiens. In 1970, this would bring Kristin a half-brother, Matthew, later a stockbroker who'd marry and divorce the daughter of beef baron Lord Vestey and become involved in drilling for uranium near the Grand Canyon. Based at the Naval Fighter School at Yeovilton, training crews for front-line service, Simon Idiens had, in 1962, been a member of the renowned Royal Naval Acrobatic Team led by Lieutenant Commander Peter Reynolds and known as Fred's Five. Come 1968, he'd lend his name to another acrobatic team. Formed from 892 Squadron once they'd dismbarked from HMS Hermes, Simon's Sircus would be comprised of six Sea Vixens, each with a pilot and an observer to constantly check instruments and call out height and speed information. They were the very best, famed for their skill and fearlessness in their tight formation flying, and the lion they used as a mascot.

Incredibly, tragedy would soon strike young Kristin again. On the 10th of January, 1972, while flying the Phantom fighter XT876 over Cornwall, Idiens would suddenly lose altitude and enter a deadly spin at 31,000 feet. His observer, Lieutenant RC O'Connor would eject. So, reportedly, would Commander Idiens. O'Connor would survive but neither the Phantom, which crashed into the sea some 20 miles off Trevose Head, nor Commander Idiens would be found. It was thought that his parachute had failed to open, or opened and then malfunctioned. Again, there'd be little sympathy for young Kristin. Coming to the end of her Christmas holidays, within three days she'd be packed off on the train back to Cheltenham Ladies' College where she had recently become a boarder.

Raised in Africa and Hong Kong then, as mentioned, trained as an actress, Deborah had never been wholly prepared for life as a mother and military wife.

Now, twice-widowed and with five kids to raise, she had to draw on all manner of favours and family traditions in order to have her children properly fed and educated. Kristin knew she was lucky to be at such a prestigious establishment as Cheltenham Ladies' College at all. However, crushingly disappointed by the death of two fathers, she felt she was always being let down and put down. She considered herself the thick one, bad at everything and forever dumped in the C Stream. Her family's relative poverty was stark when placed against the wealth of many of the other girls and, in her early years at Cheltenham, finding it hard to make friends, Kristin would have an imaginary buddy, named Wendy. Wendy had a rich family with a Rolls Royce, and she still liked Kristin. Beyond this, Kristin would spend her teens convinced she was ugly and fat, tortured by sister and school-mate Serena's superior face and figure. This problem with her body-image would cling to her for twenty or more years, the hunt for high-profile acting parts not generally being known to boost one's confidence in this area. It was only later, looking at photographs of her teenage self, that Kristin would realise how skinny she actually was.

Founded in 1853, and run for most of its first fifty years by suffragette Dorothea Beale, a pioneer of women's education who offered courses equivalent to those at boys' schools, Cheltenham Ladies' College certainly offered a fine schooling. With its motto Coelesti Luce Crescat (May She Grow In Heavenly Light), the place would turn out such luminaries as the artist Bridget Riley and the fashion designer Katherine Hamnett, as well as Carolyn Kirby, the first female president of the Law Society, and Rachel Lomax, the first female deputy governor of the Bank of England. As said, though, Kristin was not happy here and was delighted, at the age of 16, to dump the famous white blouse and green skirt and jumper, moving on to St Antony's, a Catholic independent school for girls near Sherborne (and Nether Compton), known as Leweston School. With its main building being a Palladian manor house set in over forty acres, Leweston was another top-grade college. Kristin, already decided upon a life in theatre, would blossom in drama classes. She'd form part of the Class of 1978, one of her closest friends being Mary Hoblyn, later a copywriter who came up with the line "Make poverty history".

Leaving school at 18, she'd begin to pursue her dream of acting. It didn't go well. Already turned down by the National Youth Theatre, she moved to London, found a flat above a fish and chip shop in Hampstead and worked at Selfridges in the Ladies' Separates department.

Still persisting with her chosen career she amazed herself by winning a place on a drama teaching course at the Central School of Speech and Drama, based in the Embassy Theatre at Swiss Cottage, close to her place in Hampstead. She'd told them that she desperately wanted to be a teacher and was keen to spend time working with young underprivileged kids in poor areas. Later she'd say that this was one of the best acting jobs she ever did as she had no intention of becoming a drama teacher, let alone hanging around in poor areas. Her hope was to quickly switch to an acting course and thus follow in the footsteps of such glorious alumni as Peggy Ashcroft, Claire Bloom, Vanessa Redgrave, Julie Christie and Judi Dench. At least, that was the plan. Taken into an office by two of the School's top officials she was told in no uncertain terms that the only way she'd ever get to play Lady Macbeth would be if she joined a local am-dram. They saw no potential in her, they said, no theatrical future at all.

That can't have been easy for a girl of 18 to hear and Kristin reacted badly, indulging in self-pity and letting herself go. Since her mid-teens she'd been visiting Paris as part of an exchange programme for the daughters of naval personnel. Now she sought comfort there, an escape from her failure, and took up work as an au pair for a couple in the opera business. But she wouldn't veer from her path for long. Letting slip her ambitions to her boss she found herself being persuaded to sign up for an acting college in Paris, so she applied for the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts et Techniques du Theatre (ENSATT) on the Rue Blanche in the 9th Arrondissement, just a stroll to the south of Montmartre, and was duly enrolled upon a three-year course. Many great actors would train on the Rue Blanche, including Michel Serrault, Isabelle Huppert, Maria De Medeiros, Irene Jacob and Cecile De France, and Kristin would receive the finest instruction from the likes of Marcel Bozonnet, later to be general manager of the Comedie-Francaise.

Kristin would not only find a future at ENSATT. In 1981, at the beginning of her studies, she'd also find a husband. He was Francois Olivennes, a Jewish medical student who was attending acting classes in the hope of meeting girls. Though only one year older than Kristin he seemed much more sophisticated. On their first date he impressed her by taking her to see Godard's Le Mepris. His family was impressive, too, his father being the famous poet and playwright Armand Olivennes and his uncle the renowned psychotherapist Claude Olievenstein (having fled Nazi Germany in the early 1930s, several of the family would change their name to fit in better with the French).

Francois' brother Denis would also make a name for himself as a government advisor on finance, then working for Air France, becoming president of the TV conglomerate Canal + (which would finance several of Kristin's later projects) and running the influential business group FNAC. Kristin would later say that she had begun with her own Catholic guilt, then learned Jewish guilt from her husband's family. She did consider converting, but would eventually decide against it.

Francois himself would have a glittering future. Specialising in fertility, he'd become a leading expert on birth defects, multiple pregnancy, ovarian hyperstimulation, sperm freezing and all aspects of assisted reproduction. Working out of the Cochin hospital in Paris and the Beclere hospital at Clamart, he'd write many important books and papers on his subject. He always was ambitious. In 1982, he'd involve Kristin in a plan to spend a summer selling deely boppers (comedy headbands with decorated springs attached) on the beach at Palavas-les-Flots, on the Med by Montpellier. Business-wise, it didn't go well, the young couple being left with some 2,000 of the annoying little blighters. Francois would propose to Kristin some six years into their relationship, over the phone when she was in Los Angeles. They would have three children - Hannah, born in 1988, Joseph (1991) and George (2000).

Kristin must have impressed her teacher Marcel Bozonnet as he would cast her in his 1983 play La Lune Declinante Sur 4 Ou 5 Personnes Qui Dansent, a production which he took to his own hometown at the Festival de Semur en Auxois. The next year she'd appear in two pieces. First would be Arthur Schnitzler's Terre Etrangere, directed by Luc Bondy at the Theatre des Amandiers in Nanterre. Here the wife of a philandering industrialist would be torn between her uxorial duties and a secret love for a Russian pianist. Bondy would go on to film Terre Etrangere in 1987 with Michel Piccoli, but Kristin would not be cast. Her next play would be the dark comedy Naives Hirondelles, written by Roland Dubillard and again directed by Marcel Bozonnet, this time at the Festival d'Avignon. First published in 1961, the play would use the characters' amiable chatter to reveal their melancholy solitude and the absolute impossibility of real communication.

Alongside her theatrical work, Kristin would find the occasional job onscreen. She'd make her debut in an episode of Les Enquetes du Commissaire Maigret where an old school-friend of Simenon's detective would ask for help when his mistress is murdered. Kristin would play a blonde hairdresser trying to look fascinated as Jean Richard pulled on his pipe and sought the truth. Next would come a brief role in the epic miniseries Mistral's Daughter, also known as L'Amour En Heritage, following the lives and loves of artist Stacy Keach, his muse Stefanie Powers and those of their children.

Also featuring in this adaptation of Judith Krantz's novel would be Lee Remick, Stephane Audran and Joanna Lumley, Kristin appearing for one minute out the show's six hours as an English lady chatted up charmlessly by Keach at a party. His wife would intervene to put an end to any potential shenanigans. After this would come the 11-minute short Charly, directed by Florence Strauss. This was a comedy drama where the lad of the title would busk with his sax on the Paris Metro. Meeting Kristin he'd like a date but he fears her reaction to his illiteracy. She, of course, cares not a jot if he's capable of signing a cheque, the tale being well-intentioned but unconvincing.

Come 1985, Kristin would find herself in a field in Burgundy, appearing in an production of Marguerite Duras's Yes Peut Etre, directed by Genevieve Rosset. From here, despite her severe lack of experience, she would suddenly be catapulted into the big time. Having enjoyed a giant hit with Purple Rain in 1984, the musician Prince was lining up his next cinema release, to be titled Under The Cherry Moon and filmed in the south of France. Having struck creative disagreement with director Mary Lambert, he'd sacked her and taken over the reins, turning the film into a vanity project the like of which had not been seen in years. Keen to find any work she could, Kristin had attended auditions in Paris, hoping to grab one of the smaller roles, but had been spotted by Prince - well known for his eye for a looker - and brought in to replace Apollonia Kotero, who'd starred in Purple Rain but now declined Prince's offer of a further lead role. From that field in Burgundy she was whisked to Paris's luxurious Hotel Crillon and surrounded by people wondering who she'd like to do her hair and makeup.

Filmed in colour but released in a beautiful black and white, the film would see Prince and Jerome Benton (a member of the band The Time and Prince's own Revolution) as fast-talking gigolos in Nice, endlessly hunting rich women for sex and favours. Prince is particularly successful at this, even enjoying an affair with wealthy, cosmopolitan Francesca Annis. This is one of the film's more outlandish conceits - that Prince, despite being a puffed-up ponce behaving like a giggling, pouting and occasionally sulky schoolboy, always gets the girl. All the girls. Every time. Thus his interest is piqued when he hears of Kristin, heiress to a shipping fortune who's just about to pick up a $50 million trust fund.

We cut straight away to a posh party in the gardens of a fabulous villa. This is Kristin Scott Thomas's first appearance in a feature film and she could not be further removed from the ice princess she's so often reputed to be.

Skipping down the wide white stairs, wrapped only in a towel and followed by her laughing friends, she reaches the top of the steps descending into the garden and, in front of all the guests, tears off her towel and asks "How do you like my birthday suit? I designed it myself!" Then, ebullient and carefree, she strolls through the crowd before leaping onstage with the party band, pushing the drummer out of the way and taking over on funky percussion. A real party girl, she's horribly constricted by her strict father Steven Berkoff who's keen for her to marry her fiance and create a business empire, and so she falls quickly for Prince and the exciting life he represents. Together they tango by the ocean, race cars through the dust and dance some more when Prince takes over a dinner dance. Kristin is excellent when she's larking about, better when she's warring with Berkoff, but she stands no chance of rescuing her love scenes with Prince, who's just too goofy for words. That said, the film looks wonderful, thanks to the cinematography of Michael Ballhaus, who'd worked with Fassbinder and would become Martin Scorsese's regular director of photography. When he's not busy making Prince look good, he makes Kristin and Francesca Annis look fantastic.

Kristin was now experiencing the full Hollywood experience. With producers expecting Under The Cherry Moon to at least equal Purple Rain's extraordinary profit margins, the money was flowing. Kristin was flown to Los Angeles, there were limousines, managers, handlers, security guards, many parties. Going with the flow of the tremendous hype, she threw herself at the press and so, when the reviews turned ugly and the movie bombed, she took an almighty clobbering in print. It was deeply unfair as she had acquitted herself well in her debut feature, but Prince, in his immense vanity, had set himself up for a kicking and Kristin was caught amidst the flurry of critical blows, being nominated as Worst Supporting Actress and Worst New Star at the Razzies. She would never be open with the press again.

Cast back to Earth with considerable force, Kristin would return to her budding career in France, in 1987 appearing in the TNF TV film Sentimental Journey. Then would come La Tricheuse, directed by Joyce Bunuel, daughter-in-law of the infamous film-maker Luis. Here a 45-year-old woman would begin an affair with a younger man but suffer jealousy of the younger women she's sure he'd prefer. Disappearing and presumed dead, she returns with a new ID and a younger face and he falls for her again, only this time she's jealous of her former, older self. Following this would come the more prestigious Agent Trouble, featuring Catherine Deneuve and Richard Bohringer and directed by Jean-Pierre Mocky.

Deneuve, who'd be Cesar-nominated for her work, would play a museum worker who ties the murder of her nephew in with the discovery of a tourist coach at the bottom of a lake and a secret government project that may have caused the gassing of 50 people. Bohringer would play an assassin hunting her, with Kristin enjoying herself as a high class but hilariously drunk hooker, her breast lit up with little lamps. Ice maiden, indeed.

Quickly her fortunes would turn once more, 1988 seeing three first class releases. First of these would be the classic A Handful Of Dust, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh. Set between the wars, this would see Kristin married to stuffy James Wilby and unhappily settled at his family seat, living amidst luxury, idleness and frustration. All this alters when rapacious social climber Rupert Graves comes to stay. Egged on by his ambitious mother Judi Dench, he offers Kristin's Brenda Last a more thrilling life in London and she takes it, engaging in a scandalous affair, humiliating Wilby then threatening to cost him his beloved home. It was a brilliant film, with Kristin superb as the icy Brenda, a woman capable of greeting the news of her young son's death with the words "Thank God". So chilling was she at this moment that she basically created the reputation she'd carry for the next two decades. Odd, because it was obviously an act. In Under The Cherry Moon she'd spoken English clearly and was evidently well-educated, but the voice she gave Brenda Last was new, it was cut-glass aristocratic. From now on she'd use this voice in interviews, too, as if she was hiding behind it, or perhaps trying to become the actress British people wanted her to be. A Handful Of Dust had, after all, seen her named as Most Promising Newcomer at the Evening Standard's British Film Awards (a victory she shared with Jodhi May for A World Apart). It beat a Razzie hands down.

Following A Handful Of Dust would come Jean-Francois Amiguet's satire La Meridienne, where Jerome Anger would play a cinema projectionist living with two girls, Kristin and Sylvie Orcier. He's wondering if he's ready to be married, so are the girls, so an eccentric private detective is hired to spy on him, reporting to Kristin who then reports to Anger. Of course, the different sensibilities involved necessitate that messages are mixed and misunderstood. Reviewers considered it silly, but Kristin was certainly moody and languorous enough as she spent much of the movie lounging on the garden chaise longue of the title. Better would be The Tenth Man, based on a Graham Greene novella and filmed in France for the Hallmark Hall of Fame series. Here Anthony Hopkins would play the lawyer Chavel, seized by the Nazis during the Occupation and held in prison, waiting to be shot in reprisal for the killing of Nazis by the Resistance.

When the prisoners are told to pick three of their number to face execution, Hopkins draws a short straw and offers his house and considerable fortune to anyone willing to take his place. One young man takes him up on his offer in order to secure the future of his sister and mother. After the Occupation, Hopkins returns home to find Kristin and her mother in residence and, concealing his identity begins to work for them, gradually falling for Kristin even though he knows she's waiting for Chavel to return to the house to she can spit on him and shoot him dead. Matters reach a deadly complexity when a weasely Derek Jacobi turns up, claiming to be Chavel and preying on Kristin's doubts. She'd be excellent throughout, hugely vulnerable and confused by a headful of lies, desperately trying to hold herself, her mother and her revenge fantasy together.

With her profile raised by A Handful Of Dust, Kristin would now continue to flit between French and English productions while trying to orchestrate another attempt on Hollywood. She'd be asked to fly to Los Angeles to test for Brian de Palma's Bonfire Of The Vanities, with a view to playing Tom Hanks' wife (a role eventually filled by Kim Cattrall) but producers wouldn't wait for her to complete a family holiday and thus she lost out. Instead she'd appear in Pierre Jolivet's Force Majeure (later remade in Hollywood as Return To Paradise), where Patrick Bruel and Francois Cluzet would holiday in Asia and, on leaving, hand their spare drugs to a friend they've made. He's then busted and threatened with a death sentence as a pusher, the French lads then being asked to return to the East, tell the full story and be jailed themselves in order to save the man's life. Peripheral characters would be played by Kristin and Alan Bates, Kristin appearing as the former girlfriend of the man on Death Row, trying to persuade the Gauls to do the right thing. In her naked bedroom scene she'd be wholly uninhibited, not a trace of Brenda Last about her. She'd then move on to another sexually liberated role in Bille En Tete where, bored and lonely as her husband travels constantly for work, she begins an affair with the 17-year-old son of hubbie's business partner. It was funny and touching in places, and Kristin would be named Best Actress at the Cabourg Romantic Film Festival but Thomas Langmann as the young lad was annoyingly precocious and the film suffered from telling the story from his perspective rather than hers. Next there'd be the 42-minute short Cela S'Appelle L'Amour, directed by Marcel Hanoun, which would juxtapose an am-dram performance of Romeo And Juliet with the real-life love and conflicts of a young Arab couple in the town of Gennevilliers. Kristin would here appear alongside the great Michael Lonsdale who'd featured in The Name Of The Rose, Louis Malle's classic Le Souffle Au Coeur and as Hugo Drax in Moonraker.

Try as she might, Kristin was pretty much finished in Hollywood.

The closest she'd get for the next five years or so was in American-financed TV movies like HBO's Framed where, once more in Paris, she'd rip her art forger boyfriend Jeff Goldblum off for five million francs. Two years later, when he's working as a barman in LA, she re-enters his life, now with a mob boss partner, asking Goldblum to forge a Modigliani so she can steal the real deal. With the mob and the FBI involved in a series of swindles and counter-swindles, it was entertaining stuff and the leads were quite charming, Kristin being cheeky, sweet and thoroughly manipulative. Very different would be Bryan Forbes' dark, fraught The Endless Game where retired MI6 operative Albert Finney is called back into service due to the murder of his old flame Kristin. Flashing back across time, we see their carefree affair, then she's taken by the Russians who use new methods of torture to extract information from her, torture that leaves her basically jellified. The question is, why is she then injected with poison while languishing permanently in a nursing home? It was a tough tale of duty and betrayal, with Kristin excellent as an intelligent, courageous woman crushed by a gigantic shadowy machine.

1990 would bring two very different productions. First would come Le Bal Du Gouverneur, written and directed by Marie-France Pisier, earlier the controversial star of Cousin, Cousine and The Other Side Of Midnight. Set around the time of the Algerian war, this showed the final dissolution of old French colonial power on the South Pacific island of New Caledonia. Kristin would play the wife of the Vice-Governor, beautifully dressed, sultry and sophisticated but wayward and childishly selfish, a French Brenda Last. Her affair with a doctor would destroy her teenage daughter's innocence, the girl already being unsettled by the imminent ending of this European-controlled tropical paradise. Following this would come the Turner Pictures TV movie Spymaker which wittily cast Sean Connery's son Jason as Ian Fleming in a tale of the writer's early years in Russia where his foiling of the KGB sees him recruited by British Intelligence. Kristin would play a spunky English lass, Connery's pistol-packing boss in the Royal Navy who becomes his lover, deals in official secrets and bravely confronts Connery's tyrannical mother Patricia Hodge.

Far more interesting would be The Bachelor, Kristin's second appearance in an Arthur Schnitzler piece after 1984's Terre Etrangere. Here doctor Keith Carradine, working in the health spas of the Austro-Hungarian empire, is close, too close to his unmarried sister Miranda Richardson. When she kills herself he goes clumsily seeking a mate, getting engaged to Kristin, the daughter of a retired opera singer, then calling it off as he embarks on an affair with Sarah-Jane Fenton. All the while he's drawn to a woman who looks uncannily like his sister.

Next would come the comedy short Valentino! I Love You, co-directed by the marvellously named Martin Cognito, where Kristin would be taken hostage. Then there'd be Autobus where depressed loser Yvan Attal would attempt to impress girlfriend Charlotte Gainsbourg by hijacking a school bus and forcing the driver to take him to Spain, where Gainsbourg resides. Kristin would play the teacher of the 22 kids aboard, at first frightened and bullied by Attal then gradually coming to understand and even like him. It was more a character study than a Speed-like thriller, but Kristin was unhappy with the project. For one it was hot filming in the summer and she was pregnant with Joseph, then she found that many of her scenes, the reason she'd taken the role, were cut. She felt, she said, like a prop.

Kristin's final appearance of 1991 would be on British TV in John Mortimer's Titmuss Regained. A follow-up to Paradise Postponed where a socialist reverend had caused a stink by leaving his fortune to Tory MP David Threlfall, this would see Thelfall's Titmuss at the peak of his career, attempting to plough up a beautiful valley for development as his brother tries to stop him. The two men also battle over the affections of widow Kristin, Threlfall winning her then driving her away with the rage he still feels about his upbringing. Kristin would be dutifully lovely then devastated. Far less interesting would be a French-American production of Mary Higgins Clark's Weep No More, My Lady. Very different to the book, this would see a film crew staying at a hotel-come-spa run by Robin Renucci in the French countryside. Starring in the movie would be a tempestuous Francesca Annis (earlier Kristin's co-star in Under The Cherry Moon) and she'd lose it when she suspects that her innocent sister Kristin is stealing away her wealthy boyfriend Daniel J Travanti. Someone's trying to send Annis mad with a series of videos , messages and phone calls. Then the murders begin, with the killer, idiotically, sneaking around in a mask and body armour, Renucci running kendo classes on the side. Kristin would be required mostly to react to others, taking a drink in the face from Annis for instance, but she was impressive in her intelligence, intense in her pain and realisation. Even so, she couldn't save a dodgy Euro production that made such great play of iffy red herrings and fatty Shelley Winters stealing snacks in the night. Also featuring would be Stephane Audran who'd been credited alongside Kristin in Mistral's Daughter.

Annoyingly, just as Kristin was struggling to find good parts, her sister Serena's career was taking off. She'd appear in the successful Let Him Have It in 1991, then star in Diana: Her True Story in 1993. By the time she won a recurring role in Don Johnson's series Nash Bridges, though, Kristin would be well on the way to the top.

1992 would bring Kristin's most impressive effort since A Handful Of Dust.

This was Roman Polanski's Paris-set Bitter Moon where Kristin and husband Hugh Grant would celebrate their seventh wedding anniversary on a cruise. Here Grant becomes infatuated with sexy fellow passenger Emmanuelle Seigner (Polanski's real-life wife) and meets her wheelchair-bound husband Peter Coyote who insists on telling Grant the full story of their passionate, heartbreaking and eventually indestructible love, all of which we view in a series of often kinky flashbacks as Coyote and Seigner go to ever greater lengths to keep their sex life fresh, and then descend into a cruel cycle of humiliation. Kristin would be fresh-faced, cute and plucky, but would clearly be hiding great losses, as we gradually recognise her unfulfilling sex life and thwarted desire for children. As she becomes more frustrated with Grant's unbecoming behaviour she flirts with an Italian charmer, gets righteously drunk and finally, at a New Year's Eve party where Grant proves too repressed to get it on with Seigner, Kristin takes his place on the dance-floor, joyfully bumping and grinding with the French temptress before repairing to her cabin for a lesbian liberation and the ultimate tragedy. Again she was excellent, giving clues to her buried extrovert character before gloriously revealing it. Kristin also worked well with Grant, the pair having met the year before when introduced by Kristin's great friend Julian Sands. At the time Sands was playing Liszt to Grant's Chopin in Impromptu, then being filmed in France.

Kristin's final release of 1992 would be Look At It This Way, a BBC miniseries directed by Gavin Millar. Here she'd play a free-spirited producer of TV ads, a modern woman, playfully sarcastic, in a tale of money and drug dealing, sexual betrayal and an escaped lion, all of it pointing to the passing of a traditional Cockney life, the show also starring old timers Lionel Jeffries and Jimmy Jewel. Her next two performances would be infinitely more important. First would come Body & Soul, a BAFTA-nominated six-parter where she'd star as Sister Gabriel, a nun of sixteen years' standing who must leave the convent in order to save her family's business from bankrupcy after the death of her brother. Hailing from an ascetic order, strictly run by Mother Superior Dorothy Tutin, this ordinary Yorkshire lass must now deal with both the outside world - see her surprise at a poster for female condoms - and the new demands of her own body and its desire for sex and children. The scene where she removes her nightie and contemplates her naked, skinny, rebellious form is tremendously moving. After A Handful Of Dust she was now recognised as a powerful actress for the second time.

Still, in the end she wouldn't be pushed back onto the world stage by a drama, rather a comedy.

This was Four Weddings And A Funeral where her recent co-star Hugh Grant endured an on-off relationship with American Andie MacDowell as his scatty band of friends lusted, loved, married and died around him. It was a comedy of stilted British manners, much of its humour and pain springing from advanced Anglo embarrassment, and Kristin was right at the heart of the action as Fiona, a close friend of Grant who's loved him secretly for years and dies a little every time he enters a new relationship, disguising her suffering with waspish critiques of his new paramours. Her character in Bitter Moon, the last time she'd partnered Grant onscreen, was also named Fiona, but here she was even more reserved, hiding it all behind a smart quip and a strained smile. Recognising the film's warm-hearted quality and comic potential, she'd fought hard to get the part, harder than she ever had before, and she'd be rewarded when, on a budget of just six million, it took four times that in the UK alone and scored well in America. It also won her a BAFTA. Really, considering how badly Under The Cherry Moon had bombed in the States, Four Weddings And A Funeral could be considered a Stateside Silver Screen debut of sorts.

Now much in demand on both sides of the English Channel, Kristin would move on to Un Ete Inoubliable, set in Romania in 1925, where she'd play the wife of an army officer. Turning down the advances of his CO she inadvertently causes her family to be posted to a dangerous outpost on the Bulgarian border where they're despised by both locals and their own soldiers. Kristin is especially disliked because she's half-Hungarian and must deal too with the loss of her cosmopolitan life. Flamboyant, dancing and singing along to Mozart, she's horrified when her husband is ordered to execute a gang of innocent Bulgarians rounded up for killing soldiers, putting him under great pressure with her principled stand and highlighting both the necessity and lunacy of some military actions. At the time she signed on for the movie Kristin was preparing to make a return to theatre but, having been approached by director Lucian Pintilie and seen his recent picture Le Chene, she dropped the theatre job and joined him. After Un Ete Inoubliable would come the comic short Plaisir D'Offrir. This would see Francois Morel, a co-student with Kristin back on the Rue Blanche, as an over-sensitive arse who wants to buy a present for girlfriend Kristin. She doesn't really want anything and annoys him by continually saying the wrong thing, so he bosses and bullies her until, as they pass through a hypermarket, she takes over, arguing with him, questioning him, becoming an impossible princess till he's forced to reconsider his position. It ends on the verge of another bust-up, this time in bed.

1995 would be an absurdly busy year for Scott Thomas releases.

After Plaisir D'Offrir would come Pierre Grange's episodic En Mai, Fais Ce Qu'Il Te Plait, an Altmanesque study of the denizens of a tower-block on election day. The eight inter-connecting tales of modern French life would see a wedding reception, arguments, cross-dressing, seduction, sex and an accidental shooting, with Kristin playing a working-class housewife who refuses to have sex with her partner while her young daughter is still awake. Next returning to Blighty she'd join the all-star cast of Ian McKellen's powerful adaptation of Richard III, setting the scene in a fascist state. With McKellen himself playing Richard, Kristin would play the sorrowful, abused Lady Anne who's seduced by Richard just after he's murdered her husband. The scene where he begs her to kill him and she cracks into his arms is tremendous, as is her consequent reaction to her own weakness - a descent into pallid, blinking heroin addiction. "I'll have her, but I will not keep her long", says Richard, and he's dead right. Also on the bill would be the Americans Annette Bening and Robert Downey Jr, as well as classical Brits like Nigel Hawthorne, Jim Broadbent and Kristin's own heroine Maggie Smith.

Back in France, Kristin would now take a small role in Les Milles, concerning the artists, dwarves, gays and political dissidents who fled to France from Germany to escape the Nazis, only to be held at the camp of the title. General Philippe Noiret would want to hand them over to the invading Bosche while camp commandant Jean-Pierre Marielle would seek to load them onto a train for Marseilles, with the eventual destination of Morocco. Kristin would pop up as a trouble-making American journalist, and she'd also have a limited role in her next feature, the Canadian production Le Confessional. Written and directed by famed Canadian theatre director and star Robert Lepage, this would flit between the present day and 1952, when Alfred Hitchcock is filming his classic I Confess. While the filming goes on, a real-life priest accepts the confession of a pregnant 16-year-old and in this event lies the truth of two brothers' parentage, their tale marked by guilt, deception and suicide. Kristin would play Hitchcock's harried production assistant, a cool blonde, just like Mr Hitchcock liked 'em.

Back once more to Blighty, she'd take part in Angels & Insects, based on a story by AS Byatt. Here Mark Rylance would play a quiet entymologist in the 1860s who's shipwrecked on his return from the Amazon and put up at the country pile of benefactor Jeremy Kemp. Here he meets pretty daughter Patsy Kensit and her brutish brother Douglas Henshall and is drawn into an unhappy marriage. To create a bearable life for himself he begins to teach the children of the household, looked after by a washed-out but intense Kristin, and comes to realise that she's actually a highly accomplished classical linguist, illustrator and writer.

For her part, this early feminist pushes him forward in his career, burning with passion and she explains his potential, clearly imagining her own. Kristin deliberately chose this dowdy but dramatic role over Kensit's more glamorous part, preferring to play a downtrodden pioneer rather than another one of the cruel gentry, filling their faces with cake and raping the help. There'd be more wonderful costumes, but less pervy drama in Belle Epoque, directed by her Look At It This Way director Gavin Millar from an idea by Francois Truffaut. Narrated by Jeanne Moreau (star of Truffaut's Jules Et Jim) this would be a four-hour saga of rivalry, falsehood and eventual forgiveness, where Kristin would play a mysterious woman, married to a demented man in order to save the family business, who meets inventor Andre Dussollier on a train and begins a tortured affair, Kristin struggling with her feelings, then falling and being treated most carelessly. Meanwhile Dussollier's being stalked by anarchist assassin Benno Furmann. It was pretty, but not a patch on the Oscar-winning Belle Epoque of 1992, starring Penelope Cruz and Ariadna Gil. Far more entertaining would be the marvellous documentary Microcosmos, Kristin narrating the English version.

Kristin's latest step back into US territory would come with a small role in a new epic version of Gulliver's Travels, starring Ted Danson and his wife Mary Steenburgen, and directed by Charles Sturridge, who'd given Kristin her first major breakthrough with A Handful Of Dust. Kristin would appear briefly as the fairy queen-like Immortal Gatekeeper, one of the Struldbrugg race, who offers Danson eternal life though he'd prefer a few minutes back with his wife. Featuring such greats as Gielgud, O'Toole, the brothers Fox, Geraldine Chaplin and Isabelle Huppert, it was a high-class affair, being nominated for eleven Emmies and winning five. Kristin would then move on to her first blockbuster, the Tom Cruise vehicle Mission: Impossible, directed by Brian De Palma, who'd let her slip away from The Bonfire Of the Vanities several years before. Here Cruise and a CIA team featuring Kristin, Jon Voight and an uncredited Emilio Estevez would be asked to prevent the theft of a file containing details of all of America's double agents. However, they're led into a trap and slaughtered, leaving Cruise to investigate the conspiracy against them. Kristin would look great all-too-briefly on the foggy streets of Prague, but this was about gadgetry and huge explosions and Tom Cruise flying through the air. She would just have to be grateful that so many people saw her violently truncated appearance.

Back in Paris, Kristin would pop up in Michael Shamberg's Souvenir where US sports journalist Stanton Miranda would wander the streets engaged in an off-screen dialogue with a younger brother voiced both by Christina Ricci and Adam Hann-Boyd.

Kristin would appear in one scene as Miranda's magazine boss, adding further weight to a film contemplating broken families, incest and abuse as well as exploring notions of loss, memory and the alienation of the computer age. Far lighter in tone would be Richard Schenkman's The Pompatus Of Love where we'd follow the romantic travails of four thirtysomethings buddies. Kristin would appear as a rich English interior designer who seizes the attention of married Italian plumber Adam Oliensis.

Having missed out on a part in Marion Vernoux's Love Etc which would have reunited her with her Autobus co-stars Yvan Attal and Charlotte Gainsbourg, now, at last, worldwide success would come her way. It had cost her dearly so far. Even as a child she'd been possessed of an innate melancholy, she was always being told to cheer up, it might never happen. Her career post-Under A Cherry Moon had added to her feelings of wretchedness, she so seldom won the parts she wanted. She was frustrated, neurotic, terrified of wrinkles and weight gain, still suffering the effects of her bereaved childhood and her terrible teenage self-image. Every decent film role, she jealousy thought, was given to Emma Thompson or Miranda Richardson. She could be hard to work with, her fear of further disappointment leading to aggressive perfectionism. Her husband, Francois, she'd call her rock throughout, calming her when he could. And, to her further frustration, success would not relieve her of her feelings. Therapy would.

For some time Kristin had been pestering director Anthony Minghella for one of the female leads in his version of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. She'd be perfect, she thought, as Katharine Clifton, caught up in passion and left to die, and so wrote to Minghella, engineered meetings, and eventually convinced him. In turn, he had then to convince Fox, who preferred the American pulling-power of Demi Moore. Kristen would hear the good news of her acceptance while in Prague filming Mission: Impossible. Still the struggle was not over as one month into shooting Fox would pull out, leaving Kristin mortally disappointed. She returned to France and was set to spend the summer sulking at the family's farmhouse in the Burgundy countryside near Villeneuve-sur-Yonne when she was informed that Miramax had taken over and filming was back on.

The English Patient would see Ralph Fiennes, horribly burned and possessed of neither face nor name, being cared for by nurse Juliette Binoche in war-torn Italy. When a thumbless Willem Dafoe appears, believing Fiennes to be the man who handed him over for Nazi torture, we flash back to north Africa just before the war, when Fiennes is part of the Royal Geographic Society team mapping the desert. One of his colleagues is Colin Firth, who brings his wife Kristin into this macho surround. By day she's steadfast and smiling, trying to be one of the boys on their dusty, dangerous missions.

By night she's glamorous in the clubs of Cairo, in both incarnations captivating Fiennes. At first she's irritated by his surliness and amused by his lack of social grace, put off by his indiscretion and clumsy moralising, but eventually she surrenders to his intensity and matches it in fiery sex sequences in a tin bath and up against a wall during a Christmas party. Her facial expressions in these scenes should serve as a final rebuke to anyone considering her to be an ice maiden. She still has a very English reserve but both subtly and overtly she expresses her love for both Fiennes and her husband and childhood friend Firth, and her guilt. She loved the shoot, despite her very understandable difficulties when it came to imagining what it's like to be in a plane crash, and she was really quite brilliant, being Oscar-nominated alongside Fiennes and Binoche, Binoche actually winning as Best Supporting Actress. She'd also be nominated for both a BAFTA and a Golden Globe.

Before moving on to the Hollywood movies inevitably offered to an Oscar nominee, Kristin would return to France for Amour & Confusions where writer/director Patrick Braoude would star as an underwear designer who has a one-night stand with Kristin, a businesswoman who's sacrificed it all for her job. They really like each other but, when their efforts to keep in contact are inadvertently foiled, they both become paranoid and are thus in a mood to explode when they do finally meet. It was all about New Age sexual attitudes and pop psychology, with Kristin in a spirited and welcome comedy role.

Back in Hollywood, she'd been passed over for Harrison Ford's Six Days, Seven Nights, and then had another possible Ford movie, Age Of Aquarius, where she was to play the relief worker love interest of his American journalist in Sarajevo, shelved when Universal baulked at the $94 million budget. A great shame as, at one point, Steven Spielberg was attached to direct. Instead, she'd sign up for Robert Redford's take on Nicholas Evans's The Horse Whisperer. Here she'd play a top New York magazine editor, married to lawyer Sam Neill. When their daughter Scarlett Johansson is crippled in a horrifying riding accident, Kristin decides that her resulting depression can only be cured if her horse is returned to health, thus she takes off for Montana, where she bullies horse healer Redford into taking on their case. With patience and skill he does his work, at the same time raising Johansson's spirits and calming the hyper-tense Kristin, who in turn falls for the idea of Redford and risks shattering his heart. Kristin had pushed for the part and only won it when the project was delayed and the original choice could no longer take part. She'd say afterwards that Redford worked hard to draw her out of herself, making her a braver actress.

She'd next rejoin Sam Neill, as well as Helena Bonham Carter and her Handful Of Dust co-star Rupert Graves in The Revengers' Comedies, based on the play by Alan Ayckbourn. Here Neill would play a depressed businessman who meets Bonham Carter on Tower Bridge when both are considering suicide. Over drinks they plot revenge on each other's enemies. Bonham Carter will go after Steve Coogan, the slimy rat who stole Neil's job, while Neill will attempt to destroy Kristin, the bitch who drove husband Martin Clunes in Bonham Carter's arms then stole him back. In his efforts, Neill would discover that Kristin is actually a poor wretch who's suffered Clunes's serial infidelity, while Bonham Carter is actually unhinged.

1999 would see Kristin return to Hollywood for Random Hearts, directed by Sydney Pollack and co-starring Harrison Ford, who'd clearly been keen to work with her, as well as Bitter Moon's Peter Coyote. Here both Congresswoman Kristin and police sergeant Ford would discover that their partners have been killed in a plane crash, gradually coming to understand that they were actually having an affair. Being a cop, Ford wants answers and can't move on till he gets them, while Kristin is liberated by the event, questioning what she is and what she wants to be. She could also do with keeping the details quiet as she's up for re-election. All this tempers their budding romance, but not as much as Ford's investigation of a crooked, murderous cop which hijacks the whole film. Disappointed by this experience, feeling that Hollywood films took too long, that she was simply being used as arm candy by Hollywood stars of a certain age, and again being broody, she decided to take a year off to have her third child. Her agents told her that the offers would dry up. Kristin disagreed. Kristin was wrong, but eventually unbothered.

She'd return in 2000 in a filmed version of Samuel Beckett's Play, where a man, his wife and his lover exist in a hellish afterlife where they dig over and over their relationships. Like Kristin, Beckett had chosen to make Paris his home. In the venture she'd be joined by Alan Rickman, Juliet Stevenson and her English Patient director Anthony Minghella - the team, of course, that had brought us Truly, Madly, Deeply. After this would come Up At The Villa, based on a book by W Somerset Maugham and directed by Philip Haas, who'd earlier helmed Angels & Insects. Set in the late 1930s this would see Kristin as a widow whose fortune's been wasted by her drunkard husband. Now she must decide to marry for love or money or simply to remain free and single. Thus she hears out starchy old James Fox, a Gulliver's Travels co-star, who can make her governess of Bengal. Then there's the rich American Sean Penn who comes on to her and gets slapped for his pains. And finally there's impoverished fiddler Jeremy Davies.

Italian aristo Anne Bancroft explains she should take the money then some lovers, but whatever she chooses she must do so quickly as the war and the fascists are approaching. Her Tenth Man co-star Derek Jacobi would also feature as an old queen. The same year would see Kristin court controversy at Cannes when, sitting alongside Jeremy Irons and Jonathan Demme on a jury headed by Luc Besson, she gave the Palme D'Or to Lars Von Trier's Dancer In The Dark.

2001 would bring two very different releases. First would come Life As A House, where architect Kevin Kline is told that he has terminal cancer and only a few months to live. Deciding to spend his last summer building a new house with his estranged goth son Hayden Christensen he must make contact with ex-wife Kristin who, exasperated with Kline scruffy free-spiritedness, now lives in bored comfort with a workaholic new husband and two more kids. As the project continues so she comes to help Kline in the building and in his encouragement of their son, and gradually falls again for her former husband's headstrong nature and sense of adventure. There'd be twists and turns, sometimes sexual comedy (much of it involving Gulliver's Travels co-star Mary Steenburgen and daughter Jena Malone) and drama, but eventually all would move towards Kline's death. Here the movie would be remorseless in its tear-jerking, sparing the audience no emotional mercy, and Kristin would be valuable in bringing proper emotional weight when it threatened to get slushy (and it threatened a lot).

Following this would come Robert Altman's Gosford Park, which drew together one of the greatest ever British casts, including former Kristin co-stars like Maggie Smith, Derek Jacobi, James Wilby and Alan Bates, as well as Michael Gambon, Clive Owen, Helen Mirren, Emily Watson and Eileen Atkins. Set at a big country house between the wars (again!), this was a murder mystery and a comedy of greed and snobbery, contrasting life above and below stairs. With a host of guests and family gathered for a shoot, Gambon is murdered and pretty much everyone is a suspect, including Kristin, his beautiful wife. She spends her time snapping cruelly at less fortunate members of the family and enjoying casual sex with Ryan Phillippe, an American film star disguised as a South African manservant. Even on the night of her husband's death she can't resist his temptation, her "Oh, I suppose life must go on" summing up her hard-nosed dedication to pleasure.

Gosford Park was a popular movie and brought Kristin back into the public eye, but it was far from her most important appearance of 2001. On several occasions Kristin had been invited to headline a play but always thought that she was being used as a big name in a short run.

However, having in 1998 been impressed and inspired by Zoe Wanamaker's New York performance in Election, she now came to accept a part in Racine's 1670 tragedy Berenice, directed by Lambert Wilson, a singer and actor who'd appeared in films by Greenaway, Ivory, Wajda, Chabrol and Zinneman and whose father Georges was director of the Theatre National in Paris. This was perhaps the most demanding female role in French theatre, the Palestinian queen who loves general Titus but cannot by law become his wife when he's made emperor. With Didier Sandre, a co-star in Terre Etrangere back in 1984, as Titus, and her Weep No More co-star Robin Renucci as Antiochus, they'd open at the festival of Perpignan on July 7th, then move on to Avignon where she'd appeared in Naives Hirondelles in '84. Finally, between September 19th and October 21st they'd play Wilson's father's National Theatre in the Chaillot Palace in Paris. Some reviews were sniffy about Kristin's accent, some were golden. Wilson would announce that we were witnessing the birth of a great tragedienne. Kristin herself, who'd been warned by her agents not to take the role, was ecstatic. In films, she said, she'd never felt useful, never fully involved in the process. Onstage, even using Racine's rhyming couplets, she'd felt as if she was genuinely communicating and delighted in that fact. She also loved the teamwork, the gang spirit, the immediacy of the shared danger. The experience would change her working priorities from now on.

The rehearsals and runs of Berenice, as well as the upbringing of her son George, meant that Kristin didn't appear onscreen again till 2003 and Petites Coupures. Here Daniel Auteuil, a disillusioned Commie hack whose romantic life is a mess, decides to take off for Grenoble to help his elderly relative Jean Yanne win an election. Lost in the woods, he encounters an enigmatic and bewitching Kristin who claims to be a tad crazy, the film running on dream logic to explore the foolishness of men and women together. After this she'd enjoy a brief comic moment in an episode of Absolutely Fabulous, paying a bulimic journalist giving health fad advice to Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley, Lumley having appeared with her in Mistral's Daughter nearly twenty years before.

From now on her screen appearances would be seriously limited as she concentrated on her new theatre career. 2003 would see her make her London debut at the 800-seat Playhouse in Chekhov's Three Sisters, directed by Michael Blakemore. This would follow a formerly well-off Moscow family now relegated to the provinces as relationships are formed and broken over a five year period. The three sisters would be played by Kate Burton, Madeleine Worrall and Kristin, Kristin playing the beautiful Masha, hitched to the dullard teacher James Fleet yet yearning for Robert Bathurst's married Vershinin.

Moody, petulant and cruel in her dissatisfaction, she's joyfully naive when she finds this love and shattered when she realises she'll neither make it back to Moscow nor have her man. In only her second stage performance since her return to theatre, she'd find herself Olivier-nominated alongside her Gosford Park co-stars Helen Mirren (for Mourning Becomes Elektra) and Eileen Atkins (who won for Honour). Even better, perhaps, she'd receive an OBE for her services to acting and to cultural relations between Britain and France. After the play's nine-week run in London, Kristin was asked to take it to America for a further sixteen weeks. She'd turn down the chance, not wishing to spend more time with such a miserable character, and she'd be replaced by Susannah Harker.

2004 would bring just one screen appearance. This was in Arsene Lupin, involving the daring thief invented by Maurice Leblanc, a French Raffles who'd appeared in many Gallic and Hollywood films. Set in the late 19th Century and featuring Eva Green and former co-star Robin Renucci, this would see Romain Duris' Lupin rescue Kristin's mysterious Josephine and get drawn into a plot to discover some royal jewels and restore the French monarchy. The plot was silly, the action fast and Kristin was impressive as the sinister, sensuous witch woman, ghoulish and murderous in a cowl, then a picture of yacht-bound glamour.

The next year, 2005, would see a radical change in Kristin's life. Onstage she'd appear with Bob Hoskins in Pirandello's 1930 piece As You Desire Me, filmed in 1931 with Greta Garbo. In 1998, director Jonathan Kent had saved the same writer's Naked from obscurity when he'd put it on with Kristin's English Patient co-star Juliette Binoche at the Almeida. Now he'd cast Kristin as the sultry L'Ignota, a Dietrich-style Berlin cabaret singer with amnesia and no knowledge of who she really is. She's living in a sado-masochistic relationship with Hoskins and being pursued by Hoskins' lesbian daughter when Finbar Lynch shows up, claiming he knows Kristin to be the wife of an Italian aristocrat who disappeared after being gang-raped in the Great War. Kristin then proceeds to the villa of the wealthy Richard Lintern where Hoskins arrives with a madwoman he claims is the Italian's real wife. As the play would explore the nature of memory, the relativity of truth and the way we become what people want us to be, Kristin would change easily from femme fatale to homely wife, and make us wonder if she really had lost her memory or is just playing up to the people who wish to possess her. She doesn't belong to anyone, she realises, and thus can be a clean slate.

The play would preview from October 21st and close on the 22nd of January, 2006, receiving glowing reviews. However, there'd also be a grand tabloid furore when Kristin was spotted out with co-star Tobias Menzies, who she'd first met when he'd played Tusenbach, the doomed fiance of Madeleine Worrall's Irina in Three Sisters.

A graduate of RADA, he'd been nominated for an Ian Charleson Award for his efforts and since then he'd won acclaim as Hamlet in Rupert Goold's adaptation in Northampton and in The History Boys at the National. But the red-tops weren't interested in his thespian credentials as, a good ten years her junior, he could be cast as Kristin's toy-boy. This would be hugely hurtful for Kristin and her husband. Their split had remained secret under French privacy laws but as soon as Kristin hit London she was in trouble. Early in 2006 she take an apartment on the Left Bank of the Seine and live there with Joseph and George, Hannah having now left for university. Kristin claimed to have been fascinated by L'Ignota's notion that she belonged to no one and could be a clean slate. By leaving her marriage and sacrificing cinematic success for a life onstage, she'd was clearly acting it out.

Despite now concentrating on theatre, she would still appear onscreen. 2005 had seen her in three productions. First came the little-seen epic Man To Man, directed by Regis Wargnier who'd earlier won an Oscar for Indochine. Set in 1870, this would see professor Joseph Fiennes take two pygmies from central Africa to Scotland for research. He's looking for the missing link between man and ape, but recognises the humanity of the pygmies and resolves to take them home. His colleagues, however, do not appreciate his ruining of their lucrative theory and have Fiennes imprisoned. Kristin would appear as an agent selling wild animals to the zoos of Europe and helping Fiennes transport his pygmies. Later, keen to make money, she parades them before the public but is soon convinced of Fiennes rectitude. Though the movie would be presented at the Berlin Festival in February, it would receive no release in the US or UK.

Kristin's next film would receive at least a minor release. This was Chromophobia, another Fiennes project as it was directed by Martha , had music by Magnus and featured Kristin's English Patient co-star Ralph. Kristin would get involved for a cut price, now being great friends with Ralph. In the film, Damian Lewis would play an up-and-coming solicitor who's made a partner and asked to develop the secret fund of a government minister, quickly being drawn into murky insider dealing. Kristin, meanwhile, is Lewis's wife, a wound-up shopaholic with cupboards full of unopened packages. She tries to relax through hypnosis tapes and yoga but can't manage it. All her games with her young son end with her freaking out and swearing at him. She tries to turn Lewis on but he's not interested in romance, not even foreplay, so she decides upon a boob job. Meanwhile her best friend, Ralph Fiennes, is a gay art expert who gets battered by louts he invites into his flat.

Now Kristin suspects that he may have been fiddling with her son, one of the film's many emotional climaxes coming when she must face the boy and ask him outright, the scene being fraught with pain, fear and shuddering embarrassment as she dares to mention his willy. It would be a good part for Kristin as she'd have to slip from angry and bitchy to flirty and seductive and on to brave, loyal and loving. She'd hardly be challenged at all by the weak comedy Keeping Mum where she'd play the frustrated wife of vicar Rowan Atkinson (Atkinson had famously played a bumbling clergyman back in Four Weddings And A Funeral). Sex-starved, she considers an affair with tennis coach Patrick Swayze but he's more interested in her nympho daughter Tamsin Egerton. So, along comes Gosford Park co-star Maggie Smith as an enigmatic new housekeeper who'll stop at absolutely nothing to fix the family's problems. Better news would be had when, also in 2005, Kristin would awarded the Legion D'Honneur, France's highest civilian honour.

2006 would see two further French releases. First of these would be Francis Veber's La Doublure where another former co-star, Daniel Auteuil would play a big businessman who's caught on camera arguing with his mistress, supermodel Alice Taglioni. As wife Kristin controls over half his empire she must not believe he's cheating so he finds another chap in the picture, valet Gid Elmaleh, and has him pretend to be Taglioni's partner. No fool, Kristin recognises the truth and digs deeper. A silly comedy, it was nonetheless a big success in France. As was the world-renowned Tell No One, a smart thriller directed by Guillaume Canet. Here pediatrician Francois Cluzet (Kristin's Force Majeure co-star), his beloved wife murdered eight years before, would suddenly get an e-mail from her. Alerting the police, he becomes a suspect again and goes on the run, being drawn into a tough underworld of conspiracy, paedophilia, cover-ups, revenge and murder. Kristin would appear as one of Cluzet's best friends and the lesbian lover of his sister. Kind, righteous and upstanding, she helps him uncover a secret his sister's been hiding, adding another twist to this slick, genuinely entertaining and often violent thriller. Also featuring, as Cluzet's lawyer, would be Nathalie Baye.

Kristin having turned down the Harriet Walter role in Atonement, 2007 would bring just two releases. In Paul Schrader's The Walker she'd play the wife of senator Willem Dafoe, hanging out in Washington with Lauren Bacall, Lily Tomlin (both the wives of powerful men) and gay friend Woody Harrelson, a charming southerner who escorts ladies to functions when their husbands are busy or uninterested. Way back, Kristin nearly had a sexual relationship with Harrelson and she still regrets she didn't, but she's married for money and buzzing because she's begun an affair with a wannabe mover and shaker.

Then she finds her lover stabbed to death and Harrelson steps in to prevent a furore, claiming he found the body. Now, of course, he's a suspect and the faithless Kristin takes off, holing up in rooms out by the airport. She's smart but has no real knowledge of the people around her, utterly misjudging Dafoe and failing to understand why Harrelson might go out on a limb for her. Following this, she'd lend her voice to The Golden Compass, acting as the snow leopard daemon of Daniel Craig's Lord Asriel. She'd also appear on TV's laddish motor show Top Gear. For ages presenter Jeremy Clarkson had judged mechanical matters on how he thought Kristin would consider them. Now he finally interviewed her and she set him right, hilariously ridiculing his taste and his recently purchased Lamborghini.

Kristin's main performances of 2007 had been onstage when she returned to Chekhov in The Seagull. Kristin had actually travelled to Russia with director Ian Rickson to visit all the Chekhov shrines and talk to Russian actors about the play, hoping to understand its savagery. Now she was prepared to star as Arkadina, alongside Mackenzie Crook's suicidal writer Konstantin, Chiwetel Ejiofor's novelist Trigorin and Carey Mulligan's wannabe actress Nina. Herself an aging star, Kristin's rampaging Arkadina would brook no rivals for the attention of either Konstantin or Trigorin. Obsessed with not being forgotten she dominates all around her, draining her son, her lover and her brother. Desperate to appear larger than life, she has no malice or mercy as she crushes the dreams of those around her. Again she'd receive fine reviews for her performances at the Jerwood, downstairs at the Royal Court, and she'd win a coveted Olivier award for her efforts. The play would move on to New York the next year, with Peter Sarsgaard now playing Trigorin, Kristin making her Broadway debut at the Walter Kerr Theatre, The Seagull playing to packed houses from October, 2008, till Christmas.

2008 would be a spectacular year all round for Kristin as she'd also find success onscreen in the French drama I've Loved You So Long. Here she'd play a woman just released from a fifteen year prison stretch for killing her own son. Living with her sister and her suspicious husband she tries to re-enter life, being humiliated as she seeks a job, always expecting the worst. There'd be several comic moments, as when she allows herself to be picked up in a bar by a cocky Lothario and wrecks his post-coital confidence with her candour as to his performance, but mostly the film would follow her gradual re-opening as her true story is revealed and she comes to terms with the terrible treatment she's received from friends and family, discovering herself again. It was another brilliant performance and she'd find herself nominated for a Golden Globe, a BAFTA and a Cesar.

Following this would come the historical drama The Other Boleyn Girl where she'd play the mother of Anne and Mary Boleyn, played by Natalie Portman and her Horse Whisperer co-star Scarlett Johansson respectively. Kristin's husband, played by her Angels & Insects co-star Mark Rylance, is ambitious for his girls and pushes them into the path of Eric Bana's Henry VIII, a king so desperate for a boy-child he's looking to rid himself of queen Katharine of Aragon. As both girls become dangerously involved Kristin grows angrier at her husband, reaching a peak of rage as the executions begin. Born into riches, she's noble already and has no need of social climbing, so she cannot accept the risks Rylance is taking. Next would come a very brief cameo in Seuls Two, the big screen debut of French comedy duo Ramzy Bedia and Eric Judor, the pair playing a cop and robber battling it out in a Paris where everyone else seems to have disappeared.

Still in 2008, there'd be a reunion with her English Patient husband Colin Firth in a screen version of Noel Coward's Easy Virtue. Yet again this would take her back to country house society between the wars when her son Ben Barnes would bring his feisty, liberated, auto-racing girlfriend Jessica Biel back to the family's crumbling pile. Mum Kristin's not keen on this union as she's given up on the shambling Firth and is relying on Barnes to revive the family's fortunes. Thus she rejoices comically whenever Biel falls short, her sharp wit being the source of much of the film's charm. Ending the year would be Largo Winch, inspired by the Belgian comic book. Here Tomer Sisley would play the title role of the adopted son of a dying billionaire who must prove his legitimacy in order to inherit his fortune. It'd be action all the way in a series of glamorous locales, with Kristin playing an old friend and colleague of the billionaire now hoping to grab control of his riches. As said, it was a great year and it might have been even better had she not been forced to withdraw from the original cast of Yasmina Reza's God Of Carnage, which would have seen her star onstage with her friend Ralph Fiennes.

2009 would see Kristin sticking to the same path, moving between Hollywood, Britain and France. In the US hit Confessions Of A Shopaholic, where Isla Fisher would hope to make it in the fashion world but accidentally succeed as a brilliant financial adviser, she'd play the no-nonsense boss of a fashion mag, daring to risk an outrageous French accent. Then, in Catherine Corsini's Partir, she'd play a mum ready to return to work, opening a physiotherapy centre at home and becoming obsessed with the builder who works on it. Her husband tries to ruin her and so she goes to questionable lengths to keep her love alive. The film would also feature her Autobus co-star Yvan Attal.

After this would come Sam Taylor Wood's Nowhere Boy, exploring the early years of John Lennon, Anne-Marie Duff playing his troubled, promiscuous mother and Kristin playing the stern, starchy aunt who loves and raises him. She'd be tested when her husband dies of a heart attack and Duff re-enters their lives, drawing John away with her liberated ways. Finally, the year would end with Sous Tom Emprise where Kristin would star as a well-known surgeon kidnapped by a man who blames her for his wife's death. During a psychological battle, their relationship develops.

Looking forward, 2009 had seen Kristin Scott Thomas agree to make a musical debut in Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music at the Theatre De Chatelet in Paris in February, 2010, alongside Leslie Caron and her Berenice director Lambert Wilson. This would give her a chance to break hearts with Send In The Clowns. She also had several projects on the go with her KST production company, most notably Elizabeth Jane Howard's The Sea Change and AL Kennedy's Original Bliss. It seems safe to assume that she will continue to make award-winning performances onscreen in French, British and American productions while also spreading her wings in the theatre. Far from being a one-trick pony, playing repressed English aristocrats over and over again, she has proved herself to be an actress on exceptional range and great sensuality. She's grown to enjoy an artistic risk, too. There's plenty more to come.

Dominic Wills