Star of wonder: an audience with Kristin Scott Thomas

If anyone can make being holed up in the back of a cab for an hour feel glamorous, it’s Kristin Scott Thomas. Not that she would necessarily thank you for the compliment, for neither a simperer nor a gusher is she. Indeed, she is agreeably tough, funny, thoughtful, honest and seemingly unafraid of anything — certainly not of speaking her mind. The glamour is partly to do with her transfixing beauty, but she also has that luminosity that only real stars radiate. When she removes her sunglasses, you practically gasp — the planes and angles of her face are so familiar, albeit chiselled by time. The 54-year-old’s eyes crinkle wonderfully at the edges when she laughs, which is often.

She doesn’t pretend to be unvain about her looks: ‘Of course I care. But I’m not going to spend my life worrying, because there are better things to do, and I could spend hours and thousands of pounds having injections, but I’m not sure it gives the required effect. If I could find a surgeon who could make me look exactly like I did — not even ten years younger, but at 46, 47, 48... that’s when I looked the best — I would go for it.’

She quotes a line from her new film, My Old Lady, an adaptation of the Israel Horovitz play (the old lady in question is Maggie Smith and Scott Thomas plays her daughter, opposite Kevin Kline): ‘I’m not beautiful; I’m nearly old’ — omitting Kline’s rejoinder that it is at precisely that point that a flower, just before the fading of its bloom, is at its most beautiful.

I had arrived early at the white stucco mansion Scott Thomas is renting in Little Venice. She emerged in relaxed, hipsterish attire: skinny jeans tucked into low-heeled black suede boots, a loose grey beanie covering her hair, leather bag slung across her chest. If she was wearing make-up, it was very minimal indeed.

A few nights earlier, sitting in the audience at The Old Vic, I had been faced with a very different Scott Thomas. The actress had a filthy, chalky face; matted hair standing up in awkward tufts; feverish hands clutching her ripped, sweat-stained baggy dress; barefooted; with pink-rimmed eyes. She was playing the title role of Electra, for which she has been much acclaimed, in a version of the Sophocles play by Frank McGuinness, who calls it the female Hamlet. At its simplest, the work revolves around Electra’s grief and avenging anger after the murder of her father Agamemnon by her mother Clytemnestra (played by Diana Quick) and her lover Aegisthus. Electra waits long, barren years for her missing brother Orestes to return and make his bloody amends.

It is, to put it mildly, intense. From the moment Electra runs on to the dirt-strewn floor (the play is staged in the round), she shrieks and scowls, paces and roars. Her performance is a tour de force. What Scott Thomas loves about the play is that ‘Sophocles was so clever at reproducing and understanding human behaviour... the longing for the brother and not quite knowing what to do with it, the anger of being denied marriage and childbearing — all those things can be put so easily into a modern context.’

She is conscious that she is older than most who play the part — ‘I’m cutting it a bit thin’ — so she and Ian Rickson, the director with whom she has worked on four plays now, came up with the idea that the actress plays her as a woman of indeterminate years who has been arrested in her development: ‘She is stuck in this angry teenager and until she’s killed off the mother — hahaha — she’s not able to move on. She’s the daughter from hell, but at the same time she’s very touching. Actually, that’s what my daughter [Hannah, 26, a journalist; Scott Thomas also has two sons, Joseph, 23, and George, 14 — ‘Yes, a little one, which is really lovely’] said: “It’s really funny because sometimes you just want to say, Oh, come on, get on with it — stop being so annoying, and then you feel really, really sorry for her.” So part of you is irritated by her and part of you identifies with her.’

The other night, Scott Thomas was maddened by a man in the audience: ‘There was a guy sitting on the front row who clearly didn’t want to be there,’ she says. ‘He was right by my tree where I have to go and smoulder. I’m at his feet and he’s sitting there reading his programme! It just made me really, really angry and because I was playing anger in that scene it’s much more difficult to be in control when you’ve got something like that happening.’ But she loves the matinées when the schoolkids are in.

The day after our interview it is announced that she will play the Queen in The Audience by Peter Morgan, the part first played by Helen Mirren last year, who is taking it to Broadway, while Scott Thomas fills her London throne. She messages later to say she is — no surprise here — ‘thrilled to be working with Stephen Daldry and Peter Morgan and looking forward to playing a completely different role on stage’.

Her mother Deborah studied acting, but gave it up when she married Kristin’s father, Lieutenant Commander Simon Scott Thomas, a pilot for the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm. When Kristin was five, her father died in a plane crash. Her mother remarried, but six years later her second husband, also a Royal Navy pilot, was killed in a flying accident. I refer to these tragedies and say, So here you are now in a play about a lost father... ‘Yes, it’s true and when I first saw it back in ’97 or whenever it was [it was Zoë Wanamaker’s performance in New York in 1999 that partly precipitated Scott Thomas’ decision to renounce film for theatre], I was definitely, definitely affected by that. Since working on it, I’ve discovered it’s about so much more — but it is about death as well. There’s a wonderful line — I can’t remember what it is exactly because I can never remember my lines when I’m not standing on the stage — when she says something like, “We all die; you are all mortal...” And I confront my mortality every day.’ Do you really? ‘Not in a morbid way,’ she says, ‘but I am aware... I don’t mean in a conscious way but you are, you know — every breath you take. And I did grow up with quite a lot of it. I mean, I had to come to terms with it. But you can’t spend your life worrying about it because that would be terrible.’

She says that, growing up, she was aware that the family were not exactly well-off but the children went to good schools (Scott Thomas went to Cheltenham Ladies’ College). ‘Yes, because my mother went around and... petitioned. She was amazing.’ Petitioned other family members? ‘No, the schools,’ she says. ‘In public schools, at that time, there was always room for people who couldn’t afford it. And I had great godparents who rallied round.’