She may be Dame Kristin Scott Thomas, but you're just as likely to find her living in Paris as you might in London."My blood is English, but my culture is French," she said.There is a duality about her.
She can be as heartwarming in English ("Darkest Hour") as she can be heartwrenching in French ("I've Loved You So Long").Many of her foreign films have been showcased at the Cine Lumiere, a French art house in London.
"A little slice of Paris," she said.It's convenient, now that she's back in London, playing the deputy director of MI5 in the Apple TV+ series "Slow Horses." A chilly, stiff upper-lip has often been a calling card for Thomas – too stiff, she admits, early on: "I think it was Sydney Pollock – or it might have been Robert Redford, take your pick," she laughed.
"One of them said to me, 'You know, you have to be generous.Forget what you're trying to defend.
Forget trying to hide.Be more generous.' And I'm not sure I really understood what he meant by that.
He just planted a seed, and then I was able to kind of unzip a bit more."And she about to unzip even more, creatively digging into something intensely personal in her past.She said, "When I was five, my father was killed, and my mother remarried.
And tragically, he was killed five years later.And I know that a lot of the time when I was a younger woman, I had this feeling of something missing, this piece of my puzzle missing having grown up with only one parent."Both had been pilots in the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm; both were lost in remarkably similar training accidents; and both left a hole that had her climbing out into her imagination.
When she was a little girl she wrote and illustrated stories: "A mommy and a daddy and two children, just doing ordinary things, like going away on holiday and things like that" – a family experience she never knew.The memories of her dad were incomplete, fuzzy, like sketches she played out in her head.
But those images became the seeds for w...