Chilly? Aloof? Frosty? Kristin Scott Thomas, 65, says audiences have her all wrong

When Dame Kristin Scott Thomas first watched herself playing spy boss Diana Taverner in Slow Horses, the Apple TV+ spy drama, she had a shock. “I thought, ‘Bloody hell, I get it. Now I see why people are so terrified of me.’ It was the coldness. I’d had no idea before why I came across like that. It worries me to think it might seep out into real life.”

Indeed, throughout the 39 years Scott Thomas has been in the public eye she’s been dogged by “ice queen” similes. For decades, headlines decreed her to be chilly, aloof, frosty. It’s a perception that seems to derive from a notion she wasn’t acting when she was repeatedly cast as stoically heartbroken aristos – most memorably in Four Weddings and a Funeral and The English Patient. But the description, she says with one of her trademark withering eye-rolls, is “very disappointing. Because I’m not.”

It’s true that, in person, Scott Thomas has presence, but she isn’t cold at all. This isn’t to give the impression the 65-year-old’s a big softie. She’s exacting, with a reputation she doesn’t deny for being “stroppy”, when necessary, on set. She has a very English horror of gushiness.

Yet she’s also confiding, self-deprecating and very entertaining, every line delivered for full effect, vowels elongated and accompanied by a kaleidoscope of facial expressions. Not least when she’s bemoaning the ageing process, such as when she tells me, in mock despair, “Someone called me ‘dear’ in a shop the other day.”

Curled up opposite me, she’s chic in grey pinstripe drawstring trousers (“I bought them in New York. Where from? A shop”), a Marc Jacobs “Hooligan” slogan T-shirt (“Very old. I love it”) under a sheepskin-lined leather car coat. Round her neck are a string of pearls, a small diamond crucifix and a dagger on what looks like a piece of rope. “It’s a dagger of infinite wisdom, a souvenir from a trip to Bhutan with a girlfriend. I lost mine, but my friend had bought two or three, so she gave me one.”

What’s clear is that Scott Thomas is happy. After 20 years of being mainly single following her 2005 divorce from François Olivennes, a French fertility specialist and the father of her three children, last year she married John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, also divorced and with two adult children. The couple had been together for five years.

The wedding took place in Rutland, where Micklethwait’s family come from. “It was so nice because it was just us and our children and siblings. No nephews and nieces. No cousins. I’d recommend anyone who’s thinking about marrying to do it with only your nearest and dearest. Wonderful! Just thinking about it makes my heart swell.”

They ate coronation chicken, “because we love old-fashioned things”, and Scott Thomas wore a cream A-line Valentino dress with buttons up the front. She’d spotted it when shopping with her sister “eight years ago, way before I met John. She said, ‘You’ve got to get that.’ I said, ‘When am I going to wear a cream dress?’

Scott Thomas was rejected from a UK drama school by a teacher who thought she was talentless.Credit: Times Media Limited

“But it had my name written all over it, so I bought it and it sat in the cupboard with its tag still on, unworn. Then, when I got asked [she affects a regal tone] to marry, I thought, ‘Oh bloody hell, now I’ve got to look for a dress.’ Then [her voice rises to a shriek], ‘I’ve got it already!’ And I splashed out and got a very, very, very pretty hat made.”

Is remarrying at 64 what Oscar Wilde described as a triumph of hope over experience? “I’d say it’s a triumph of experience over hope. I don’t know how to describe it without going mushy, but to have two hearts, two brains, two minds, two energies all striving for the same thing is fantastic.

“What you’re looking for when you’re in your 50s and 60s is very different from what you’re looking for in your 20s, when you want to make babies and you’ve got the dream of a family. I’ve worked out what’s worth paying attention to, what the really important things in my life are, and I’ve found someone who thinks the same. So it’s great.”

She’d been in relationships during her singleton years, notably with actor Tobias Menzies and French tycoon Arpad Busson. “But I hadn’t imagined getting married again. Not at all. I don’t know what I imagined, but I’d been living in Paris for 22 years and I never thought I’d come back [to the UK] and marry an Englishman.”

She’d also previously said she’d never act in a television series, telling a journalist, “[A series] just goes on and on. I get terribly bored.” But here she is, winning a whole new generation of fans with Slow Horses. Season five has just finished, season six is in the bag and season seven is said to be in preparation.

Scott Thomas grew up in Dorset, the oldest child of a navy pilot. When she was five, he was killed when his plane crashed. Her mother, who was 28 with four children, then married one of his colleagues. When Scott Thomas was 11, her stepfather died in exactly the same way. It was left to the housemistress at her boarding school to break the news.

“Believe me, I’ve spent a lot of money and many, many hours dealing with all the stuff that goes with childhood catastrophe. It does make you who you are, having to deal with stuff like that when you’re five and then again when you’re 11. It gives you something to lug around your whole life.”

Scott Thomas as “Lady Di” (Diana Taverner) in Slow Horses.Credit: Jack English

In 2023, she directed her first film (co-written with Micklethwait), My Mother’s Wedding, in which she stars as a twice widowed mother of three daughters who marries for a third time at 66. “Quite fun,” she says. “It’s about how these events have affected the women’s love lives.”

And how is that? “Well, one daughter is an overachiever. One is desperate for affection. And one tries to do everything right.” Which one is she? “All of them.”

I’d imagine such trauma contributed to the don’t-mess-with-me vibe she’s, however subconsciously, exuded ever since. She was “riveted” by her children’s close relationship with Olivennes. “I thought, ‘I really did miss out.’ Their father has been so influential in their lives. You think, ‘How on earth did I manage to do it all with just my mum?’ ”

At 18, having been rejected from a drama course in London by a teacher who said she had “no talent”, Scott Thomas moved to Paris to become an au pair. There she won a place at drama school and met Olivennes, whom she married aged 26. By then she’d starred with Prince in his film Under the Cherry Moon.

While she was pregnant with her first child, Hannah (now 37, with two children aged eight and five), she was cast as callous toff Brenda Last in A Handful of Dust, the inspiration for her subsequent typecasting as “tough, wicked bitches”. Around the time her second child, Joseph, now 34, was born, the call came from Hollywood to star in Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient, which won her an Oscar nomination.

Flavour of the month, she was cast in Random Hearts with Harrison Ford and The Horse Whisperer with Robert Redford. They took six months to shoot and although her children were with her for some of it, “I thought, ‘I can’t do this. I want to live in Europe.’ ”

Scott Thomas in one of her breakthrough roles, in The English Patient.

She went on to star in a string of French arthouse films – Tell No One, I’ve Loved You So Long – but just over a decade ago declared she’d had enough of hanging around film sets and was going to concentrate on theatre. By then she and Olivennes had split. She told the podcast Rosebud her divorce was “traumatic” but the relationship had “run its course”.

Yet she and Olivennes are friends and whatever midlife hump she hit has vanished. A turning point in the way she was perceived came in 2019, when Phoebe Waller-Bridge cast her in Fleabag as Belinda, a businesswoman whose speech rhapsodising the menopause went viral.

“Women are born with pain built in,” says Belinda. “It’s our physical destiny: period pains, sore boobs, childbirth… We have pain on a cycle for years and years and years and then, just when you feel you are making peace with it all, what happens? The menopause comes, and it is the most wonderful f---ing thing in the world. Yes, your entire pelvic floor crumbles and you get f---ing hot and no one cares, but then you’re free, no longer a slave, no longer a machine with parts. You’re just a person.”

Says Scott Thomas, “You know, when I went through meno…” She stops. “This is very personal; I’m not sure I want to talk about this.” She collects herself. “I found the passage from being a fertile, producing mother very difficult: ‘What am I for? What do I do now? What is my purpose?’

“I absolutely loved childbearing; that was my raison d’être. When nature takes that away, you’re a bit lost. You’re no longer of service. I’d always thought of parenting as the ultimate creation. So the shock took a while, but you get used to it and find other outlets for your creativity. You think, ‘This is who I am. I don’t have to please anybody. I don’t have to be attractive. I can just be.’

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“You gain more energy, more stamina. That’s when I started doing theatre and being much braver in my choices. You’d have thought that would happen when you’re young, but I was so frightened of everything then.”

She remembers another time she got “very cross and sulked” when a director told her she needed to be “more attractive”. It turned out he’d meant something different but, at the time, “I took it incredibly badly. I was very upset. Why should I be ‘attractive’? Why should I be sweet and kind? Since 50, my life has just got better and better. My 60s have been fantastic. It’s once you’ve dealt with childbearing and having to seduce and be attractive that you can be adventurous.”

Slow Horses is on Apple TV+.

The Times (UK)