Premier division - Kristin Scott Thomas interview

Known for her roles as slightly frosty English aristocrats, Kristin Scott Thomas is a class act in French too. By CHARLES McGRATH

IN FRANCE, WHERE SHE BEGAN acting and where she has lived for the last 28 years, Kristin Scott Thomas is known as la plus Anglaise des Parisiennes ou la plus Parisienne des Anglaises: the most English of the Parisians or the most Parisian of the English. She has said of herself that she is a Frenchwoman who happened to spend her childhood in England.

In person, though, she sometimes seems less a citizen of either place than a refugee from an almost vanished show business past. Now 48, she has the big, heavy-lidded eyes, the regal cheekbones, the Garbo-like self-possession of an old-fashioned film star: so glamorous and mysterious that you wouldn't mind sitting out a sandstorm with her, as Ralph Fiennes did in The English Patient.

Last year she won an Olivier Award for playing just such a character – the stage diva Arkadina in Chekhov's The Seagull – and has just made her Broadway debut in the role. Meanwhile, she is already the subject of Oscar buzz for her role in the French film I've Loved You So Long.

"So far, there hasn't been much crossover between the French-language career and the English one, but maybe it will happen this time," Scott Thomas says, sipping a cappuccino at a coffee shop in Chelsea, New York. On her finger is an enormous chunk of rhinestone, one of Madame Arkadina's baubles left over from a preview performance the night before. "People will now go to films with subtitles, you know," she adds. "They're not afraid of them. It's one of the upsides of text-messaging and e-mail." She smiles. "Maybe the only good thing to come of it."

Some critics have suggested that Scott Thomas is two different actresses, that she's warmer in French, a theory she dismisses. "I suppose it's a bit more difficult in French," she says. "Sometimes, I get nervous about pronunciation, or I used to. I think maybe I've conquered that now. The main difference is just that I get different roles in France. They don't make films about the 1930s in country houses there.

"When I speak English, I've been told, I have this patrician way of speaking that's very irritating. It's the whole class thing. But the French have no inkling. And, your first success tends to mark you. In England, the first time I was ever on screen I was playing an Evelyn Waugh character in A Handful of Dust, and people loved it. But that sort of thing just grows, and people want to see you reproduce your own work. In France, thank goodness, they don't really get that."

Scott Thomas neglects to mention – possibly she's repressed it – that the first time she appeared in an American movie was as a spoiled, headstrong British heiress in Prince's dismal Under the Cherry Moon. It's true that, in many people's imaginations anyway, she lingers as an alluring, slightly frosty aristocrat. She's Fiona, Hugh Grant's jaded, sardonic pal in Four Weddings and a Funeral; she's the glittering Katharine Clifton, Ralph Fiennes's love in The English Patient; and she's Lady Sylvia, the bored, predatory hostess in Gosford Park, with her cigarette holder, marcelled hair and appetite for young houseboys. In reality, she's reserved but much less grand, as if she has turned down the wattage so as not to appear rude.

Scott Thomas is distantly related to Robert F Scott, the great Antarctic explorer. An uncle, Admiral Richard Thomas, was a peer, but she claims not to be an aristo herself. "It's so wrong, that image," she says.

When she was five, her father, a pilot in the Royal Navy, died in a crash; her stepfather died a few years later. So she grew up in a single-parent family, one of five children in a household that she recalls as frequently "squabbling" and dependent on the kindness of friends and relatives for things like school fees. She attended Cheltenham Ladies' College, a secondary school for the brainy and well-bred, but never went to college.

She applied to the National Youth Theatre of England and was rejected. She then enrolled in a teacher-training course at a London drama school, and when she tried to switch to the acting programme, was rejected again. "They said I had no talent, and if I wanted to play Lady Macbeth, I'd have to join my local amateur dramatic society," she says.

She moved to Paris, became an au pair and enrolled in the Ecole Nationale Superieur des Arts et Techniques du Theatre, where she caught the eye of Marcel Bozonnet, a distinguished French actor who later became the head of the Comedie-Francaise. "He was a proper teacher," Scott Thomas says. "He was just a grown-up, very smart devourer of all things cultural, and I said to myself: 'Yes, yes, I want to be like him! I don't want to do kitchen-sink dramas, I don't want to be on telly, I want to do what he does'."

In the recent French-made hit, Tell No One, Scott Thomas again played an aristocrat of sorts, but one who is a little louche and completely at ease in her own skin. She's a wealthy cafe owner, the live-in girlfriend of the protagonist's sister, with a roving eye for other women. In I've Loved You So Long, on the other hand, she's a former doctor, convicted of an unspeakable crime and now, reluctantly, living with her sister and her family, stripped of almost everything. It's a part that requires acting by subtraction, an emptying out of ego and mannerism.

For most of the film she wears no make-up, her hair is cut unflatteringly, and she speaks only grudgingly. Yet, by doing almost nothing, just sitting in an airport lounge and staring out the window, she manages to suggest the character's unutterable sadness and loneliness.

"I just tried to be as honest as I could," Scott Thomas says. "I didn't want people to like it particularly, and I didn't want to have any emotion of my own. I would not think about it at all but just do it. It's very difficult not to be affected yourself. It's hard to pull away from that. But it was very important to me that the character didn't have my self-pity. I didn't want to go and meet real prisoners, for example. I was frightened of my own emotions getting in the way of the directness, the rawness."

She filmed I've Loved You So Long right after the London run of The Seagull, she says, and the two roles couldn't have been more different. "Arkadina never stops talking and always wants to be heard, while the other woman doesn't want to be noticed, would just like to disappear. "

Arkadina, Chekhov's ageing actress, feels guilty about a lot of things – her troubled son especially – and also uses every artifice at her disposal to make an impression and cling to her youth. As Scott Thomas plays her, she floats into the room, as if pretending to be weightless. Her hand flutters to her upswept hair, or hovers at her waist, to call attention to its narrowness. "The character is so well observed," Scott Thomas says, laughing. "I told Ian Rickson, the director: 'I don't have to do any acting. It's me.'"

"I think her being an actress is just a condition," Scott Thomas continues. "She's also a mother who loves her son but can't cope with him. I think that's a universal feeling. What are my children going to turn out like? What happens if I don't admire them? What happens if one turns out to be a disappointment? All parents go through that." She smiles and adds: "My children are lovely. They're perfect."

Scott Thomas, who is separated from her husband, a French physician, has three children, 20, 17 and eight, and they partly explain her odd, bilingual career. After earning an Academy Award nomination for The English Patient, she could have written her own ticket in Hollywood. But she starred in just two more big-budget movies – The Horse Whisperer, with Robert Redford, in which she was a Tina Brownish editor, and Random Hearts, with Harrison Ford, in which her American accent showed a few chinks – and then went back to Paris. She wanted another child, she said, and wanted to raise her family in France.

"My experience with these big, pictures is that they just keep you away from your family for too long," she says. So she told her agent she wanted a year off and would see what happened after that.

What happened was that in 2000 she got a call from a French touring company asking her to play the title role in Racine's Berenice, probably the most demanding role in classical French theatre and not a part handed out to non-native speakers. But Scott Thomas, who except for student productions had not been on stage before, was a hit, despite a few sniffs over her pronunciation. The French actor/director, Lambert Wilson said: "We are witnessing the birth of a great tragedienne."

Scott Thomas also rediscovered her love for the theatre. "I've always really wanted to be on stage," she says, "but movies kind of carry you along. You get swept away by them. And there's this feeling sometimes of being a bit of a pawn and of other people channeling their ambition through you." She adds: "They make films, they make films, they make films. But theatre – good theatre – is rarer. If you see a really amazing production – there aren't many, but if you see one – it stays with you forever and ever. Films are just consumables. The experience of living theatre is more powerful."

On the other hand, actors have to pay the bills, and movies are very useful for that. Scott Thomas has just finished making one, in English this time, called Confessions of a Shopaholic. "I'm not complaining," she says. "I love the teamwork of making films, and you get to go to the most beautiful places. It's a very privileged life in that respect."

• I've Loved You So Long is in selected cinemas now, including the Filmhouse, Edinburgh, 24-30 October.