KEY POINTS:
Not a speck of ice. Not even a dusting of light frost. Kristin Scott Thomas winces at the mention of the word "icy" - which many have used when trying to describe her elusive quality as an actress. She's rather grand and aloof on the outside and a ribald scarlet woman on the inside, isn't she?
It's a perception that has fascinated European directors and even the odd (odd) American like Prince, who discovered her years ago during a routine casting call in Paris. For Prince, she did vampy heiress and sex kitten with a comedy British accent in Under the Cherry Moon; her performance was nominated for a Golden Raspberry. It could have finished her off, but it didn't. She discovered formality, distance, complexity.
Since her subsequent turn as Lady Brenda in A Handful of Dust, there's been a certain froideur to some of her performances, a sense that her leading men, from Harrison Ford in Random Hearts to Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer, might suffer from freezer burn at her touch. Their lips might stick to her beautifully chiselled face like fingertips on an icebox. The executives of Fox studios thought so when they clashed with Anthony Minghella over her casting in The English Patient. He went elsewhere.
It's a perception that doesn't go away. Ice and tears. Seriousness, the odd vivid thaw of pain and grief. Fellow actors sometimes haven't helped. There's that ambiguous comment from Hugh Grant that she needed "warming up" every morning on Four Weddings and a Funeral.
But now she's truly fed up with the tag. She rolls her eyes at the mention of the word ("I don't think I'm particularly icy"). It distresses her. She's known for falling silent in interviews, or getting bored and leaving, so I have to be careful not to mention it too directly. Besides, she doesn't strike me as icy at all. She's quite animated and chatty. She's self-deprecating. She laughs a lot. People read too much into her immaculate pronunciation, and see it as aloofness. People sense, intuitively, there's more to her than meets the eye. That the clipped accent is a shimmering disguise and the porcelain face a mask.
She's suffered in the past from clotted, heart-palpating depressions that lasted for months. Tragedy lurks in her family background (father and step-father both died in plane crashes; school an alienating experience precipitating an early exit to France and marriage, never to return).
She would probably be a lot less English if she lived in her homeland. She's been gone for more than 20 years and lives in Paris with her obstetrician husband and three children.
She's known for not toeing a Hollywood line, of being indiscreet. When an American PR suggested she had plastic surgery around her eyes (at 46 she looks very good indeed), she didn't have plastic surgery, she sacked the PR. This is not the behaviour of an ice maiden, one could argue.
There's a change in the air. Are we about to meet more of the playful Scott Thomas who briefly lived and died in Under the Cherry Moon? During our conversation it became obvious that her films in post-production reveal a retreat from the Arctic towards - wait for it - comedy.
There's been , a time-hopping 19th-century tale of a jewel thief with a roistering plot recalling The Da Vinci Code (it even involves an art-related murder in the Louvre) in which she plays an ageless being, one minute ghoulish and murderous in monk's cowl, with a whiff of the grave about her, the next minute svelte as Audrey Hepburn on a yacht wearing a black polo-neck, or her face covered and veiled in a horse-drawn carriage.
And now she's in Francis Veber's farce The Valet as the cheated-upon wife of Daniel Auteil's billionaire. The film meant she didn't have to leave her hometown to go to work for a change.
At some point or another she's always asked whether she feels more English or French.
I could see her in a manor in the Cotswolds, I mention. "In my dreams," she says. "The older I get, the more I feel drawn to England. Driving down country lanes with high hedges. But I'm not sure I'd want to live there, because life is so good in France."
Haven't they just given you the Legion d'honneur, topping your OBE from a few years back? For the first time in our encounter she looks uncomfortable. "I don't know what to say about it, really. I'm flabbergasted." Don't you think you deserve it? "I don't know!" she wails.
"It's all a bit frightening." You don't feel you deserve an OBE and the Legion d'honneur?
"I think we'd better talk about something else," she announces, briskly. She's completely spooked. She feels a fraud, I can see.
The way to soothe her, I discover, is to talk about comedy. She's also recently done Keeping Mum, which features her living with Rowan Atkinson, a vicar ("He does a good line in vicars") and considering running off with golf coach Patrick Swayze.
"I'm unsure about comedy because I don't really know about comedy. Bursting into tears I'm very good at. Recently I did a tour with the Racine play Berenice and it was incredibly draining and went on for a long time. By the end of it I was thinking about my career. Do I really want to spend my life weeping for camera? I'm more interested in being happier."
- INDEPENDENT
* Who: Kristin Scott Thomas
* What: The Valet
* Where: Screening at cinemas now
