When Kristin Scott Thomas walks into a room everything becomes a little bit sharper. "Ugh, the driver brought me down Oxford Street, nightmare!" she shudders in that famous, crisp voice, flinging her pale woollen coat and red Miu Miu fur stole on to the sofa. Beneath, she wears jeans with a Breton top and a colourful kerchief tied around her neck, the effect of which is very European-effortless-chic. Scott Thomas surveys her surroundings, squinting (because she is a little short-sighted), and the make-up artist, the stylist, the manicurist - all of us - inhale a collective breath, gauging the temperature of her mood.
Scott Thomas can't help the effect she has on people. She is a daunting combination of severe beauty and innate elegance. At 54, her body remains the size it has been all her adult life - for that, she admits, she owes a fair bit to "Tim the trainer". It is well known that when she gets bored or irritated she's not unlike her heroine Dame Maggie Smith at her haughtiest. People expect the actress to be difficult.
And yet, on the whole, Scott Thomas isn't an ice queen. She may be late to today's photoshoot, but she texted ahead an apology. She arrives without an assistant or publicist or any of the typical celebrity accessories running after her. And by the time she has settled down with a soy latte to have her make-up done, she's cracking jokes and enjoying a gossip. Scott Thomas is funny. Hers is a natural, acerbic wit first revealed to audiences in Four Weddings and a Funeral as she shot out lines like "I was a lesbian once at school, but only for about 15 minutes" with her signature languor. When I congratulate her on her New Year's Honour, she hoots and says, "I'm a dame! Oh, yeah! I want to put that on my phone…" As she laughs, her hawk-like eyes crinkle up. "Awards are very nice, but you can be nominated and nominated, and often nothing much happens. While this is really thrilling - not just for me but for my mum and my children and my uncle in the Royal Navy, this makes them all so proud."
Born in 1960 in Cornwall, the actress was the eldest of five. Her father was a Royal Navy pilot and her mother a former drama student whom Scott Thomas describes as "very skinny and glamorous". The actress's father died in a plane crash when she was five and her mother remarried another pilot. He, too, died in a similar accident when she was 11 years old. She is open about having been in therapy throughout her life.
"I knew I was an actress even when I was tiny," she recalls. "I was playing cowboys and Indians with my brothers and sisters, and when I got shot I remember thinking, now is this how one would really fall?" After her all-girls boarding school - excellent training ground for acquiring British hauteur - she attended London's Central School of Drama, where she was told she wasn't going to make it as an actress. Scott Thomas moved to Paris to get some distance. And it was there, while studying drama again, this time with a view to teaching it, she was cast in her breakthrough film, Under the Cherry Moon, directed by and co-starring her hero, Prince.
Scott Thomas remained in Paris, marrying a gynaecologist with whom she has three children. She didn't follow the usual British-actress route to Hollywood; instead she made films in her chosen home, in her adopted tongue, and scooped up awards as she did so. Projects such as I've Loved You So Long and Leaving have built her reputation as a celebrated European actress. But Scott Thomas particularly excels at playing a peculiar brand of British woman - women who, in Four Weddings and a Funeral, The English Patient, A Handful of Dust and Gosford Park, appear too bored to breathe, but are really concealing depths filled with painful longing and constrained anger. It has been said before, and rightly so, that she has a knack for making the unlikable likable. "I'm always being regarded as 'other'," she says. "I'm British in Europe, European in Britain."
Following her divorce in 2006, Scott Thomas returned to England and has been welcomed back as a national treasure, winning plaudits for her role in Electra at the Old Vic last year. Next she takes on the role of Elizabeth II at the Apollo Theatre, in the second run of Peter Morgan's The Audience, which dramatises the meetings between the Queen and the various prime ministers of her reign. Helen Mirren played the role the first time round. The play's producer, Robert Fox, says of its new star, "She has that extra quality that makes an audience go wild for her. It's a rare gift. Maggie Smith has it, so does Judi Dench and Helen Mirren. It's to do with a generosity in her acting, a sense of giving everything she has to the audience, and they feel it and they love her for it."
I wonder if she is nervous about stepping into Mirren's shoes? After all, the other actress did very much manage to make the Queen her own, and she will be starring in a simultaneous production of the play on Broadway. "Actually, not at all," says Scott Thomas emphatically. "I see this as my interpretation of the Queen, and I certainly don't want to step into her shoes literally. I am having all new costumes made for me."
Scott Thomas won't only have new costumes to help her into the role. This is the first time she has worked with a living playwright, and she and Peter Morgan have co-operated closely. "This part is like a dress," he says. "You want it to fit the person wearing it. There are things Kristin feels comfortable saying as the Queen that Helen wouldn't. She never saw Helen in the play and is therefore only focused on her own interpretation." It's unusual for a playwright to rejig their work, but Morgan loves to tweak, and this time The Audience will no doubt have something to say about the looming election, as well as other current events. All this is why Scott Thomas so loves the theatre world. "I adore being part of a team. No waiting in trailers, no being bored to death doing retakes. It's a tightrope walk every night and we all have to be there to support each other."
"Theatre provides a certain home to people," says Ian Rickson, who directed Scott Thomas in her last five productions, including the highly acclaimed Old Times by Pinter. "Kristin is able to access her inner life: both pain and joy, and use them with economy in her work."
"The Audience" is at the Apollo Theatre, W1, from April 21
