Behind the Scott Thomas ‘Revelation’

In addition to such phrases as “elegant to behold” and “a singular sensation,” the word most frequently used by excited British critics about Kristin Scott Thomas’ performance in “A Handful of Dust” was revelation : “a revelation,” “the revelation of the film,” “the real revelation,” they said, a word which in repetition gives an almost religious aura to Evelyn Waugh’s novel.

Recent scholars have in fact found signs of Waugh’s conversion to Catholicism in the 1932 novel, which also reflects his bitterness over the defection of his first wife. Scott Thomas plays the faithless Brenda, a glamorous and unforgivable figure.

Scott Thomas was born in Dorset and educated at Cheltenham Ladies College as well as at a convent school.

But Brenda was hardly typecasting. Most of Scott Thomas’ experience has been in small French films and in the French theater, where she appeared in a play by Marguerite Duras and in a prestigious revival at Avignon of Roland Dubillard’s “Les Naives Hirondelles.”

Scott Thomas, 27, lives with her French husband, an obstetrician, in a jumbled flat in Paris’ Latin Quarter. The chief decorative element is the carriage of their 2-month-old daughter, Hannah Scott Thomas (she played Brenda when four months pregnant). She has two French films coming up but has not yet decided on her next English-language role.

“It has to be something I really want to do; if it isn’t you just don’t do as good a job. People say you must hurry up because they’ll forget you, but I don’t think they’ll forget about me until I’ve done something that makes them forget about me.”

Bright and engaging, with a mobile face and the requisite amount of self-involvement without a trace of conceit, Scott Thomas is at the unique career moment when the doors have opened. She is happy and excited and exhausted.

“I want to do everything, I want to do so much it’s awful. I’d love to do comedy, I’d love to do something really wacky, I’d love to do something really heart-wrenching. I’d love to do something in long dresses and wigs.”

Her present ebullience is a far cry from her mood on first coming to France eight years ago after she had flunked out of London’s Central drama school and couldn’t face slumping back to Dorset. She had known from childhood that she wanted to act but grown-ups kept telling her, “It isn’t all glamour and fur coats, you know.”

“I knew it wasn’t glamorous,” she says. “I mean, when you see repertory theater in England and you see rather scruffy actors with holes in their costumes and you see the chap standing still at the back who’s been standing still for half an hour, that isn’t glamorous at all--but still I wanted to do it.”

In Paris, thoroughly demoralized by the Central school failure, she became a nanny and luckily landed in a family that was involved in the theater. She went to acting school in Paris and began getting work in the second of her three years.

The filming of “A Handful of Dust” was not frightening, despite the presence of such veterans as Sir Alec Guinness and Dame Judi Dench, she says, because she was far too busy. When people later asked her if the filming was fun, she gaped.

“Acting isn’t fun . I loved working, I love having to find the bits, having to needle into the character and find things that match you as near as possible. It’s like a puzzle, complete detective work.”