“When you’re my age, you’re invariably in a
supporting role, so there’s often a young woman in her twenties or early
thirties who is the lead, and you’re constantly put next to them. You’re
watching yourself get old, on a screen that hides nothing.”--Fiftysomething
actress Kristin Scott Thomas, quoted in Sheryl Garratt, “Kristin Scott Thomas: 'I Feel Like an Old Ragbag,'” The Sunday Telegraph (U.K.), July 21, 2013.
In the course of maintaining this blog, I maintain a
“Quote Bank” culled from my reading over time. Sometimes, for the sake of an
item that has just appeared in a newspaper or magazine, it might seem better to
post the quote immediately. But if you wait, you never know when it’s going to gain new,
unexpected relevance.
And so it happened last night, when, scrolling on
the Internet, I notice the news headline, “Kristin Scott Thomas Quits.” In one
way, the resulting article wasn’t that
drastic (if she were giving up acting completely, the operative verb in the
headline would have been “Retires”). But as I read about the self-described
“aging actress”’ exhaustion with the film industry (“I realised I've done the
things I know how to do so many times in different languages, and I just
suddenly thought, I can't do it any more”), I noticed a conjunction of events:
Her shock, described above, at the Cannes Film Festival, upon seeing so many of her
contemporaries looking “so beautiful and gorgeous and healthy,” of feeling
“like an old ragbag” next to them and contemplating plastic surgery—and her
latest movie, The Invisible Woman, in
which she plays the middle-aged mom of Charles Dickens’ lover.
The actor who plays Dickens is Ralph Fiennes. You
might remember him as Scott Thomas’ co-star (and partner in a steamy love
scene) in The English Patient. Nearly twenty
years later, he still gets to play
the leading man, while she is stuck
in a supporting role.
When you think about this, you realize that not much
has changed in a quarter century in the film industry, when Sally Field played
the lover of Tom Hanks in Punchline,
only to take on the role of the mother of his (young) character only six years
later in Forrest Gump.
Over time, the French have been held up as a model
for their treatment of actresses of a certain age such as Jeanne Moreau and
Catherine Deneuve—and indeed, as a Francophone, Scott Thomas has a number of
French films among her nearly 70 appearances onscreen. But even in that
country, it must be a struggle for her lately, because she says she is giving
up films completely.
Luckily, Scott Thomas says she will continue to act
for the stage. The stage is, as she notes, an arena in which, unlike film, an
actor is called upon to give more than just “raw material” for a director. But
it is also absent of the closeups on which film relies—the same closeups that,
increasingly in the era of high-definition television, highlight every
imperfection of an actor so much as to compel serious consideration of plastic surgery.
I was lucky enough four years ago to catch Scott
Thomas on Broadway, in an imported production from the U.K. of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. (My review is here.) Yet, despite the complexity of
her character, Arkadina, the role—of an aging actress fearful of losing her
desirability—has to be among the most emotionally wrenching for a member of a
profession so dependent on knowing how one appears. One hopes that she’ll
find happier roles for one in her age group (Noel Coward’s Private Lives, perhaps?)
(Photograph of
Kristin Scott Thomas at the Cannes Film Festival last year, taken by Georges
Biard)
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