Quote of the Day (Kristin Scott Thomas, on ‘Watching Yourself Get Old’ Onscreen)

“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)

Theater Review: "The Seagull," by Anton Chekhov

The past several months have offered New York-area theater fans like myself a bonanza of opportunities to see accomplished actors in meaty roles from Anton Chekhov. The one I would most like to see, The Cherry Orchard, part of “The Bridge Project” of British and American actors who will also perform Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, is now playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. More convenient for me to travel to will be Uncle Vanya, set to open Feb. 12 at the Classic Stage Company in Manhattan, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Denis O’Hare and Peter Sarsgaard. It’s hard to see, however, how either of these can top the production of The Seagull that closed last month at the Walter Kerr Theater. I find it difficult to believe, from this distance in time, that it took me so long to comment on it, particularly when it was one of my favorite experiences at the theater this past year. But many of the subjects of my other blog posts intrigued me so much and were so time-sensitive that I kept putting off reviewing an adept production of this perilously tricky tragicomedy about melancholy and lost loves and hopes in Czarist Russia. Start with the translation by Christopher Hampton. It’s sharp and pungent, with much attention given not merely to the nuances of language but how it all plays on stage. For instance, in a key scene, the mother and son at the heart of the play, Arkadina and Konstantin, insult each other with a cascading series of one-word insults. Translators aiming for the literal meaning in the past might have rendered this in two words or more, but Hampton strove to keep it as close to the original pacing as possible. Director Ian Rickson, transferring his acclaimed production from Britain’s Royal Court Theatre, made sure its sterling value survived the Atlantic crossing, in no small measure due to the cast. Leading the way was Kristin Scott Thomas, who took a different slant on the role of Arkadina, the actress-mother-from hell, from the actress who formed my principal impression of the role, Lee Grant (in a 1973 PBS version that also starred Frank Langella, Kevin McCarthy, and Blythe Danner). Thomas heightened the kittenish aspects of her character rather than the hauteur that Grant stressed, at times giddily twirling about the stage. That made all the more credible her son Konstantin’s bitter observation about their relationship: “When I’m not around she can be 32; when I am, she’s 43. She hates me for it.” That remark encapsulates a portion of Chekhov’s complex attitude toward his characters: his clear-eyed depiction of the vanity of human wishes. Several characters not only desire what they can’t have but are caught in triangular relationships, the primary one being the ferociously Oedipal one among Konstantin, Arkadina and the latter’s younger lover, Trigorin. At the same time, even as the characters' neuroses threaten to drive you mad, Chekhov pulls back enough to reveal, with sympathy, their deepest insecurities: Arkadia's terror of aging, Konstantin's inability to find a place in the world where he can be accepted as anything other than his mother's son. The latter, possessing two things Konstantin wants—success as a writer and the attention of Arkadina—attracts the son’s enmity. In this role, Peter Sarsgaard might have been the one weak link in the show, though not a fatal one. His passivity and hapless falling into the arms of pretty young things reminded me of Jeff Daniels’ annoying professor-husband in the film Terms of Endearment. I hope he’s better in Uncle Vanya next month. Three more members of the excellent cast deserve particular note: * Playing Konstantin, Mackenzie Crook (best known for his appearance in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films as Ragetti), captures the desperation of a young artist struggling to create “new forms” in the theater, only to settle for the sense of mediocrity that comes with giving the public what it wants. Callow and immature at the beginning, he stalks around the stage staring blankly by the play’s shattering denouement. (He is the same age as Saarsgard, but his scarecrow appearance gives him the look of an aging grad student.) * Art Malik added to the pleasant memories I had of him from the PBS Jewel in the Crown mini-series from a quarter-century ago with his turn as the deeply sympathetic writer Dorn, who is in some ways a stand-in for Chekhov. * Zoe Kazan (yes, the granddaughter of famed director Elia) stole the show with her wildly off-center portrayal of the depressed Masha. “I’m in mourning for my life,” her character announces at the beginning of the play, and too many actresses over the years have emphasized the depressive qualities of the character. In a wildly, darkly comic drunk scene, Kazan chugged one drink after another with a bitter, the-hell-with-it abandon. Her turn here makes me anxious to see whether she will add to a resume that promises to be glittering when her film Revolutionary Road goes into wider release later this month.