Kristin Scott Thomas can thank lockdown for one thing: it’s made her stay put. But now she is craving the bright lights and buzz of a film set…
If you went for a stroll in Rutland during the early days of lockdown, enjoying your daily dose of exercise in England’s tiniest county, you might have been interrupted by the sight of a strange woman ranting about her antiques shop and a dying neighbour. It was Kristin Scott Thomas, rehearsing her lines for an Alan Bennett Talking Heads monologue hurriedly commissioned by the BBC when production on other shows had to stop. Nicholas Hytner, former director of the National Theatre, has revived the series of one-actor plays, in which Scott Thomas plays Celia, a woman approaching retirement age with a struggling business and an accidentally cunning plan for how to make some cash.
“The script was quite difficult to learn, actually, so I’d go on very long walks, and anyone coming across me in the lanes here would find me shouting with a piece of paper in my hand. Or people would roll down the car windows: ‘Are you lost dear?’ Did they recognise me? Oh I don’t think so – I’m not sure I have much of a fanbase in Rutland,” says Scott Thomas with a wry smile. Or rather, with a Kristin Scott Thomas smile, the one that suggests that the actor has been in on a magnificent joke for much of her 60 years, and that it hasn’t stopped being discreetly amusing yet.
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