Joaquin Phoenix Quits Movies to Focus on Music.

It's official.

Phoenix's publicist, Susan Patricola, has confirmed his earlier comments to TV's "Extra": The upcoming Two Lovers will be his last performance on film.

"He has said that Two Lovers is his last. But this is not strange. Joaquin has been directing music videos and been involved in music for the last number of years," she says.

Phoenix first talked about his decision to "Extra" this week while attending a fundraiser in San Francisco, abruptly ending the interview after the reporter wondered whether he was joking.

The 34-year-old star received Oscar nominations for his roles in Gladiator and Walk the Line. He learned to play guitar on the latter.

Phoenix co-stars with Gwyneth Paltrow in the romantic drama slated for release Feb. 13.

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How to Loose Friends & Alienate People [The Review]

Adapted from the tome by Toby Young, which in turn became a successful stage play, Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) plays the socially dysfunctional Brit who lands up working in a Vanity Fair type Manhattan publication. And screws it all up.

The pleasure of Young’s original book was its self-mocking tone as he lists his toe-curling misjudgements, rubbing everyone up the wrong way before finally getting himself fired.

In person Toby Young is perfectly affable and currently has a successful career as a journalist here in the UK. His desire to do everything wrong, quite deliberately, has always had the whiff of contrivance about it. I worked, many years ago, for an single afternoon at the Modern Review, his anti-establishment publication whose office-life is briefly featured in this movie. A more disagreeable bunch of narcissists would be hard to meet - but Young himself was never anything less than pleasant and scrupulously polite. At midday I walked out for lunch and never went back.

Anyhow, the film. Here all the names are changed. Graydon Carter. Vanity Fair. All changed. The Hollywood star he asked whether he was gay, in an interview, which caused a ruckus? It’s no longer Nathan Lane. Everything has been tidied up and defanged. Worse, there’s even a love-interest with Kirsten Dunst. A cherished signet ring, which in his book he drunkenly gives to a girl in a bar, becomes the main McGuffin which moves the story forward – the shining object which draws in his romance with the woman he is destined to marry. Absurdly, he briefly becomes very good indeed at his job, having sold his soul to the devil. No such thing happened with Toby Young.

The whole tone of the book is changed then, and consequently, the whole point of the experience. This is no longer an attack on superficial media culture, pretty much the same, by the way, in both Manhattan and London. And it’s certainly no The Devil Wears Prada. It doesn’t have that slickness and facility. It’s not even as funny as the TV show Ugly Betty, also set in NYC’s glossy magazine world.

Young has gone on record as saying that Simon Pegg is just too nice to play him, and certainly he does a good job of making an unsympathetic character vaguely likeable. But in the end this is another generic comedy which loses its way within minutes, unsure whether to satirise the this fanciful, snobbish, rarefied world, or celebrate it.

Carrie Bradshaw - as a Teenager

Fancy reading about Carrie in her High School days when there was probably no sex and no city?

Candace Bushnell, the author of the column that became the hit series and movie, is writing a novel about Carrie Bradshaw's teenaged years, HarperCollins announced Wednesday.

"I've always been interested in exploring Carrie's teenage years," Bushnell said in a statement. "Carrie in high school did not follow the crowd - she led it. It was there that she began observing and commenting on the social scene."

The novel, part of a two-book deal, is due for publication in fall 2010. That’s one film role for an ingénue the girls of America had better get ready for

HBO website is here.

Kirsten Dunst meets a Jealous Ghost

Kirsten Dunst is starring in, and producing, a ghost story simply called Ghost. It’s based on the book by AN Wilson A Jealous Ghost

Wilson's highly literary 2005 novel describes a young American woman who travels to London to write a dissertation on Henry James' classic ghost tale, "The Turn of the Screw," and then goes to work as a nanny for two children in the British countryside. Before long she’s experiencing all-to-familiar events from the original book (read a review here).

Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego is to direct. You can read more about this project here.

Brideshead Revisited [The Review]

It’s a tale of bedeviled aristocrats, catholic guilt and large palatial residences that played very well in 1981 when it became a British TV staple and more-or-less introduced the world to Jeremy Irons. Eyebrows were raised when this remake was announced; the New York Times has already called it ‘Brideshead Regurgitated’.

Despite the success of Atonement, a more-or-less a straight crib of both the book and the original 1945 novel by Evelyn Waugh, is there really a need for the honied sirops, the curds and whey, the wasps in the jam jars, of such hysterical and nostalgic feasts? Well – just look at the news. Nostalgia sells when the world seems to be turning itself to the business of ruin.

Brideshead Revisited is the story of a fairly ordinary young middle-class man Charles Ryder who goes up to Oxford in the 1920’s and is immediately drawn into the social circle of a louche, gay aristocrat named Sebastian Flyte. Flyte is highly unstable and prone to alcoholism, but Ryder is seduced by him, especially, like a Jane Austen heroine, when he sees his house at Brideshead. But on a trip to Venice Ryder is drawn to Sebastian’s equally seductive sister Julia, and Sebastian embarks on a drinking frenzy which never comes to an end. The film begins and ends in WWII when Ryder has been billeted at Brideshead and moons around the empty, decaying grandeur of it all remembering the past.

Director Julian Jarrold is necessarily reaching for a high standard here. Some of the casting is better than the original. Some of it is worse. The best moments are when Ben Whishaw (as Sebastian) and Emma Thompson (as his mother Lady Marchmain) are onscreen. The worst are turns by the otherwise splendid actor Michael Gambon, doing a kind of Ricky Gervais impersonation as Lord Marchmain (a role rather better inhabited by Laurence Olivier), and by the chief casting of Matthew Goode (Matchpoint) as Charles Ryder, who gives a performance so lumpen and unappealing that the mystery of why everyone throws themselves at him becomes the elephant in the very large silk-wallpapered Drawing Room. This character always was a winnying arriviste but somehow Jeremy Irons still made him appealing.

It’s a long film at 132 minutes and the magnificence of the original TV series was that it allowed the story to breathe. Here Ben Whishaw (who camps his character up substantially compared to Anthony Andrews version) disappears far too early in the film and what we are left with is the dreary, dank melodrama of the endgame; miserable marriages, catholic deathbed scenes and so on. The lightness of the Oxford years, and the stolen summers at Brideshead, have been trimmed back. And it’s a mistake. Despite the presence of a scriptwriter as good as Andrew Davies (Bridget Jones), the roll of the story has been misjudged and weighted towards the theme of guilt.

That said, this film is perfectly good in many ways. And it’s also perfectly pointless. As predicted.

** Two Stars Out of Five

Already released in the US, Brideshead opens in UK cinemas October 3rd

How to Lose Friends and Make a Movie

I just saw a sneak preview of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, adapted from the book by Toby Young.

Studio and PR protocols prevent me from posting a review quite this early, but let’s just say that the film is going to get mixed reviews, mostly on the skeptical side. And since some of the most powerful film critics and journalists in the UK are friends of Toby Young, this might get interesting.

The book was brilliant; it was the story of a maverick British journalist in flight both from his famous father and his mightily upscale education. Young struck an almost grotesquely self-deprecating tone as we followed his misguided attempts at seducing the New York glitterati with his drunken, boorish antics. Hired by Vanity Fair as a kind of mad whim by its editor Graydon Carter, Young has subsequently built an entire career out of his spectacular failure to play the Manhattan game.

Three decades ago John Cleese made a fortune on the simple comedy stereotype of the uptight Brit and the expansive, liberated American. Now Toby Young has inverted that formula. Cosmopolitan America, we are told, is now obsessed with appropriate behavior, form, snobbery and etiquette. Now it’s the Brits who don’t know how to behave.

Things that have been lost in translation? Sophie Dahl sharing a flat with Young in NYC (an incident worthy of a whole film on its own). And who he actually gave his signet ring to - one of the main plot devices in the movie.

I can't see admirers of the book or the play finding much to like about the movie, but it may find a whole new audience.

You can find the trailer here

The Duchess: Contoversy Reigns

Writer of the original book titled The Duchess, Amanda Foreman was just on CNN complaining about an old photograph of her, in a state of some undress, which has been doing the rounds of certain amused media pundits.

The source of this embarrassing, coquettish photograph? Why, Amanda’s own website of course!

Elsewhere on British TV she's been complaining about the trailer for The Duchess, which despite all the protestations from Keira Knightley etc explicitly uses photographs of the late Princess of Wales to sell its wares. 'I thought it was a Youtube spoof,' explained the baffled authoress.

Horse Whisperer Author Poisoned

The author of the novel that inspired a Robert Redford film has become seriously ill after eating mushrooms gathered on a holiday trip to the Scottish Highlands.

Horse Whisperer writer Nicholas Evans, 58, his wife Charlotte, her brother Sir Alistair Gordon-Cumming, 54, and his wife Lady Louise, 46, mistakenly consumed Cortinarius Speciosissimus, which can cause renal failure. All are now on dialysis in Aberdeen, Scotland, but are said to be recovering.

Evans was struggling with £65,000 of debt when Robert Redford bought the film rights for his unfinished debut novel, The Horse Whisperer, for a record £3 million in 1995.

The Duchess

Saul Dibb has come a long way from Bullet Boy – his gritty tale set on a London housing estate. His latest is The Duchess with Keira Knightley, based on the real-life tale of an 18th Century aristocrat whose 'there are three people in this unhappy marriage' bears an uncanny resemblance to her descendant – one Diana Spencer. Both Dibb and Knightley have denied there is any link with the late Princess of Wales, but in truth the marketing of the film has played on the connection for months.

I’m happy to report the film is well-made and well-played with Ralph Fiennes the up-tight husband to the charismatic, flirty Georgiana, who is doomed from the moment her mother played by Charlotte Rampling obliges her to marry the well-connected Duke of Devonshire. It’s Knightley’s best acting turn since the somewhat similar Pride and Prejudice - bearing in mind her acting is usually a succession of infinitesimally changeable moues.

Look out for Fiennes niece Mercy Tiffin, who plays a young Georgiana.

Here’s a little-known fact: afternoon tea was invented by the Duchess of Bedford, but it was the Duchess of Devonshire who has a dalliance with Earl Grey.

See a trailer here

Don't Put Your Wife on the Stage, Mr Payne - matrimonial film-making, the perils thereof

‘When a director and an actress click,’ Quentin Tarantino once said, ‘only a husband and wife, or a father and daughter, share the same level of intimacy’. But what when the director and actress really are husband and wife? In the Oscar-winning comedy Sideways Alexander Payne decided to direct his Korean-Canadian wife Sandra Oh, later star of Grey's Anatomy, for the first time. She played a woman working in a vineyard who dates about-to-be-married Thomas Haden Church. ‘She actually had to obey me – that was so nice,’ Payne observed. They divorced a few years later in 2006.

Some years ago Kevin Bacon self-directed a film Loverboy made with wife Kyra Sedgwick, having previously cast her in his risky, award-winning pedophile drama The Woodsman. They are still married 19 years after they met on the set of Lemon Sky, a PBS version of the Lanford Wilson play. Directing your wife is a dangerous business though – just ask Mr and Mrs Guy Ritchie (Guy Ritchie's latest guyzer caper RockNroller is out shortly). What if it all goes wrong?

Some directors who met their wives through central casting – Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg are examples – chose never to cast their wives in their own films again. Perhaps they’re right to be wary. History still shows the DNA of many a catastrophic director-actress marriage preserved onscreen. Just what was Judy Garland doing falling in love with Vincente Minnelli in Meet Me in St Louis when the result was a gay husband and Liza Minnelli? How painfully obvious is the estrangement of Rita Hayworth towards Orson Welles in The Lady from Shanghai – the film that proved the final nail in his Hollywood coffin, the onset of their divorce and Hayworth’s last contract movie for Columbia Pictures? And how sad and difficult it is to watch Sharon Tate in Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire without recalling the macabre circumstances of her occult-influenced murder at 10050 Cielo Drive?

Polanski fell for Tate during the filming of The Fearless Vampire Killers in much the same way that Olivier Assayas did for Maggie Cheung in Irma Vep and Woody Allen did for Mia Farrow In A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy in 1982 (though not actually married we always felt they were – Hannah and her Sisters and Husbands and Wives evoking a painful resonance of their final bitter estrangement and court-cases). The Assayas-Cheung marriage only lasted a few years as they were constantly filming in different continents, but Irma Vep is a very good example of a male director turning an actress into a fantasy figure and then marrying her. Prophetic in same ways of Tarantino’s festishisation of Uma Thurman in Kill Bill – similar slinky leather and form-hugging jumpsuits – Hong Kong superstar Cheung (Hero, In the Mood for Love) cuts quite a figure in the chilly Parisian landscape of the movie. You can see the same dynamic at work with Luc Besson and Milla Jovovich in The Fifth Element; Besson’s camera just can’t get enough of her lissom tangerine-haired alien in Jean-Paul Gaultier rags. They reunited two years later for his ill-fated Joan of Arc saga The Messenger. He made her look like a boy. It was all over. They separated soon after.

It seems that in the breast of many a married actress there beats the heart of a medieval virgin-martyr, and a whole monograph could be written on the pathology of men who direct their wives as Joan of Arc. Its an international phenomenon that goes from the obscure (Russia’s greatest living actress Inna Churikova filmed the story with her husband at the helm in 1970) to the very well known (Ingrid Bergman created several versions of the Joan of Arc story with husband Roberto Rossellini – having also made a 1948 version for Victor Fleming). The marriage of Ingrid Bergman and Rossellini is book-ended with Joan of Arc; her obsession with La Pucelle was so intense she carried soil from Domremy in her pocket for many years. ‘I've gone from saint to whore and back to saint again, all in one lifetime,’ she said, after he marriage ended, and she made Joan of Arc at the Stake in 1954. She had fallen for Rossellini on the set of Stromboli, become pregnant, and abandoned her child and then husband of thirteen years to be with the Italian. The public never forgave her. Rossellini’s vision of his wife, piously caparisoned in armour and chained to a stake, is a curious images to mark the end of any marriage.

But its not always trouble and strife. There is a breed of director who simply cannot do without their wife in a lead role. Robert Guédiguian barely makes any of his socially-conscious Marseilles-based films without wife Ariane Ascaride. In many ways her thin, strong face is the actual face of her husband’s work; even when she appears in other movies she takes a whiff of that Red Flag waved in the soft Marseilles air from the likes of Marius and Jeanette. In that movie, where she plays the supermarket worker who gets sacked for her strident communism, one sees exactly why former communist agitator Guédiguian married her in the first place.

The same is probably true of the wife of Federico Fellini, Giulietta Masina, whom he married in 1943. His first truly independent work was The White Sheik in 1952 and it featured Masina – albeit briefly - as a prostitute. Two years later his first masterpiece La Strada had a plum role for her as the simple and clownish girl Gelsomina, who is ‘purchased’ by brutish circus strongman Anthony Quinn. Critic Roger Ebert praised her ‘Chaplinesque innocence that somehow shields her from the worst of life’ and she seemed to represent much of the personal and autobiographical qualities of his masterpieces. In 1990, when Fellini received an honorary Oscar, she was on hand in the audience as well. It remains one of the most successful and long-lasting marriages in the movies.

Many admirers of Jean-Luc Godard believe his best work was when he was married to Anna Karina – again for a while the ‘face’ and muse of the reclusive auteur – and that both their careers declined when they divorced in 1967 after a six year marriage. But on the whole its hard not to agree with Quentin Tarantino’s assessment of the actress/director dynamic. ‘Directors are…by and large the most butt-ugly motley group of geeks found this side of a Star Trek convention’. He concludes that no ‘woman would give them a second glance if they weren’t a director’.

All the same, Alexander Payne is one of Hollywood’s better-looking directors. Asked about directing his former wife in a sex scene he just shrugged and said ‘I didn’t see her as my wife, I saw her as just another of these pieces of meat I put in front of the camera’. Payne, you understand, is not a man that dwells sentimentally on things. ‘I wouldn’t have hired her if she wasn’t perfect for the part’.

He admits to giving Oh just one practical direction – when she beats up Thomas Haden Church for not being honest about his single status. ‘I need to see 1600 years of Korean rage against the oppressor,’ he shouted onset as she began to pummel the actor in question.

Two years later they were pummeling each other over the question of post-divorce support. It seems Oh didn't need it after all; she's now far more successful in monetary terms than her Oscar-winning ex-hubby ever was.

Stockard Channing and her film The Business of Strangers

Stockard Channing appears in the downstairs hotel conference room wearing a black leather jacket, black top and slacks and some heavy black eyeliner that brings a little too much exaggeration to her face. Since she will not be posing for a photograph for the Independent (she’s careful about the unkindness of cameras) I feel obliged to tell you how she looks. Frankly, she looks like the kind of person who breakfasts exclusively on coffee and a packet of Camel Lights. She has the sweetly crumpled air of the late sleeper. I can imagine her wearing sunglasses in dark rooms, in that stylish but raddled kind of Jackie Onassis way. Unlike the yoga-toned Sigourney Weaver who shares a similar Uptown New York debutante background, there’s a bit of mess, a bit of a frayed edge with Stockard Channing. Perhaps that’s why we love her so much. She’s quite the grande dame.

The actress is in town to promote her new movie The Business of Strangers, a striking psychodrama by young New Yorker Patrick Stettner where she plays a successful businesswoman having a ‘breakdown’ in an airport hotel egged on by an evil Julia Stiles. Her long career (in which she ‘couldn’t get arrested’ before the age of 32 in Grease) is full of roles displaying what David Thomson describes as ‘sturdy perversity’ in his Biographical Dictionary of Film. In Stettner’s script Stockard plays a company director, recently promoted, who gets drawn into a scheme to wreak revenge on a man Stiles claims raped her friend in the past. The boozy enthusiasm with which her character decides to go for a wild ride in la-la land at the moment of complete and unadulterated career success is clearly one that appeals to the actress. ‘In a Hollywood film she would either be punished or redeemed, but here she just walks away from it unscathed’.

If the 58 year-old film star has any kind of image created over many years of hard work and career highs and lows its one of picking her teeth with neophytes, wiping the floor with the callow and the dumb. Her best-known role remains the fabulously mouthy Rizzo in Grease (‘where are you going?’ she bawls at an awestruck John Travolta ‘to flog your log?); it’s one that continues to haunt her, to her slight chagrin. But she’s also known for rather smart (in both senses of the word) performances – some bearing the mahogany shine of her of her rather grand background. A Harvard graduate, her father was a wealthy shipping magnate until he was financially ruined and died of cancer when Stockard was still young. In another life, Stockard would have been a Society Hostess who summers in Long Island and sits on the Board of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.

There’s certainly the clink of diamonds and privilege in many of her roles. She’s convincing, for example, as a wealthy heiress in a ménage-a-trois with Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson in The Fortune (1975). She was Oscar nominated as a trendy Society matron in Six Degree of Separation (1993) and of course we know her best as the US first lady, the President’s prickly physician wife in the huge TV hit The West Wing. Her onscreen chemistry with Martin Sheen saw her tiny early part developed into one of the biggest of the show, and she apparently is the envy of the cast, most of whom have golden handcuffs to the lucrative series, by a contract which allows her out to make a couple of movies a year. Movies like Business of Strangers.

Stettner, a genial Columbia Graduate whose father is a famous photographer and whose uncle is a Beat poet, had made a short graduation film that featured actress Allison Janney – who plays the press attaché at the fictional TV White House (and with delicious inevitability, has been now offered the job in real life). Since Stockard has declared on several occasions that her idea of a nightmare job is anything to do with working in an office (despite and probably because of two failed marriages to businessmen, arranged around two failed marriages to writers) I was intrigued that she should have taken this role as a battle-bruised demented businesswoman in psycho-sexual overdrive (‘when I attack the man it’s like I’m humping him’). An office drone?

‘The West Wing is about people working in the office,’ Stockard counters with a that patrician neutrality to her accent so often mistaken for a monotone, the bespoke linguistics of an East Coat grandee of a certain age (her language peppered with such old-fashioned upper-class English phrases as calling someone ‘a perfect pill’ or further mentioning that as a child he dressed up as characters in Kind Hearts and Coronets like some latterday Edith Sitwell recording a childhood at Knole). But don’t be fooled – this woman has a first class brain. ‘There are these caricatures of female executives and they’re brisk and bitchy, and often semi-villains, and that’s certainly how I begin the film. She’s such a bitch and so neurotic that I had to forgive her, since I realised it made her very human’

How did she respond to the allegations that the film is a man-hating piece of feminist triumphalism? ‘I don’t think it is at all,‘ she says. ‘It could have just as easily been about an older and a younger man ganging up on a woman, a story which seems kind of familiar, doesn’t it? You know I see these male executives on the plane all the time, and hear them talking about how they never even had the chance to drive the last car they bought, how they have to walk the walk and talk the talk. But we just thought it would be more interesting if the characters were women. We never talked about it in feminist terms’.

Actually she’s been a wonderfully vengeful vamp before in an early success, a Joan Rivers-scripted TV movie called Girl Most Likely To.. (1973) in which she plays a Fay Weldon-esque character who after plastic surgery does away with all the people who were nasty to her (‘any Channing fan should hound the airwaves for this one,’ pants David Thomson). ‘That was a rough and tumble comedy,’ she says, positioning a cushion on her lap and drinking her coffee. She has a lovely smoky laugh, which she uses often. ‘I had this Marilyn Monroe wig and I killed everybody, and I was just so green as an actress I just threw myself into it.

‘With Business of Strangers it was like being in a Chabrol movie, and it’s an ancient story, Dionysian and Apollonian, in which this antic person comes in and my character doesn’t look worse at the end of it she looks – refreshed! It’s just this emotional bungee jump, which I wasn’t sure I could pull off. Doing any film is like getting dressed in the dark but this one – well, I wasn’t sure whether the film would ever come together. It was a draining, gruelling experience because of having so little time and so little money to make it with, and a lot of very earnest young people who didn’t have a tremendous amount of experience’.

Perhaps she was still walking around with her character’s traits, despite the purging experience of having just made a Roger Spottiswoode film about the murdered American gay teen Matthew Shepard. Now she’s zooming off to do a Merchant Ivory film in Paris, but first she’s returning to the States for the season finale of West Wing (‘she could go down in a plane crash for all I know, but I hope not’). Would she be prone to a Bacchic frenzy? Defacing hotel mirrors with mad scrawls of lipstick? Did the Covent Garden hotel where she was staying have any idea of her film’s attack on hotels? ‘‘I don’t think I could ever be that bitchy or neurotic,’ she says carefully. ‘I’m sure I have been’.

Then she chuckles, nervously. She feels the need to answer honestly. ‘I like to think I’m not like that all the time – I know there are times when I’ve been short, bitchy and disagreeable, and I know there have been times when I’ve behaved stupidly and neurotically.’ So the effects of the film didn’t linger? ‘I tried to be as nice, polite and congenial as I could for at least a month afterwards!’ Heaven forbid such a phase would last to long. Too much sugar in Stockard Channing and not even a Marilyn Monroe wig (or a reprise of her role as a nurse on Sesame Street saying ‘next’ to a room full of puppets) could save one of our most cherishable actresses.

You can see more of Stockard Channing here and here

Ice Maiden Cometh--Kristin Scott Thomas

Not a speck of ice. Not even a dusting of light frost. Kristin Scott Thomas winces at the mention of the word ‘icy’ – the word many have used when trying (and usually failing) to describe her elusive quality as an actress. She’s a rather grand ice-maiden on the outside and a ribald scarlet woman on the inside, isn’t she? It’s a perception that has fascinated French and European directors, and even the odd (odd) American like Prince, who discovered her all those years ago during a routine casting call in Paris.

For Prince she did vampy heiress and sex kitten with a comedy British accent in Under the Cherry Moon; her performance got nominated for a Golden Raspberry. It could have finished her off, but it didn’t. She discovered formality, distance, complexity. Since her subsequent turn as Lady Brenda in A Handful of Dust there’s been a certain froideur to some of her performances, a sense that her leading men, from Harrison Ford in Random Hearts to Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer, or Sean Penn huffing and puffing at Up At the Villa, might suffer from freezer burn at her every touch. Their lips might stick to her beautifully chiselled face and creamy rose-petal skin like fingertips on an ice-box. The executives of Fox studios thought as much when they clashed with Anthony Minghella over her casting in The English Patient. He went elsewhere.

It’s a perception that doesn’t go away after all the years. Ice and tears. Seriousness, being seized up, the odd vivid thaw of pain and grief. Her fellow thesps sometimes haven’t exactly helped. There’s that ambiguous comment from Hugh Grant that she needed ‘warming up’ every morning after he’d acted with her on Four Weddings and a Funeral and Polanski’s underrated Bitter Moon (when of course it’s his apnoeic, strangulated acting that needs the chilli sauce).

But now she’s truly fed up with the tag. She rolls her eyes at the mention of the word (‘I don’t think I’m particularly icy,’ she complains quietly). It distresses her. She’s known for falling silent for five minutes in interviews, or getting bored and leaving, so I have to be careful not to mention it too directly.

Besides, she doesn’t strike me as icy at all. She’s quite animated and chatty. She’s endlessly self-deprecating. She laughs a lot. People read too much into her immaculate pronunciation, and read it as aloofness. It’s certainly rather old-fashioned for her age-group, even for someone who attended Cheltenham Ladies College. I have a friend who was there two years below her. She certainly doesn’t speak in the same way.

There’s more. People sense, intuitively, there’s more to her that meets the eye. That the clipped accent is a shimmering disguise and the porcelain face a mask. What is it? Perhaps there’s a touch of madness there - the connective tissue between her light and dark sides, her hot and cold. She’s suffered in the past from clotted, heart-palpating depressions that lasted for months. Tragedy lurks in her family background (father and step-father both died in plane crashes, school an alienating experience precipitating an early exit to France, and marriage, never to return).

She would probably be a lot less English if she lived here. She’s been gone for over twenty years and lives in Paris with her obstetrician husband and three children. She’s like one of the colonial English that stayed on in India after its emancipation, and never changed, while England did. Not so long ago Jeremy Clarkson more-or-less made this point in an otherwise disagreeable attack on the actress, noting how she had complained in some newspaper that Britain was stuck in the 1950’s and how we’re all ‘fat, acquisitive telly addicts’. Clarkson, necessarily protecting the Top Gear demographic that pays his inflated wages, was outraged that this emigrant minx, once an object of his lust, could be so scathing of old blighty. Anthony Burgess once remarked how we do hate our own who go and live abroad, the writers and actors, whatever the lifestyle makeover shows might say.

Her candour is refreshing. She says what she thinks. She’s famous for not towing a Hollywood line, of being indiscreet. When an American PR suggested she had plastic surgery around her eyes (at 44 she looks very good indeed), she didn’t have plastic surgery, she sacked the PR. This is not the behaviour of an ice-maiden, one could argue.

There’s a change in the air. Are we about to meet more of the playful Kristin Scott Thomas who briefly lived and died in Under the Cherry Moon? During my conversation with her it became obvious that her films in post-production reveal a retreat from the arctic towards – wait for it - comedy.

Arsène Lupin is the time-hopping 19th century tale of a jewel-thief with a roistering plot recalling The Da Vinci Code (it even involves an art-related murder in the Louvre). She plays an ageless being, one minute ghoulish and murderous in monk’s cowl, with a whiff of the grave about her, the next minute svelte as Audrey Hepburn on a yacht wearing a black polo-neck, or her face covered and veiled in a horse-drawn carriage. Though she has been in better films, you get the sense that she’s enjoying herself. She’s vamping it up a treat, recalling some of the great actresses and performances of Hammer Horror (Ingrid Pitt springs to mind). She looks fantastic – scary, sexy, tricky. She looks like one of those busty types she’s been dismissive of in the past. The camera loves her. Adores and is infatuated by her.

I accused her point blank of having a streak of camp in her soul. This was a high-risk strategy. To her credit she drew herself up to a great height and in a commanding autocratic voice, quivering like Lady Bracknell saying ‘a handbag!’ in The Importance of Being Earnest, boomed out ‘how daaaare you!’.

What of herself is in this character, I wonder? ‘When I read it I thought that teenagers will really love this film,’ she enthuses. ‘I love all the jewellery, the fabulous costumes, the ridiculous – not, not ridiculous – wicked things she does and the knives she conceals about her person. I loved all that! Fun to be able to imagine something so far-fetched, yet my job was to make her believable. That’s what drew me to playing the part. We don’t know whether she’s a figment of people’s imagination. People accuse her of being a witch don’t they?’

It’s a return to the vamp of Under the Cherry Moon, I venture. How was it working with His Purpleness? ‘People are never going to stop asking me about that,’ she sighs. ‘I was a freshly graduated drama student doing a play in a field in Burgundy and I drive back to Paris and I heard about this casting. And then they said would you be interested in auditioning for the lead opposite Prince? So suddenly I was in limousines, and getting phone calls asking me whether I would be bringing my own stylist and make-up artist.’

I was intrigued to know what she thought of Prince, then at the height of his career. She whispers like a naughty girl, conspiratorially. ‘Very very small and very very extraordinary – a bit bonkers. Terribly gentle. At the time everyone was terrified of him, but then they always are, terrified of the boss. He fired the director and rang me up in the middle of the night and said he was going to take over the directing role as well. He asked me if that was all right. What was I going to say?’

Did you find him sexy? ‘He’s a popstar, an idol, and there’s something fascinating about that. You have to be quite careful to keep your hands in the right place and I think I managed to.’ You could have gone quite showbiz, surely? ‘I did try!’ she wails. And failed? ‘Dismally! The film was an absolute – what they call a – turkey in America. I had the worst line I ever had: you’ve painted my life as a picture and now you’ve given me the frame – ghastly! I rather naively and pathetically threw myself at all the newspapers and they wrote the most appalling things and printed my picture. I don’t do that anymore. But you know, Prince gave me my first job. He was the first to say she’s good – fantastic!’

Did it make you realise what you didn’t want? ‘Yes it was defining in that way. Are we going to sit around and feel slightly shabby or are we going to start again? So basically I started from scratch again.’

I was interested to know what role she was first proud of, and it turns out to be her Lady Brenda in A Handful of Dust, the Charles Sturridge adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s bitterest and most personal novel based on the break-up of his marriage. It set the template for her future roles. ‘She was the first in a long line of unsympathetic characters that I fall in love with because I want people to love them because they’re not as horrible as they appear’. So you want to persuade the audience to love them? ‘Yes it’s sad isn’t it,’ she giggles nervously. ‘It’s something I’m guilty of, making judgements about people in a few seconds and then finding out that I’m mistaken. I like to take on someone who is prickly and make people understand what is going on. I quite like that’.

Her career really isn’t bad for someone who has claimed in the past to live on ‘planet Kristin’ and whose career has ended and been revived twice (drama school in England a disaster, and then the debacle of Under the Cherry Moon). At some point or another she’s always asked whether she feels more English or French. She met her husband aged only 21 in Paris, while an au pair going to drama school for the second time, and has joined that select group of smart English-Parisian refugees that includes Charlotte Rampling and Jane Birkin. ‘We’re the three witches of Paris,’ she jokes.

I could see her in a manor house in the Cotswolds, I mention. ‘In my dreams,’ she says. ‘The older I get the more I feel drawn to this country. Driving down country lanes with high hedges either side. But I’m not sure I’d want to live here because life is so good in France’. Haven’t they just given you the Legion D’Honneur, topping your OBE from a few years back. For the first time in our encounter she looks uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know what to say about it really. I’m flabbergasted’. Don’t you think you deserve it? ‘I don’t know!’ she wails with genuine distress. ‘It’s all a bit frightening’. You don’t feel you deserve an OBE and the Legion D’Honneur? ‘I think we’d better talk about something else,’ she announces, briskly. She’s completely spooked. She feels a fraud, I can see.

The way to soothe her, I discover, is to talk about comedy. She’s just done two. One of them, Keeping Mum, features her living with Rowan Atkinson, a vicar (‘I think he has his own kit now – he does a good line in vicars’) and considering running off with golf coach Patrick Swayze. Then Maggie Smith arrives, with an agenda. ‘I’m unsure about comedy because I don’t really know about comedy. Bursting into tears I’m very good at. Recently I did a tour with the Racine play Berenice and it was incredibly difficult and draining and went on for such a long time. By the end of it I was thinking about my career. It gave me lots of time to think. Do I really want to spend my life weeping for camera? I’m more interested in being happier’.

We return to the subject of camp. ‘I don’t know how to say this without sounding completely idiotic,’ she ventures, ‘but I’d like to do things like the Pirandello play [a Jonathan Kent production scheduled for later this year] and acting in comedies. But then I’d also like to make a serious thing from time to time. I don’t want to get too camp too quickly’.

I realise the key to Kristin Scott Thomas isn’t her perceived iciness, or defensiveness, but her very English fear of passion. The way she filters, controls, deflects and uses her extraordinarily passionate personality is what makes her quite so remarkable. She is, as Harvey Weinstein has observed, one of the great actresses of her generation.