Turning 60 is rather fabulous

Dame Kristin Scott Thomas is known for playing frosty, posh Brits but behind the aristocratic cheekbones, Louise Gannon meets the real KST who learned her craft in France, loves babies and laughing, and refuses to reveal the name of the lady who keeps her skin so radiant.

- Louise Gannon

Kristin Scott Thomas has a reputation for being an ice queen of the movie industry. As an actress she has immortalised those particular roles which require a certain aloofness and hauteur. Her breakthrough came in 1994 in Four Weddings and a Funeral when she played the acerbic Fiona, who is madly in love with the hapless Charles (Hugh Grant) but too proud to let him know how she feels. She went on to star opposite Robert Redford as the powerful, successful but-broken Annie MacLean in The Horse Whisperer, and then as a frosty, married congresswoman who falls for a tough police detective (Harrison Ford) in Random Hearts. But it was as the brilliant, complicated, Katharine in The English Patient in 1996 – where her steamy affair with Ralph Fiennes won her multiple award nominations, including an Oscar – that she really put her mark on Hollywood.

Now 59, Kristin has never played the Hollywood game. She cannot bear Los Angeles (“Who would want to actually live there?”) and has spent much of her life in France. She is not a fan of social media (“I do have an official Twitter account but it is for work purposes,” she says. “I think we should be aware that social media can be as dangerous as it is useful.”) And she has never really cared what people think of her.

Hugh Grant famously remarked she had to be “warmed up” every morning on set, and in interviews she is infamous for refusing to suffer foolish or intrusive questions, and happier to sit in chilly silence. She has been known to launch withering attacks on “vulgar” girls with fake tans and short skirts. She is a woman who knows her own mind. I have been warned.