Last week, Kristin Scott Thomas, the British actress, found herself in an enormous meeting room in the bowels of the Louvre museum, rubbing shoulders with Marlène Schiappa, the French Minister for Equality; François-Henri Pinault, the C.E.O. of Kering; and Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris.
Ms. Scott Thomas was presiding over the 14th global meeting of the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society, a sort of Davos for women’s voices on key issues and policies attended by 2,500 leaders from over 90 countries, debating topics like equal access to health care and gender-based violence.
On Oct. 18, the forum had announced the naming of Ms. Scott Thomas as honorary president.
Few people were probably more surprised to find herself playing the part than Ms. Scott Thomas herself.
“I thought there must be some mistake,” she said over tea at the Wolseley in London a few days before the event. “I’m not a feminist. I’m not a politician.”
Nevertheless, newly relocated to Britain from France (where she spent decades married to a French doctor, before their divorce), and enjoying a career resurgence (she is about to appear in Netflix’s adaptation of “Rebecca” as Mrs. Danvers), she is preparing to take on the role.
“Really, I’m doing it for incredibly selfish reasons,” she said. When she was married to a surgeon, who was a fertility expert, she said, she “somehow felt justified in my choice of career, and having photographs taken and makeup applied. It was all about dresses. Sometimes that can let a little bit overwhelming and you can think, hang on, there is more to life than looking attractive and selling magazines.”
That feeling had been building gradually, until, she said, “you spend so much energy promoting films, and I just think, if you could use that energy promoting things that are literally going to change people’s lives, then you should be doing it.”
It was Maurice Lévy, the chairman of the supervisory board of Publicis Groupe, the French advertising and communications group that bought a majority stake in the Women’s Forum in 2009, who chose Ms. Scott Thomas for the Women’s Forum.
He is, he said by phone, something of a Kristin Scott Thomas “groupie.”
“I had admired her for many years,” Mr. Lévy said. The appointment was “something that I did very personally.” No shortlist was drawn up, no votes were held. Usually, he said, he has little to do with the day-to-day running of the forum, but on this matter he was sure “there was one, and one only.”
So he ferreted out her personal email address and invited her to lunch earlier this year. “She has been a little bit tough to convince,” Mr. Lévy said. “I had to insist. I had to be patient. She turned me down at first.” Over the next few months, he wooed her with text messages and invitations.
“It is the brain,” Mr. Lévy said, when pushed on why he was so convinced Ms. Scott Thomas was the right choice (a representative of the Women’s Forum also acknowledged that the organization hoped Ms. Scott Thomas would help it reach a new audience, giving the forum the same star dazzle that Angelina Jolie has brought to the United Nations).
“She is considered as a great actress — she’s a star,” Mr. Lévy said. “But at the same time she is considered as being an intellectual.”
Ms. Scott Thomas does not know why she is regarded as such a great thinker. Yet since her earliest work as an actress, save for a turn in the disastrous Prince vanity project “Under the Cherry Moon,” she has usually played smart-girl roles.
Onscreen, she makes cutting remarks that keep men on their toes. She smokes cigarettes haughtily. She makes devastatingly pithy asides. She surveys the melee of a joyful dancing crowd with disdain.
Ask anyone even vaguely interested in cinema, and they’ll inevitably tell you how clever she seems to be; a definite intellectual. Almost every profile mentions cheekbones, and then — often in the same sentence — coldness, or some similar term to convey impenetrability.
It’s the reverse of what most actresses put up with; being regarded as frivolous. And she has spent sleepless nights worrying about why people think she is lofty or frosty.
“Technically I think it’s the shape of my eyelids, because it looks as if I’m looking down on people,” Ms. Scott Thomas said. There are some other explanations; she has told interviewers, including this reporter, that she enjoys the fact she scares younger women, finding it “funny.”
She has expressed dismay at the thought of a girls’ night out: “If you go to an all-girls school, the last thing you want to do is go out and drink white wine with a whole group of women.” She is known for being difficult on set, though “I used to be much, much trickier,” she said.
She has gravitated toward roles in which she plays someone moneyed, or unflinchingly elegant yet internally tormented, in the midst of rejecting monogamy or a conventional life.
“But aren’t all films about adultery?” Ms. Scott Thomas said. “When you are an actress, you are mostly identified by the thing that made you famous.” In her case, this means “A Handful of Dust,” in which she is cruel and aristocratic, and “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” in which she is stoic and plummy.
The associations have stuck, she said. Sometimes, she wonders if people think the only thing she does all day is get in and out of large cars in dark glasses.
Not Mr. Lévy. “When you discuss with her, you see that she is extremely knowledgeable about what is happening to the women, she has been shocked about what happened with the Weinstein story,” he said. “She is highly motivated by the cause, but it’s more than a cause, as it’s half of the worldwide population.”
When the topic of sexual harassment is raised, Ms. Scott Thomas presents as more weary than outraged, more uncertain than furious, her stance not unlike the French response to #MeToo, which was more ambivalent.
She is, however, aware of the pressure that many actresses face today to speak up; the opposite of the old pressure to stay silent. “That we have to be a victim of something?” she said. “I find that quite annoying, actually: ‘So what’s your horror story? Can we have it, please?’ And maybe there isn’t one.”
In 1992, Ms. Scott Thomas starred in “Bitter Moon,” directed by Roman Polanski, who, in 1977 was charged with the rape of a 13-year-old girl. Many actors have now reflected on similar collaborations with Mr. Polanski, later apologizing or rethinking their choice to work with him, or with other powerful figures such as Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein, who allegedly abused women.
Ms. Scott Thomas said that, so far, she hasn’t been probed on the issue, but anticipates that will change.
“It’s very difficult,” she said. “I think Woody Allen is an incredibly talented director, and I would love to work with him.” Even now?
“I don’t know if it’s about now. Or yesterday. It’s not a question of time. I think he’s an incredibly talented director. People have said things about him — and others — that make you sort of think, Well, do I want to work with that human being? So, I don’t really know what the answer to that question is.”
Ms. Scott Thomas looked, for a moment, overwhelmed. “I think in some cases, when things have been put in front of the law, and judged, then they should be left alone,” she said. “If someone has done their time, then they have done their time. If they are judged to be innocent, then they are judged to be innocent.”
Whether or not to forgive them she said, comes down to “a very personal decision.”
Ms. Scott Thomas is not the first celebrity who has waded into muddy waters: Scarlett Johansson and Diane Keaton have defended Mr. Allen. But given Ms. Scott Thomas’s new role, her comments highlight the complexities that may occur when actors are presented as activists.
In any case, younger viewers will likely not recognize Ms. Scott Thomas from her Polanski history and “Bitter Moon,” but rather from “Fleabag,” in which she plays the successful businesswoman Belinda, who, cocktail in hand, delivers a much-tweeted speech about women being born “with pain built in,” before turning down Fleabag’s sexual advances.
It was the intimidating quality that shrouds Ms. Scott Thomas that appealed to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who created “Fleabag.” “I knew we needed someone formidable, and the moment Kristin’s name was mentioned there was a collective cry of ‘Imagine!’ throughout the team,” she said.
“She’s so aware of herself, her body, her age, her position in her industry, and isn’t afraid to lay it out there, which raises her above it all in some way,” Ms. Waller-Bridge said of both the character and Ms. Scott Thomas. “Kristin is very similar. And has a natural status that is so rare.”
In the show, Belinda argues that no one flirts with older women, and if they do, it’s “not with dangerous.”
Ms. Scott Thomas agreed. “It’s the invisible thing, that is a shocker,” she said. “It’s extraordinary — you’re spoken over, you’re barged into, you’re pushed.”
This has given her sympathy with women in business, she said, like many of the women who make up the Women’s Forum. “I imagine this is what a lot of women feel in their work situations,” she said. “This is what it is to feel ignored. Or not heard, or just walked all over.”
Pointedly, in the “Fleabag,” Ms. Scott Thomas’s character has just won an award at a Women in Business event, and is full of critique. “It’s infantilizing bollocks,” Belinda says. “It’s ghettoizing. It’s a subsection of success.” It’s “the children’s table,” of awards, she says.
When asked about the lines in relation to the Women’s Forum appointment, Ms. Scott Thomas laughed and called the question “cruel,” though she also said, “I know what she’s talking about. It’s like, to begin with, before I really thought about it and digested the whole thing, the whole idea of having an International Day for Women just made me want to scream.
“I think that’s what we’re talking about,” she continued: about giving women “something — a little tidbit — to keep them quiet.”
However, her new appointment is not that, she said. Rather, “I think it’s really the most amazing opportunity for me to learn a whole lot more about the world. And it’s a proper effective platform for discussion. I don’t think this is infantilizing bollocks at all.”
