Slow Horses star Kristin Scott Thomas has said the grief of losing her father and step father in similar circumstances when she was young felt “like the ceiling falling in”.
The Four Weddings and a Funeral actor was just five years old when her father Simon, a Royal Navy pilot, died while on duty in 1966, aged 31.
Scott Thomas’s mother remarried another man named Simon, who was also a pilot in the Royal Navy. History repeated itself and he was killed six years later, leaving behind Scott Thomas and her three young siblings.
“I’m the last generation of people who weren’t allowed to talk about it,” Scott Thomas said of her grief at such a young age. “Literally nothing. It was a shock, like the ceiling falling in.
“There was no idea of suffering before that. It just hit me and we were packed off to school. So my sadness got muddled up with different sadnesses,” she told The Times.
Scott Thomas first shared the story of her family member’s deaths on French television in 1986, while promoting her debut film Under the Cherry Moon, which also starred Prince.
When the talk show host asked what her father thought of her starring alongside the “Purple Rain” singer, the actor replied: “Well, I don’t know because he died when I was five and my stepfather died when I was eleven,” without thinking about the after math of making the story public.
“I wish I hadn’t said it, that I’d been better guided,” she said. “But I was so angry and my way of lashing out was to put him in a tricky spot. The tone of his voice. It drove me mad.”
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Now 65, Scott Thomas is exploring her grief on her own terms in her directorial debut My Mother’s Wedding, in which she stars as the twice-widowed matriarch Diana, alongside Sienna Miller, Emily Beecham and Scarlett Johansson as her daughters.
“When you get to 60 it’s, like, ‘Get over it already,’” the actor said of the project. “The trouble is, I’ll always be that child with a tragic past, but I’m not that any more. So I wanted to reclaim my story by saying, ‘Bugger off! This is what I want to say about losing a parent as a child.’”
The film, inspired by Richard Curtis and various French “family dramas set in nice houses with people doing things behind bushes” follows the bereaved family as Diana prepares for her third wedding.
Scott Thomas said her mother would have loved the cemetery scenes in the film but never got to watch them as she died before filming began.
The actor, who has three grown up children of her own, Hannah, Joseph and George — with her first husband, François Olivennes, a French obstetrician, said motherhood brought her closer to her mum.
“It certainly made our relationship stronger,” she said. “And when I saw a man, François, with his children, I realised it was something I’d never seen before. It was a revelation — I loved having small children. But I love even more having grown-up children. It’s the best.”
Scott Thomas was born in Cornwall in 1960 and grew up in Dorset. After leaving school, she worked as an au pair and studied to be an actor in Paris before landing her first role in Under the Cherry Moon aged 26.
