NEED TO KNOW
Kristin Scott Thomas helped define ’90s cinema with a breakout role in 1994’s Four Weddings and Funeral, followed by 1996’s Mission: Impossible and, of course, The English Patient, which cemented her ranking in Hollywood with a Best Actress Oscar nomination.
As often happens with fame, Scott Thomas began to be asked about her past. “I don’t know if you’ve done any homework,” says Scott Thomas, 65, “but if you read a profile on me, it will more often than not, I mean 99 percent of the time, say ‘Tragedy struck’ or whatever.’ ”
For the British actress, it sadly struck twice: At 5 years old, she lost her father, and when she was 12, her stepfather died — both were Royal Navy pilots who were killed in service.
After 40 years in the business, Scott Thomas says she “felt that it was time to reclaim” her story via her moving directorial debut, My Mother’s Wedding, a semi-autobiographical drama that draws from her family history to tell the tale of three sisters (Scarlett Johansson, Sienna Miller and Emily Beecham) who return home to the English countryside for the third wedding of their twice-widowed mother (Scott Thomas).
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In co-writing the film with her now-husband, John Micklethwait, whom she wed in 2024 after the film had wrapped production, Scott Thomas says she wanted to take her past “and make it into something positive — and to show that yes, catastrophe at a young age can be disastrous, and sometimes it just makes you who you are.”
Scott Thomas credits Micklethwait with making the project “more accessible to everybody” with a narrative that will strike a chord with many tight-knit families.
“I’ve never really written anything — that’s his job,” she says of Micklethwait, who’s been Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief since 2015. “He’s very good at organizing and editing and making a kind of narrative out of a string of events. And so that’s what we did and it was really fun.”
To shape her film’s emotional climax, where Scott Thomas’s matriarch shares much needed wisdom with her daughters, she recalls telling Micklethwait, “You’ve got to do this. I can’t cope with this one.”
The actress and filmmaker is especially fond of a line he wrote for her character: “Let go of the children you were, and pay attention to the children you have.” She explains, “That is what growing up is. It’s much easier to do once you have children because your perspective shifts.”
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Like the mother she plays in her film, Scott Thomas is a mom to three children — Hannah, 37, Joseph and, 34, George, 24 — with her ex-husband, French doctor François Olivennes.
She says she didn’t model the daughters’ dynamic in the film on her own brood. Her inspiration, she adds, was more general: “How siblings react and spin off each other, and how one thing said can get completely out of control and turn into something else. Life observation, listening, hearing people, all of those things contribute to what was written and what appears onscreen.”
The tragedy that binds them, however, is deeply familiar to Scott Thomas and her own three siblings. “It’s made these three women in my film who they are, as it’s made me who I am,” she says. “There are moments that are incredibly joyous and happy and fun, and others that are really difficult and crippling. Some of those are caused by the trauma that all my siblings and myself suffered as children. Here I’m the one telling the story.”
My Mother’s Wedding is now playing in theaters.
