Kristin Scott Thomas breaks the ice

The famously frosty actress warms up to playing a woman just out of prison in 'I've Loved You So Long'

NEW YORK - Kristin Scott Thomas, the luminous British beauty who rose to fame in '90s films like "The English Patient," has a reputation as an ice queen with a withering tongue and a prickly demeanor. Press interviews with Scott Thomas are chock full of phrases like "ill-tempered," "England's thorniest rose," and, gulp, "an interviewer's nightmare."

Hugh Grant, who worked with her on the beloved romantic comedy "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and in Roman Polanski's "Bitter Moon," memorably dubbed her the kind of woman who needed warming up every day on set. She hasn't exactly prevented these notions from percolating either, admitting in previous interviews that she can be "quite grumpy and cold" and calling herself "a pain in the arse stickler . . . who wants everything to be the best."

As I wait to be ushered into the Manhattan hotel where Scott Thomas is holding court about her new film "I've Loved You So Long," I fully expect to be chewed up and spit out like so much charred meat. Instead the woman who materializes before me proves to be a considerably thawed version of her popular portrayal.

While she evinces a regal bearing and Garbo-like glamour in a form-fitting Dior frock, the 48-year-old Scott Thomas is an inviting and lively personality, flashing a warm smile and wielding a spiky wit throughout our conversation. Curling up in a cozy armchair, she is pensive and thoughtful one moment, animated the next.

She even tweaks her permafrost reputation, turning on her considerable charm with the flick of a wrist or tilt of her chin.

"I've tried to maintain my mystery. But it's just too much hard work," she cracks.

Indeed, her more welcoming disposition may be a reflection of the state of her life and career at the moment. After happily spending the past decade toiling far away from Hollywood, focusing on theater and working mostly in British and French cinema, Scott Thomas is back, warming to the spotlight once again.

She's presently ensconced on Broadway in Chekhov's "The Seagull," garnering kudos for her riveting turn as the monstrously narcissistic Madame Arkadina, for which she won an Olivier award in London. She's also wrapped supporting roles in a couple of recent films, "Easy Virtue," with Jessica Biel and Colin Firth, based on the Noel Coward play, and "Confessions of a Shopaholic," due in theaters in February. This summer, she played a sexy lesbian in Guillaume Canet's well-received French thriller "Tell No One."

Yet film critics and awards prognosticators have been wagging their tongues most feverishly about the actress's devastating performance in Philippe Claudel's "I've Loved You So Long," opening Friday, in which she plays a woman gingerly navigating life outside of prison after spending 15 years behind bars for a horrendous crime.

"It was a very different role from the kind of witty, sharp, patrician women that I've played before and that I'm often asked to play in English language movies," she says.

True, Scott Thomas cemented her standing by playing brittle, sophisticated, vaguely aristocratic types early in her career. There's her Oscar-nominated turn as Katharine Clifton, whose passions simmer just under the surface, in the "The English Patient"; the droll, chain-smoking Fiona in "Four Weddings and a Funeral"; the brisk magazine editor in Robert Redford's "The Horse Whisperer"; and the dog-kicking, servant-schtupping Lady Sylvia in Robert Altman's "Gosford Park."

In the French-language "I've Loved You So Long," helmed by the Gallic novelist and first-time director Claudel, Scott Thomas plays Juliette, a broken, irrevocably scarred woman who's taken in by the family of her younger sister, Léa (played by the heartbreaking Elsa Zylberstein) after her release from prison. A poignant story of paralyzing grief, wrenching loss, and ultimate redemption, the film follows the withdrawn Juliette, an erstwhile doctor, making tentative steps to reconnect to the outside world and to forge a bond with a sister she never really knew.

"I liked the idea of exploring that fear of abandonment. Juliette is completely alone and is forced to be totally self-reliant," says Scott Thomas. "I also love playing a woman who has a secret, this thing that she carries inside of her - sort of like an unborn child. It's hers, and she won't let anybody else get their hands on it."

Initially, Scott Thomas had hoped to talk with current or former prisoners as part of her research, but decided against the idea.

"I thought, I don't want to go and look at a prisoner like a specimen. There is something yucky about that," she says. "I was also very afraid of my own emotions vis-a-vis any women I might meet - whether that be pity or anger or disgust. I didn't want those emotions to interfere with my instinctive, gut feelings about how I wanted to play the character."

Claudel reveals that he hoped to "destroy her beauty on screen," to shoot her without makeup and "wearing sad clothes." Having worked in prisons for 11 years as a teacher, the director knew that inmates gradually take on the faded colors of the prison walls, and he wanted Juliette to have that quality, especially early in the film.

"It was very important for me to show the destruction of prison life on the face of a woman," says Claudel. "It's usually very hard for actresses to accept these restrictions. I think it's a sign of Kristin's professionalism and deep engagement with the part that she agreed."

Scott Thomas wouldn't have it any other way and thinks that most actresses worth their salt would have done the same thing.

"I found it very liberating, actually, not having to be beautiful," she says. "I wanted her to be as raw, as naked, and in-your-face as possible."

Beauty is also on the mind of the vain, solipsistic, yet caustically funny Arkadina in "The Seagull," a woman grappling with the cruel realities of advancing age and fading sexual allure. As an actress-of-a-certain-age who sometimes works in the unforgiving world of big-budget film, Scott Thomas says she can deeply relate to Arkadina's predicament.

"She's every woman I know," she says. "We all recognize ourselves in this part. I can certainly identify with the fear of getting old and of not having any money, the fear of not being loved anymore, not being adored anymore - and trying to keep everything together."

Scott Thomas has been forsaken by Hollywood once before, even if she instigated the breakup. After her rise to fame, the actress, who has lived in France since she was 19, decided to take a year off to have a third child with her then-husband, a French fertility doctor. Her agents warned her that directors and producers would begin looking elsewhere for their leading ladies.

"They said, 'If you turn your back, the roles won't be there when you return.' I didn't believe them, but they were right," she says. "But then I was saved - by the theater!"

After a turn opposite Kevin Kline in the well-received 2001 film "Life as a House," Scott Thomas was unhappy with the offers coming her way. So she signed up for an eight-month tour of France in the classic tragedy by Racine, "Berenice," much to her agent's horror, she exlaims. Although the reviews were bad, "It changed my life," she says.

She has never looked back. Despite an almost total lack of prior theater experience, she has soared on the stage. She went on to tackle Chekhov's "Three Sisters" and Pirandello's "As You Desire Me" in London, to much acclaim.

"I do much better film work if I've done a really great play," she says. "I love the way that theater kind of beats me up for the next movie - it really works those muscles."

Acting also provides a kind of catharsis for a woman touched by tragedy. In one of life's harsh twists of fate, she lost both her father and step-father in airplane crashes (they were both pilots) within the span of less than a decade. She has spoken about how the childhood trauma informed her personality, giving her a steely aloofness that can sometimes be mistaken for arrogance or snobbery.

So, while navigating the glare of the media can be a challenge, she says she cherishes being an actor, even if it can seem frivolous at times.

"People do need this. They need to be told stories, they need to go see something and have shared emotions, whether it's in the theater or in the cinema. And somebody has to do it," she says with a little laugh. "So I'll do it. I love doing it."