Kristin Scott Thomas stars with Maggie Smith in ‘My Old Lady’

KRISTIN Scott Thomas talks about getting older and her new film role.

Kristin Scott Thomas

KRISTIN Scott Thomas is promoting her most recent film, My Old Lady. But she is not the titular “old lady”. That would be Maggie Smith in Israel Horovitz’s adaptation of his own 2002 stage play.

Smith, 80 next month, plays a 90-year-old English widow rattling around in a Paris apartment that a New Yorker, played by Kevin Kline, believes to be his inheritance. Scott Thomas is her daughter — although, I suggest in a bumbling manner, she remains in too good a condition to be playing a 60-something single daughter of a dowager.

“Well, I’m not very old,” the stunning 54-year-old Englishwoman says before I fumble for words. “No, it’s OK, you’re Australian,” she chuckles before admitting she soon will be fending off the old lady roles “because you become old at 50 in film”.

My Old Lady was a fine fit for Scott Thomas, who lives in Paris and is becoming known for French films and English stage ­work.

“I do make a lot of French films,” she says between performances of her acclaimed turn as Electra in Ian Rickson’s current production at London’s the Old Vic. Scott Thomas regards the ­reaction to her performance as “quite amazing”.

“It’s been better than expected — well, you never know what to expect — but I’ve always been very trusting that what we were doing was what we wanted to do,” she says.

The response entrenches her status in the West End, where she will return in May as the Queen in a revival of Peter Morgan’s The Audience. “It’s just the way things go,” she says of her English theatre contrasting with French films.

“I have made films in English language recently but they haven’t worked so well. What I’ve tended to do recently is more theatre in London and worked in films in France.”

My Old Lady is a sweet little three-hander swinging around a strangely French property title, a viager. This actuarial gamble allows apartments to be traded with the buyer paying the seller a ­recurring fee until they die, at which point the property reverts to the buyer.

“The really scary thing is when you see the ad in the paper saying “Viager, deux tetes,” she says with a laugh, squirming at the prospect of waiting for two people, or “two heads”, to die before taking possession of an apartment.

In Horovitz’s tale, Kline’s Jim comes to Paris anticipating title to the sprawling, valuable apartment in which Smith’s Mathilde and Scott Thomas’s Chloe reside. The 90-year-old Mathilde, stubbornly won’t die (and a spoiler — Smith said she loved the screenplay because it was the only one she’d read recently where her character did not die.)

Scott Thomas relished the chance to “work from home” after so many of her recent films, including Philippe Claudel’s Before the Winter Chill, Francois Ozon’s In the House and Alain Corneau’s Love Crime, filmed outside Paris.

“I just loved it! I would love to do that more often,” she says of a film she regards as “like a gift- wrapped role” given her by Horovitz’s daughter, Rachael, who produced the film after success with Moneyball and About Schmidt.

“It was a no-brainer,” she says. “And I just thought the screenplay was very sort of slick. I like the repartee and the themes of how children imagine their parents and how they discover how they’re not as they expected. I liked the role of the daughter devoting herself to mother.”

Horovitz’s scenario sets up comic possibilities but he opts to turn it into a psychotherapy session for the New Yorker. And the film is at its best when it ­discusses the nature of family ­relationships.

“At some point, you have to not give up on (your parents) but realise they are human just like you are, and they’re people,” Scott Thomas says. “It is interesting. I love the line where Maggie says: ‘You were my child until you were 15 and then you became my daughter.’ ”

About Smith, she jokes that “we’re practically family now”, having worked together before, including mother and daughter roles in the 2005 comedy Keeping Mum, and on Gosford Park, Richard III and more.

“I think she enjoys working me now,” Scott Thomas says, ­before a well-timed beat: “Well, I hope so.”

She says Smith “does a lot of that old acting” now, which is what people seem to want from her. Certainly producers have discovered there is an older audience who prefers considered cinema made for grown-ups.

“People do realise with the hits like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel there is an audience for films about getting older,” Scott Thomas says. “And I’m really glad they’re making films like that,” she says before adding: “I don’t get much joy out of films, really.”

That is a strange admission from an Oscar nominee who has made such a stunning impression for three decades in films including The English Patient, Four Weddings and a Funeral and recently, The Invisible Woman.

“I haven’t been asked to do anything that made me want to go to that foreign land or spend three weeks with it,” she says with a sigh. “I lie: there was one thing I really, really wanted to do but I didn’t get the part! It still happens.”

My Old Lady is a fine fit, though, even if it is the debut feature for the 75-year-old Horovitz, an American playwright with more than 70 produced plays to his credit.

Scott Thomas says that he took on the task of directing primarily because he had not done it before.

“It was really brave to try something new when you’re an established playwright, an established stage director, teaching at university and thoroughly respected as a writer and to try your hand at something that requires such ­energy.”

And to deliver such a stately, thoughtful film is the bonus. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?” Scott Thomas says. “It’s one of these things where you think: ‘Oh, you can still make films like that.’

“It’s reassuring,” she says before I make my final apologies for a bumbling interview where every attempt at a compliment came out like an insult. “Don’t worry,” she says with a laugh. “Like the Queen, I’m amused.”

This weekend in Review David Stratton assesses My Old Lady