Dame Kristin Scott Thomas has vowed to never pose for a fashion shoot again as she doesn’t want to be associated her best-known film characters’ style.
The screen star, 59, who rose to fame in chart-topping films The English Patient, Gosford Park and Four Weddings And A Funeral, admitted she fears getting sartorially stuck in the era when she was at her ‘most successful and admired’.
Actress Kristin said during Susannah Constantine’s podcast My Wardrobe Malfunction: ‘So every time I go to do a fashion shoot, which I’ve sworn I will never do again… they put me in a white Armani shirt and a pair of pants. It’s so boring.’
‘It’s so boring’: Dame Kristin Scott Thomas has vowed to never pose for a fashion shoot again as she doesn’t want to be associated her best-known film characters’ style (pictured in 2019)
Known for her elegant eye for fashion, the Tomb Raider star was once listed among the 50 best-dressed women over 50 by The Guardian.
Kristin highlighted the ‘dangers’ of female actresses maintaining a generic fashion sense as she explained: ‘The one thing I’m terrified of is that we stick to the style that you are most admired and recognised for.
‘People love me in those strapless gowns, they love me with my hair up, they love me looking like a classic statue-type person. Or they love the English Patient white shirt-trousers type thing.
‘You get stuck in that period when you are most successful and most admired and you keep hanging on to that.
‘You get stuck in that period’: The screen star, 59, who rose to fame in chart-topping films such as The English Patient (pictured in 1996), Gosford Park and Four Weddings And A Funeral
‘You see that with women who won’t change their make-up, or women who won’t change the length of their skirt. That’s so dangerous and I really want to avoid that.’
Earlier in the week, she admitted she refuses to say ‘thank you’ when someone compliments her on looking good for her age.
The media personality has said how she is tired of the assumption that women ‘fade away’ after they reach 50.
‘I’m fed up of having to say ‘thank you’ when someone says I’ve still got it,’ she told Radio Times.
Defiant: Earlier in the week, she admitted she refuses to say ‘thank you’ when someone compliments her on looking good for her age (pictured last month)
The Darkest Hour actress went on to state that just because a woman gets older, she doesn’t just disappear and fade into the background.
‘Ageing is a quality for women, she continued. ‘We don’t just fade away. I don’t put up with any bull**** any more. I’ve never been happier.’
The celebrated star of The English Patient and Four Weddings And A Funeral was last year praised for her description of what it means to be a woman during her cameo in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag.
Her character Belinda was a businesswoman who said that ‘women are born with pain built in’ and that their ‘physical destiny’ is ‘period pains, sore boobs, childbirth’.
‘Ageing is a quality for women’: The Darkest Hour actress went on to state that just because a woman gets older, she doesn’t just disappear and fade into the background (pictured in 1991)
‘I’m super grateful to Phoebe for articulating my own personal frustration with the way women are treated as they age,’ she said.
The actress, who was appointed the honorary president of the Women’s Economic Forum last October, will star in Phedre at the National Theatre this year as well as taking on the sinister housekeeper Mrs Danvers in an upcoming Netflix adaptation of Rebecca.
Dame Kristin said she started to turn down roles after decades of being expected to play ‘hard but fragile’ on screen.
Fellow thespian Maxine Peake has also lamented the limited roles available to women, and criticised the assumption that ‘women act personally, men act politically’.
Maxine, 45, has taken matters into her own hands to write a play for BBC Radio 3, Only Mountains, in which actress Lyndsey Marshal plays Pearl, a woman who joins an all-female militia fighting in Syria.
‘Men who go to fight for a cause are seen as heroes, while women are seen as naive and idealistic,’ she told Radio Times.
Read the full interview in this week’s Radio Times
‘And be it telly or film or theatre or whatever, a woman only does something because she’s driven by some event in her life – because she’s lost a child, or she was raped, or her mother died –but a man acts because he’s a man… and that drives me mad.’
It comes after Kristen recently detailed her fury at a director who told her to try and be more ‘appealing’ as she admitted it made her feel ‘so cross’.
The actress detailed the ‘situation, without naming the filmmaker in question, to Town & Country, and admitted: ‘I was so cross!
‘That really rubbed me up the wrong way. It kicked something off in me. Why the hell should I be appealing?
‘Why should I be pretty, and sweet, and kind, and nice, and have everybody love me? Why? I’m incredibly grumpy about lots and lots of things.’
Having her say: ‘I don’t put up with any bull**** any more. I’ve never been happier’, she defiantly said in the interview about ageing