Dame Kristin Scott Thomas tells of the grief which marred her childhood, and how she’s channelled such unimaginable heartbreak into her directorial debut in My Mother’s Wedding
Dame Kristin Scott Thomas was five years old when her father was killed in a plane crash. Six years later, her stepfather died the same way. Now, more than half a century on, she has drawn on that double tragedy for her debut as a film director in My Mother’s Wedding. She says: “Every single profile ever written about me has a couple of paragraphs about my tragic childhood. I decided to reclaim that. Now that I’m grown up, I can tell it as it is.”
With credits including Four Weddings and a Funeral, The English Patient and Slow Horses, she is one of the UK’s finest actors and was made a Dame in 2015 for her services to drama. Kristin, 65, says of her childhood loss: “I think that it has certainly made me quite good at telling stories about people who have a secret suffering and have to keep the stiff upper lip and keep going, I mean, Fiona in Four Weddings, who is the sort of epitome of that.”
Fiona confesses her unrequited love for her longtime friend Charles (Hugh Grant) during the wedding reception of Carrie (Andie MacDowell) and Hamish (Corn Redgrave) in the 1994 movie. Kristin continues: “She had this secret that she keeps under wraps and won’t tell anyone and then it all comes out. And I think I’ve been quite expert at that. There was very little acting required, because I had all this sort of built-up information. Repressed emotion, perhaps, but also things that aren’t supposed to be known about.”
Kristin, who calls west London home, but splits her time between the capital and Paris, says that even as a young woman she was consistently cast older than her years. She says: “Funnily enough, I’ve always been cast as older people. Even when I was a very young woman. I was 23 and they wanted me to play 35. I obviously had something within me that said,’ she knows too much. or something.”
And Kristin’s own experience has heavily influenced My Mother’s Wedding – co-written with her husband John Micklethwait, 63, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, who she married after production wrapped. The film follows three sisters who return to their childhood home for a momentous weekend: the third wedding of their twice-widowed mother, Diana Frost, played by Kristin.
The three daughters are from vastly different walks of life: Katherine, played by Scarlett Johansson, is a captain in the Royal Navy; Victoria, played by Sienna Miller, is a Hollywood star, and Georgina, played by Emily Beecham, is a hospice nurse. But Kristin – who shares three children, Hannah, 38, George, 25, and Joseph, 35, with her ex husband, French medic Francois Oliveness, 67 – says the film was not about catharsis. Rather, it was a way to share her memories of her father and stepfather with her brothers.
Kristin, who has two brothers and two sisters, says: “I thought that I would make some little short films about what I remembered about Daddy and my stepfathe, Simon. I got talking to somebody about this and they said, well, why don’t you turn it into a fiction?”
Kristen’s father was a pilot in the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm, who died in a flying accident when she was five. Her mother was remarried to another Royal Navy pilot, Lieutenant Commander Simon Idiens, who also died in a flying accident, leaving her mother to raise her children alone.
Kristin described the grief of losing her stepfather as devastating, but remembers being cautioned not to cry. “This was before counselling,” she says. “You just didn’t discuss it. You just kept going and it was very tough.”
In My Mother’s Wedding, the triple role of writer, director and co-star was entirely new territory for the actress – but she says it was a fantastically exciting journey. Kristin describes stepping into the director’s chair, saying: “It was the biggest thrill of my life. Look at the cast I’ve got. I mean, it was like being given a fleet of Ferraris. It was absolutely amazing to have these incredible actors around me. Scarlett Johansson, Sienna Miller, Emily Beecham, James Fleet, Frida Pinto.”
But she is candid about the difficulty of acting in and also directing the film. She says: “I can’t recommend being an actor in one’s own film when it’s one’s first film because it is very, very difficult to sort of separate and sort of observe the other actor while you’re acting with them. I find that incredibly difficult.”
However, Kristin believes the time was right to finally make the movie, after dealing with decades of pain, as she has now processed it. She says: “I’ve recovered.” She also says the subject matter prompted people around her to share their own experiences of losing a parent when they were young, after identifying with the storyline.
And Kristin is in good company, by choosing to get behind the camera for the first time. Oscar winning actress Kate Winslet made her feature directorial debut with Goodbye June, in which she also starred alongside Toni Collette and Helen Mirren. It was released in December 2025.
Brian Cox, best known as Logan Roy in Succession, made his directorial debut with Glenrothan, a drama in which he also stars as Sandy, alongside Alan Cumming. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025. Meanwhile, for Kristin, her latest project has been more than a career milestone. It has been a way of ensuring that the men some of her siblings never had the chance to know properly are now on film forever.
She says: “What made me want to do it was that I realised that one of my brothers, in fact both my brothers, have absolutely no idea about who their father was, no image in their heads.” And while she had reservations about telling her life story, she says: “What you do is you take that and you use it as a sort of seed for telling another story. And that’s what I did.”
*This article has been adapted from The Arts Hour on the BBC World Service and BBC Sounds.
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