How To Fail With Elizabeth Day
Kristin Scott Thomas – ‘Having children allowed me to see where I’d gone wrong’
24 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I was very good at holding it in, at not letting anybody don't cry in class, don't do this, don't do that, don't keep it all back, be the funniest in the room. Having children allowed me to see where I'd gone wrong and where I was beating myself up and where I was, you know, doing unnecessary sabotage and damaging. And of course, because I'd been used to
Chapter 2: What tragic narrative does Kristin Scott Thomas reclaim?
And I'd kind of grown up with it and got over it and, as I said, kept going.
Chapter 3: How has Kristin Scott Thomas found joy in her 60s?
Grieving for my mother was just like being run over by a tank.
This episode of How To Fail is brought to you by Dove Whole Body Deodorant.
Chapter 4: What was the experience of co-writing a film with her husband?
Welcome to How to Fail, the podcast that looks beneath the hood of success to see the failure that lies underneath. Before we get started on this episode, please do remember to subscribe, follow and like so that you never miss a single conversation.
My name is Yo-Ai Shaw. I used to host a human behavior show called Invisibilia, which means I spent years trying to understand why people do what they do. It turns out the answer is often, inconveniently, feelings, especially the ones we don't know what to do with. On my new show, Proxy, listeners bring me their emotional conundrums, the cases they haven't been able to close.
Chapter 5: What lessons did Kristin learn from her film debut with Prince?
Maybe because no one in their life can relate, or maybe because the one person they wish they could talk to won't or can't. On Proxy, I find the person who gets it, the person with the closest possible experience to what someone is going through, and then I put them together in a conversation.
I recommend starting with Bisexual Wife Guy, about a man who's happy for his ex-wife after she came out as queer, but doesn't understand what happened in their marriage. Listen to Proxy wherever you get your podcasts.
For years, a deranged man in Wichita known as The Poet stalked Ruth Finley. He sent her letters, gifts, and poems. The Wichita police put everything they had into Ruth's case, but got nowhere. The Poet was always two steps in front of us, and we just didn't know why. And the city was already living in fear under the watch of another monster who called himself BTK.
And he also had a thing for poetry. Could we really have two different people? But no one could have guessed how this would end. That's one of those Hitchcock endings that we did not expect.
Chapter 6: How did teenage grief impact Kristin's life and career?
From Sony Music Entertainment and New Metric Media, this is The Poet.
Chapter 7: What insights does Kristin share about childhood losses?
I'm Rachel Brown. Coming July 1st to The Binge. Search for The Poet wherever you get your podcasts to start listening today. Subscribers to The Binge can listen to all episodes, all at once, ad-free.
We all have our favourite Dame Kristin Scott Thomas performance. It might be the brittle but heart-sore Fiona in Four Weddings and a Funeral, or the married woman who experiences a sexual awakening with an enigmatic Hungarian count in The English Patient. Perhaps it's her turn in The Horse Whisperer, which she acted in despite being terrified of horses.
Or her role as the businesswoman in Fleabag, who delivers a memorable monologue about women being born with pain built in. Maybe it's one of the riveting performances Scott Thomas has delivered in Fluent French, the lead in Thriller Tell No One, or the doctor released from prison in I've Loved You So Long. Or it's the icy Diana Tavenner, Deputy Director General of MI5 in Apple TV's Slow Horses.
Chapter 8: What role did therapy play in Kristin's healing journey?
Then there are her stage performances. She won an Olivier for her turn in The Seagull in 2008. It's a hugely successful career, and yet it almost ended in failure when teachers at the Central School of Speech and Drama discouraged her from acting in probably saying that she lacked talent. Instead, she moved to Paris as an au pair and restarted her training there.
Her childhood had been beset by both happiness and tragedy. Her father, a Navy pilot, was killed in a plane crash when she was five. Her mother, left widowed at 28 with four children, remarried one of his colleagues, only for him to die in a near identical accident when Scott Thomas was 11.
It's an unimaginable experience she has used as inspiration for her directorial film debut, My Mother's Wedding, in which she also co-stars and which she co-wrote with her second husband, John Micklethwaite. The film tells the story of three sisters who return home for the wedding of their twice-widowed mother.
In bringing it to the screen, Scott Thomas says, I wanted to take my 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. Dame Kristen Scott Thomas, welcome to How to Fail. Thank you. It's so lovely to meet you in this studio. And
I'm also aware that writing a potted introduction like that can be rather emotionally bruising, I imagine, to hear again and again and again your life story sort of rehashed for the purposes of journalism.
When you hear it over and over again, as I have, because I've been doing this a very, very long time, it does... It's so boring. Everybody knows that, but actually lots of people don't. And then when they do find out the sort of the kind of catastrophic element, they're often quite kind of flummoxed by it.
And I guess that's why it's in all the articles, because people can't quite believe what they're reading.
The film that you have directed, starred in and written, is that an attempt to reclaim that narrative for yourself? Yeah, absolutely. Spot on.
I just got a bit fed up with seeing that every single profile always had a little paragraph about my tragic childhood. And I said, oh, hang on, it wasn't that bad. And then looking at it, you think, well, actually, that is quite serious.
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