It is not unusual for movie stars, in the middle of hectic press schedules, to ask their publicity assistants for much-needed sustenance: a soft drink, a double espresso, a line of coke if things start going really badly. Kristin Scott Thomas, sitting in an inconspicuous corner of the tea room at Claridge’s, looks vaguely distracted as we are introduced. She wants to know where to get a gas fire.

The assistant and I are flummoxed. I want to say Homebase but the word just won’t come out. This is Kristin Scott Thomas and we are having tea in Claridge’s, and discussions of DIY superstores are surely off-limits. Besides, it seems warm enough.

I sit down. There is a band playing something weird and jaunty that puts one in mind of the sinking of the Titanic. But Scott Thomas says she loves the ambience here, offers me a Canarino (which I find out later is an Italian hot lemon drink, like Lemsip for non-sore throat sufferers) and proceeds to tell me she has an embarrassing admission to make.

“I haven’t seen this film,” she says, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “I can’t pass any judgment on it. I can only tell you what it was like to make it.”

This is as unsettling as the gas fire quest. The film concerned is The Walker, a political thriller directed by Paul Schrader, out next week in London, in which Scott Thomas plays the wife of a liberal senator who suddenly finds her lover murdered, and is subsequently drawn into what Hollywood loves to call a web of intrigue but is, in this case, a damp thicket of improbable occurrences.

I say that it is convenient for her not to have watched the finished product, so that she doesn’t have to be diplomatic about something she may not like. “It’s frequently the case, believe me,” she fires back with a wicked smile.

It is reassuring to see her smile. Her flawless complexion – it defies belief that she is 47 years old – makes me think of George Melly’s joke about Mick Jagger’s insistence that his wrinkles were, in fact, laughter lines – “Nothing’s that funny, Mick.” Don’t you find anything funny, Kristin?

But she does. Scott Thomas had a well-publicised disillusionment with Hollywood in the wake of her success in The English Patient, which brings a certain welcome sharpness to her observations on the film industry. But on the making of The Walker, which was mostly shot and financed in the UK and the Isle of Man, she is positive.

She says she was attracted to the role by the involvement of Schrader, and her co-stars Woody Harrelson, Lauren Bacall and Lily Tomlin. She describes the director as a “funny man – rough and tough. You might think you won’t like him very much when you meet him.

“I thought that at first. In one scene, I was listening to Woody, and I asked for some instruction, and he said, ‘Just be attractive and attentive.’ I nearly exploded with rage. And then I saw the twinkle in his eye, and it was all all right.”

She had met Bacall socially. “I admired her as a woman. She is fantastically judgmental. So outspoken. And so many interesting stories to tell, but she doesn’t draw them out. She loves to talk about new things, which is a great thing for a lady of 83.”

The set-piece scenes between the two women and Tomlin, playing moody games of canasta while their menfolk get on with the sinister task of running the country, are the highlights of the film. “The energy round the table was fantastic. We had to keep the games going. And then we carried on playing them in the evening as well.”

But despite the powerful female presence, it still has the feel of a man’s film, I say. “It is a man’s film. Paul Schrader is the man’s man. It is about what happens to a woman when she gets to the end of her use in that environment, when you’re no longer useful as a wife.”

Putting aside the American accent and the Washington context, there is a disappointing familiarity about Scott Thomas’s performance in The Walker. Apart from one brief scene, when she has just discovered her lover’s body and is trying instantly to absorb its consequences, she is deep in her acting comfort zone: a little aloof, aristocratic, reserved and, ultimately, fragile.

She has been here before, notably in her early work such as Bitter Moon and Four Weddings and a Funeral, in which she and Hugh Grant have acted as stiff-backed ambassadors for a certain English froideur that evidently found worldwide favour amid lovers of class and clipped consonants.

But here’s the thing. Just before meeting Scott Thomas, who has lived in Paris since she was 19 and is bilingual, I saw her latest French film release, and it was like watching a completely different woman. In Guillaume Canet’s thriller, Tell No One, she is tanned, tousle-haired, cigarette-waving, expressive of gesture and a lesbian to boot.

“French, you mean?”

Exactly. When I say I have just seen it, her face lights up. “Good, isn’t it?”

I say it is bizarre, watching this other side of her. Is it closer to her real personality?

“It’s not so much that.” She begins to pick her words very carefully here. “I have found that Anglo-Saxon productions tend to want from me something that I do pretty well, which is doing that sort of brittle, mean . . . you know.” A Gallic shrug, just to rub the point in. “They like it. It’s OK. I keep making those films, so . . . ”

So the English-speaking cinematic world never gets to see this other aspect of her acting? We just see the posh-glacial turn?

She is far less exercised about it than I am. “I don’t particularly mind it. You have to have a label. It’s better than ‘big, fat slob’. In the [French] film I have just made, I play a woman who has just served 15 years in prison for having killed her only child. I don’t have a scrap of make-up, I look terrible. It’s going to be really hard for me to watch it. I hardly say a word in the whole film. They wouldn’t ask me to do that here. I don’t know why. They wouldn’t, would they?”

The question is rhetorical, and she puts on some lip gloss in almost defiant fashion.

Scott Thomas was raised in Dorset and attended Cheltenham Ladies’ College. She was told to forget her acting ambitions while in drama college in England, so she left to become an au pair in Paris, where she has remained ever since. Her marriage to a French obstetrician, which has produced three children, was widely reported to have broken down last year, a subject she has declined to discuss.

I ask how she selects her work, having two languages and three cultural sensibilities to choose from.

“Fifty per cent of it is logistics, to be frank – can I fit the work around school holidays? And then, making a film is a huge commitment. It is giving someone months of your life, when it is the only thing you can think of. It’s like going into a cupboard and shutting the door. So you have to want to say those words. Do you want to give that [director] four months of your life, and your kids’ lives? That’s how I think about it now.”

I ask what it was like performing Chekhov on the London stage last year, for which she received fantastic notices.

“Ahhhh.” An expression of rapture fills her face. “Heaven. Absolute heaven.”

So she will do more?

“Yep.”

The pleasurable memory makes her momentarily monosyllabic, and then she is back in the real world. “The problem is I have to earn a living. Coming to London to do a play is a real luxury. It’s my present to myself.” She says that a mixture of French cinema and English theatre is the ideal way ahead for her.

Her jadedness with American cinema is palpable, the cultural distance between Europe and Hollywood evidently too great for her to bridge happily. “The best film I have seen for years was that German one [The Lives of Others]. And I think it’s really great that while America is doing all its Spidermans and God knows what, it takes a German no one has heard of to show us how to make a film. Don’t you love that?

“Besides, I don’t want to spend half the year in America. All that money means things get plodding and slow.”

I ask how that related to her experience in making The English Patient, the blockbuster that marked her breakthrough as a true romantic lead.

“I was so involved in that character and that story that I was blissfully unaware of anything else.” She was famously insistent on wanting to be in Anthony Minghella’s film. “I read it, and then I found out they were making it, and I said, ‘If I don’t get this film, I’m giving up.’ It was very, very important to me.”

She had initially intended to play Hana, the part played by Juliette Binoche, but was asked instead to read for Katharine (“I thought it was a mistake”), reread the screenplay, changed her mind, and set about transforming herself. “It was the first time I had blonde hair, and I wanted to be this open character, not someone who was closed, secretive, interiorised. I wanted to be out there.

“Anthony and Saul [Zaentz, the producer] and Ralph [Fiennes] all fought for me. It was a fantastic risk for them. But I think it paid off. I think I can say that.”

It was in making the inevitable Hollywood follow-ups – Mission: Impossible, The Horse Whisperer, Random Hearts among them – that disillusionment set in. “I became very conscious of everyone laughing at my jokes, always having everything I wanted, people pre-empting my desires all the time. I never felt comfortable in that role.”

She says she felt that sense of unease right from the start of her acting career, making her film debut with Prince, in a charmless 1986 vanity project for the rock star called Under the Cherry Moon. “I had just left drama college [in Paris] and was doing a Marguerite Duras play in a field in Burgundy when I got the call,” she says, not without a touch of sarcasm.

“It was very strange, and endlessly fascinating. My eyes were permanently on stalks. And that’s when I first felt I was not in the right place. I was like a fish out of water.”

She says nothing about her diminutive first co-star. Discretion is as much part of the Kristin Scott Thomas brand as her fabled ability to portray detachment. She appears infrequently on television but last year made a memorable guest appearance on the motoring series Top Gear, which has traditionally judged the fashionability of a car according to what the presenters think she might think of it.

The woman who judges the boys’ toys. That’s cool, in any language.

‘The Walker’: Anthony Haden-Guest remembers Jerry Zipkin

Jerry Zipkin, the New Yorker, whose social life did much to inspire Paul Schrader’s new film, The Walker, died at 80 in 1995. His obituary’s headline – Jerry Zipkin, (companion to wealthy women) – in the US edition of the Economist captured the conflicting feelings he aroused. It was mentioned in the text that during the Reagan era “Jerry Zipkin had some claim to be considered the third most powerful person in the United States.”

Not a day went by when Zipkin didn’t talk to Nancy Reagan. He spent the evening with the couple on the day that Reagan was elected president and he was rumoured to be a social gatekeeper at the White House. The 1980s was his time of power.

In Manhattan, Zipkin had become the dedicated escort of a bevy of women, including Betsy Bloomingdale whose husbands were too tired, bored or otherwise occupied, to take their wives to lunch, to dinner and to la ronde of charity balls. He accumulated nicknames, such as “A Man About Everywhere,” “The Social Moth” and – this was the coinage of John Fairchild, the publisher of Women’s Wear Daily – “The Walker”.

It was a vocation. Zipkin had inherited a multi-million dollar real-estate fortune from his father and happily picked up the tabs – something that always tickles the rich pink – so he was no gigolo. He was homosexual, so there was no scandal risk. And he spent hours on the telephone so he was a delicious gossip but famously discreet as to just who he gossiped with.

As to the movie, well, I don’t remember who it was that, after seeing Brideshead Revisited, said, “Evelyn’s life would have been completely different if he had looked like Jeremy Irons.” Zipkin’s life might have taken a different track had he resembled Woody Harrelson. David Patrick Columbia, the normally urbane editor of the on-line New York Social Diary describes him as “squawky and surly”; I would say that he looked at once strong and spoiled, like one of the earlier Roman emperors. Galba comes to mind. And that was rather the way he behaved, too.Jerry Zipkin was a familiar figure, This was because the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the 1980s and early 1990s had a village-like character unimaginable in contemporary London. Zipkin was one of the more memorable of the village characters. We both frequented Mortimer’s, Glenn Bernbaum’s restaurant on Lexington and 76th, which had certain aspects of a village hostelry. Regulars included trust-fund brats, Eurotrash and well-heeled married women whom the writer Nora Ephron named the “Ladies Who Lunch”. Zipkin was in his element.

Bernbaum’s restaurant was lively. When Princess Margaret reacted with pique when somebody there struck up “God Save the Queen”, the Spectator columnist Taki loudly reassured her, “It’s not for you, ma’am. It’s for Jerry Zipkin.” But Mortimer’s, like so much of the best of Manhattan, is no more.

There was notoriously a downside to Jerry Zipkin. He had a domineering streak and an extremely thin skin and could be very rude, to his peers, which was fine, and staffers, which was less so. The best-known of his feuds was with Truman Capote, who delighted in not inviting him to his Black and White Ball and, more so, in the fact that Zipkin was one of the non-invitees who left the country so as not to be there on the night of the event. When Capote published Answered Prayers, salty anecdotes about thinly disguised social figures, Zipkin denounced it as “disgusting”. They slapped each other outside a restaurant in Beverly Hills. Later, Capote, affecting to forget Zipkin’s name, described him as the man with “a face shaped like a bidet”.

I never had experience of Zipkin’s ugly side. He was a close friend of the brilliant Ahmet Ertegün, the late capo of Atlantic Records, and others who didn’t tolerate fools. I’ll remember him in full spate in Mortimer’s and at various soirees. And await the movie with the keenest interest.