At school, I always wanted to belong to a gang, and no one would have me. So I'd have make my own gang, but with everybody else's leftovers.
Buy, buy, buy, buy! They want to grab you and trap you and turn you into little Elizabeth Hurleys.
Have you ever been to the proper desert? The most extraordinary thing is the silence. There's nothing to move out there. I got such a buzz out of it.
Having a leading man who is actually prettier than you are is quite upsetting.
I can look pig ugly standing on my head - I'm plain, bony and brittle.
I did all those things you're supposed to do when you're nineteen in Paris. Spent hours talking, redoing the world in the back of a cafe, and smoking about fifty Gitanes. Had a great time doing that - corny, but great.
I find it difficult to explain, but I'm quite ashamed of being an actress.
I find it very difficult to be two different characters at the same time - actress and mother.
I hate what I would call the whorish provoking of tears, and I hate feeling that I've been tricked into crying when I see a film. And I cry at the drop of a hat -- pathetic!
I never go straight to the point if I can go the most difficult way. Why be simple when you can be complicated?
I resent articles that have described my childhood as tragic. It wasn't a bed of roses and it wasn't a hellhole. You just get on with it.
I was happy, I wasn't beaten, and I lacked nothing. But it wasn't what people expect - it was very much sort of pinching and scraping. I don't know how my mother did it.
I'm not at all fed up with British films, but I am fed up with playing upper-class people.
If you're feeling insecure and you need to feel special, the best place to go is somewhere foreign where people treat you as special because you're different.
Men whistle at you in the street and boys fantasize about you - not my kind of blondes, only those with a 40-inch chest.
Movies make you immortal and ageless.
My idea of bliss was to be on a TV talent show from somewhere like Blackpool, doing tap or singing. I loved that stuff, but my mother thought it was vulgar.
Of course I'm horrible. I am bitchy about people behind their backs and I can be callous, insensitive and brutal. I try to be good, but I am very wicked.
People accuse me of being Methody, but I'm not at all. The one thing I don't want people to see is me. I don't want them to be able to recognize my faults and failures and qualities, and I won't use those things to spark off emotions or to illustrate.
People are always saying, English, English, English rose, and I just feel so completely different.
Seeing The English Patient is wonderfully draining, but imagine acting in it for six months.
The one thing I do not want to be in, is a film in which I'm someone there to make men look good, muscularly and strong.
There's something incredibly sexy about sand and sweat and dunes photographed like women's backs.
When I get to Hollywood I feel all this pressure to be exactly the same as everybody else. I think it's more interesting to dither around on the outskirts and just nip in from time to time.
Kristin is a Roman Catholic.
She was nominated for an Academy Award (Best Actress) for The English Patient (1996).
Kristin's main fan site is bilingual, in English and French. Around half of her fans are French-speaking.
In the U.K. motoring program Top Gear, presenter Jeremy Clarkson uses Kristin as a touchstone of good taste. He asks himself what she would think of a new car. If he thinks she would like it, the car gets a high place on what he calls the "cool wall".
Kristin was appointed an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in H.M. the Queen's Birthday Honours list, 2003.
She is married to a French doctor, Fran?ois Oliviennes, and they have three children, Hannah, Joseph and George.
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