`PATIENT' CAMPAIGN : ACTRESS FALLS IN LOVE WITH PART AFTER READING WARTIME NOVEL.

Byline: Amy Dawes Daily News Film Writer

If you think you know actress Kristin Scott Thomas from her movies, the real article is bound to surprise you. So is her unguarded, intensely passionate performance in her new movie, ``The English Patient.''

Most widely known to American audiences as the wryly sophisticated and lovelorn admirer of Hugh Grant's character in ``Four Weddings and a Funeral,'' Scott Thomas has done the kind of film roles that lead you to expect two things from her - cool British reserve and the kind of breeding that would make her role in the wartime drama ``The English Patient,'' as glamorous and aristocratic Katharine Clifton, a dead-on example of typecasting.

In person, she dismisses both notions with a peal of laughter.

``I suppose that image must be something I give off to people, but it's so weird, because it does not correspond to me personally at all,'' she says. ``A, I'm not glamorous, and B, I'm not aristocratic, so it's very peculiar. It's like a third character, this image I have. But if it finds me cast in roles like Katharine Clifton, then it's all the better.''

In ``The English Patient,'' which opens Friday and is based on the Booker Prize-winning novel by Canadian author Michael Ondaatje, Scott Thomas plays a well-read, well-bred Englishwoman who is drawn into a fierce, consuming love affair with a mapmaker in North Africa (Ralph Fiennes) in spite of the affection she feels for her aviator husband (Colin Firth).

Their relationship is told in flashbacks after Fiennes is shot down during World War II. His face burned away like his memory, he convalesces in the care of a sensitive Canadian army nurse (Juliette Binoche), shell-shocked by the war. The nurse, Hana, retreats with the patient to a ruined Italian monastery, where she reads to him from a history book he carries with him, his own history, or a story that he's not sure is his own. Before long, these two refugees also are visited by a rogue soldier, Carravaggio (Willem Dafoe), and a brave but tender turban-wearing Sikh bomb expert, Kip (Naveen Andrews) with whom the nurse falls in love.

Although Scott Thomas speaks with the kind of precisely perfect Julie Andrews-style English diction that makes Americans feel inferior, she emphasizes that she was not to the manor born. She was raised in Dorset, England, in a rural village she describes as ``quite isolated - we spent our lives in the fields, really,'' and lost her father, a pilot for the Royal Navy, in a plane crash when she was 5. After her mother remarried, her pilot stepfather died the same way, six years later.

``I don't know how my mother managed. There was a lot of pinching and scraping to get by,'' she says.

Now married to an obstetrician, with whom she shares an apartment on Paris' Left Bank and the parenting of their two children, a boy and a girl ages 5 and 8, Scott Thomas is aware that with her showcase role in ``The English Patient'' and her recent mainstream exposure in ``Mission: Impossible,'' she's about to experience a major breakthrough in marquee value.

But she allows that that's not really the prize she's had her eyes on.

``There are some roles, like Katharine Clifton, that you feel you absolutely need to do,'' she says. ``I don't want to make a mainstream blockbuster movie unless it is a story I feel utterly compelled to be in.''

Having read the novel ``The English Patient'' three times in a row (she was that taken with it), Scott Thomas campaigned hard to become a part of the movie project, overcoming the resistance of skeptical financiers and winning over writer-director Anthony Minghella during a read-through with co-star Fiennes that the filmmaker says produced a ``magical chemistry.''

Minghella told The New York Times that he never hesitated in casting Fiennes and Binoche but found it more difficult to choose his Katharine. ``There was a whole encyclopedia of possible actors,'' he recalled. ``It was a quite bewildering process. At one point, I thought of an American, but it was not possible. There is something about Katharine's character that is like an index of England. You have to be able to cut that person open and find a Union Jack waving. And that was Kristin.''

Fiennes, speaking from Australia, where he is shooting ``Oscar and Lucinda,'' a film about Oscar Wilde, told The New York Times he immediately had recognized that Scott Thomas was right for Katharine. ``I think in many ways the part was second nature to her,'' he said. ``I always felt she understood Katharine's painful dilemma acutely and passionately.''

Minghella, a British playwright and filmmaker, is perhaps best-known in the United States for his movie ``Truly Madly Deeply,'' a romance and ghost story that starred Juliette Stevens and Alan Rickman. The movie caught the attention of Berkeley-based American producer Saul Zaentz, who got into the habit of urging video copies of it on friends. Without Zaentz, says Minghella, ``The English Patient'' would likely never have been made.

Zaentz, the producer of movie adaptations as daunting as ``At Play in the Fields of the Lord'' and ``The Unbearable Lightness of Being,'' helped Minghella believe he could become the first filmmaker to turn a novel by Ondaatje, a brilliant but unconventional prose writer, into a novel.

``He's like a bull in pursuit of an uncompromised vision, and he has this enormous gift of empowering people,'' said Minghella. ``He made me feel that I could do anything I wanted, and yet he also puts enormous demands on you.''

With a budget of slightly more than $30 million, the filmmakers traveled to Italy and Tunisia to shoot the sprawling wartime epic, which takes place mostly in Cairo, the North African desert and a monastery in Italy during World War II.

``I saw the monastery as being a place of healing, which is the theme of the movie,'' said Minghella. ``The English patient is healed by being finally able to die, and the nurse Hana is healed by being able to love again, no longer believing she is cursed by the war.''

``Carravaggio is healed by being able to finally let go of his hatred.''

``What has happened to Carravaggio in the story is so typical of what happens in war. The history of this century is littered with absolutely understandable grievances and the worst kind of human behavior. But if we can't move on from there, then the world can't ever make peace with itself.''

``If you live in Ireland, then you have a right to hate the British, but you can't exercise that right anymore, any more than the Jew can continue to hate the Arab. You can keep marshaling historical evidence to perpetuate enmity, but if you do, you're mutilating people for life, with no way out.''

CAPTION(S):

4 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) `English' patience

Kristin Scott Thomas' British reserve erupts in fiery romantic role

(2) Kristin Scott Thomas lobbied hard to win the role of aristocrat Katharine Clifton in ``The English Patient.''

(3) Director Anthony Minghella and Kristin Scott Thomas work on ``The English Patient,'' based on Michael Ondaatje's novel.

(4) ``I don't want to make a mainstream blockbuster movie unless it is a story I feel utterly compelled to be in,'' says Scott Thomas, whose fame took a leap with ``Four Weddings and a Funeral.''

David Sprague/Daily News