Profile: Kate Winslet

Post-Oscar, post-divorce, what’s next for Britain’s most talented actress?

You’re Kate Winslet. You’ve been nominated for an Oscar six times and you’re barely in your mid-thirties. You’ve been in one of the most successful blockbusters ever (Titanic). In one year alone you’ve made the high-profile dramas Revolutionary Road and The Reader, and scooped a Best Actress Academy Award, two Golden Globes, another BAFTA, and almost every other acting award known to man. How do you follow that? Well, you do a bit of telly.

The 35-year-old Reading-born actress has already proved to be boldly unpredictable in her choice of roles. She turned down Shakespeare in Love and The Lord of the Rings, and followed Titanic with the tiny art-house efforts Holy Smoke and Quills. Now she’s downsizing to the small screen for this summer’s HBO mini-series Mildred Pierce, which will be broadcast here on Sky Atlantic. The five-part drama is a lush adaptation of James M Cain’s 1941 novel about a resilient divorcee in Depression-era California, whose life is defined by her overpowering love for her resentful and increasingly wicked daughter Veda (Evan Rachel Wood).

The book was first dramatised for the screen in 1945, with Joan Crawford in the title role. But just because it’s TV, says Winslet, doesn’t make it any less ambitious than her film work. “This was so much harder, and more intense, than any film I’ve done,” she said recently. “There was so much more story to tell. Plus the story was utterly compelling to me, because Mildred’s need for her daughter’s approval is something that I think every mother does feel from their child. It’s a story that every parent can relate to.”

This is the key to Kate Winslet, and perhaps even to her success and her entire career. For she doesn’t do fantasy (eg Middle Earth). She speaks at length about the need for her movies to relate to people, and to be real. Recently divorced from the Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes, the parallels between her life and Mildred’s weren’t lost on her. “There were some days when I would realise the scenes I was shooting were in tandem with things that were happening that day in my life,” she says.

Mildred Pierce is far from a big glamour vehicle, but then Winslet doesn’t do those. She isn’t Angelina Jolie in The Tourist or Sandra Bullock in The Proposal. “Not to put down people who are known for playing those types of glamorous roles,” she says, “but to me films should be relatable to.” Even on the rare occasion where she has to doll-up for a scene (as in The Holiday) or the red carpet, she finds it frustrating. “I still sometimes want to go, ‘This isn’t real! I’ve been in hair and make-up for three and a half hours! I don’t look like this!’”

This need to be real, she says, stems from her childhood. Her parents Roger and Sally were both jobbing actors, as are her two sisters, Anna and Beth (only younger brother, Joss, has been spared), so money was scarce in their household. “We lived off family allowance,” she explains. “We never flew to Barbados on family holidays. My dad would borrow a VW van from a mate and we’d drive to Dover instead. I grew up in the same house all my life and shared a bedroom with my older sister. There simply weren’t the funds to do other things. So I grew up in the thick of reality and have always followed that lead in life.”

It hasn’t always been that easy, or straightforward. Winslet’s rapid career ascent, from commercials to TV bit parts (including Casualty) to a starring role in Peter Jackson’s haunting Heavenly Creatures, was often accompanied by media comment about her body size, being a full-figured English rose rather than a skinny Hollywood vixen. Then, when she divorced her husband James Threapleton (they have a daughter, Mia) and moved to New York with her new partner, Mendes, she was decried for ‘going Hollywood’ and becoming exactly the lithesome archetype that was apparently off limits.

“It was hard for me, because I had been obsessed with my weight for so long,” she confesses a tad ruefully. “Strangely, it’s only now that I’ve had two children (she also has a son with Mendes, Joe) that I have a healthy body image, and I’m proud that I don’t have those issues any more.”

Currently single, Winslet, it seems, is pouring herself entirely into her professional life. After Mildred Pierce she’s starring in Steven Soderbergh’s virus movie Contagion, and then with Jodie Foster in Roman Polanski’s adaptation of the provocative play God of Carnage. It is an “empowering thing”, she has said. “I really need to not have anyone around. It’s a surprise to discover that I like being on my own.”

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