Kate's Magizine Articles

Winslet back in awards spotlight

So far, Winslet has been nominated for best supporting actress twice at the Oscars, for Sense and Sensibility and for playing the young Iris Murdoch in Iris, while she netted a best actress nomination in 1997 for the multi-Oscar winning Titanic, ultimately losing out to Helen Hunt for As Good As It Gets.

Winslet received two Golden Globe nominations this year But of course she is no stranger to the red carpet, having scored a whole batch of awards and nominations over the past decade.

Bit parts

Winslet, who was born in Reading in 1975, made a low-key screen debut at the age of 11, starring in a cereal commercial.
Over the next few years she landed bit parts in TV shows and plays, the most notable being an episode of Casualty in 1993. But her first big screen break came when a pre-Lord Of The Rings Peter Jackson cast her in Heavenly Creatures in 1994.

One of Winslet's earliest TV appearances was in Casualty

Based on a true story, Winslet played teenager Juliet Hulme, whose obsessive relationship with schoolfriend Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey) resulted in a shocking tragedy.
Although the film had only a limited release, it was warmly received by critics and Winslet received good reviews for her performance.
But it was Ang Lee's adaptation of Sense And Sensibility which really thrust her into the limelight.

Global stardom

As the lovestruck Marianne Dashwood, Winslet more than held her own against her more experienced co-stars Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant, and scored her first Oscar nomination as a result.
The role of Rose DeWitt Bukater in Titanic gave Winslet her second Oscar nomination, as well as propelling her to global stardom. The film went on to win 11 awards on the big night, as well as becoming the biggest box office hit of all time.
But rather than use it as a springboard for other blockbusters, Winslet followed it up with a string of smaller projects.

Winslet at the 2002 Oscars, where she was nominated for Iris

She played a single mother travelling through 1960s Morocco in Hideous Kinky, while Jane Campion's Holy Smoke saw her as a woman who joins a bizarre religious cult.
More recently, she's been seen alongside Kevin Spacey in The Life Of David Gale, and in the World War II drama Enigma, co-starring with Dougray Scott - although neither made much of an impact at the box office.

Physicality

But 2004 saw a return to form with both Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and her Bafta-nominated role in Finding Neverland - the latter saw her as Sylvia Llewellyn Davies, whose son Peter served as the inspiration for JM Barrie's classic Peter Pan.
Winslet, who has two young children, has said that she drew upon her own experiences of parenting in order to play the role.

Winslet plays Sylvia Llewellyn Davies in Finding Neverland

"I don't think I could have played Sylvia if I wasn't a mother," she said.
"There is something about the physicality of being a parent that you don't know about until you become one."
Away from the screen, her personal life has kept her in the headlines almost as much as her career. She married her first husband, assistant director Jim Threapleton in 1998, and their daughter Mia was born in 2000, but sadly the couple split up the following year.
She is now married to American Beauty director Sam Mendes, with whom she has a son, Joe.

Entertainment Weekly's Entertainers of the Year #6
2004

''I remember being suspended by the wires and liking it a lot,'' says Kate Winslet, reminiscing about playing Wendy in a school production of Peter Pan when she was 15. ''I'm sure I was not very good.''
Somehow we doubt it. After all, in her most recent brush with J.M. Barrie's children's classic, Finding Neverland, Winslet soars. As a widowed mother of four, Winslet's Sylvia Llewelyn Davies meets a married playwright (Johnny Depp) willing to both accept and help carry her baggage. Her character is a radiant mix of grief and innocence — a grown-up saint who's a devilish kid at heart.
For most actors, that performance would be enough to rest on this year. But Neverland was the follow-up to Winslet's other terrific turn. In the Möbius-strip romance, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the biggest stunt in a movie consisting of daredevil storytelling stunts was casting Winslet — not costar Jim Carrey — as the film's live wire. Desperate to be loved, Winslet's Clementine is frazzled — her emotions as schizophrenic as her ever-changing hair color. And Winslet goes for broke in a way she never has before. At the end, when Clementine takes a chance on a relationship that may end in disaster for a second time, it feels like the most hopeful definition of love there is.--by Chris Nashawaty

Kate Winslet has never won an Academy Award. When you say it out loud, it seems extremely odd. Before this year, she's earned three nominations — her last for 2001's Iris — and she has danced gracefully among the elite in her field for 10 years now. Lovely, talented, and blessed with supremely discriminating taste, she is, perhaps, the leading actress of her generation.
If you need proof, look no further than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. As Jim Carrey's loopy-manic-brilliant-romantic lover, Clementine, she has a tough assignment. Buried under bulky clothes and shocks of orange hair, Winslet must emerge as the perfect damaged girl: the one that got away, the one so killer that you would fight tooth and nail just for another chance with her. Through divine alchemy (and with no small amount of help from director Michel Gondry and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman), the 29-year-old actress turns Clementine into a thinking man's dream. When she whips around to Carrey in Barnes & Noble with the rat-a-tat line ''Too many guys think I'm a concept, or I complete them, or I'm gonna make them alive. I'm just a f---ed-up girl who's looking for my own peace of mind. Don't assign me yours,'' you fall in love. The performance is gobsmacking — and only made more so when lined up against her sickly, subdued (but equally lovely) turn as a mother of four young boys in Finding Neverland.
What a year Winslet has had! Two stellar movies. Two stellar performances. Thousands of hearts broken. And if there's any luck or justice this February, one of the best actresses in decades will finally walk home with an Oscar.
Entertainment Weekly's look at the nominess for the 2005 Oscars

THE REAL DEAL
Kate Winslet has bucked the trend of Hollywood stars by remaining resolutely down-to-earth. To hear her tell it, she's one of us, not one of them, writes Eve McSweeney

Kate Winslet is drinking verbena tea in a Japanese café in Chelsea. She's dressed in generic jeans and a baggy black V-neck sweater with elbow patches that looks like she's borrowed it from her husband, the director Sam Mendes. Her long blonde hair hangs limp and a little frayed around her face—she actually took the trouble to dry it today, she says with some amusement. But her resolutely dressed-down appearance only emphasizes the Madonna-like beauty of her face, a softness that could break your heart, and probably has. Most people can name the moment they fell in love with Kate Winslet on-screen, whether it was her bold innocence in Titanic, her painfully reined-in passions in Sense and Sensibility (my personal favorite), the tender, suffering mother of Finding Neverland, or the lovable kook of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
The gentleness of Winslet's features in repose belies her full-on feistiness in action. A few minutes into our conversation, a pleasant-enough exchange about photo shoots (she enjoys them more now than she did at "the Keira Knightley stage"), her leg-waxing habits ("very sporadic these days"), and mastering various accents (the dialect coach on Titanic forbade her to talk to Leo between takes), she leans forward intently and grips my knee.
"Now, listen; I have to say something," she announces in her own clarion English, which makes no concessions to her presence in America. "I'm sure that in prepping for this you've probably read that I always have puree down my shirt, and I have cellulite as well, and I don't give a fuck about my weight, and I was with somebody who died, and I'm onto my second marriage, and blah blah blah. Yes, all those things have happened, but I've reached a point in my life where I'm an actress, and I want to be appreciated as an actress. I have, in fact, done a lot that I'm really proud of. I feel like I can say that now."
To hear her tell it, Winslet woke up one recent morning and realized that not only was she at the top of her profession, she was enjoying it, too. "I've almost reached a point where I'm going, 'I'm an A-lister,' " she says with marvel in her voice, and then laughs. "And I'm wondering, how has that happened? Some part of it I'm sure has been luck, and a foot in the door at an early age. But then another part of it has been sheer, bloody hard work. And that's come at a price, too."
This burst of self-assertion has been brought on in part by the fact that Winslet turns 30 this fall and has, she says, been reflecting on the past ten years in a big way lately. She's feeling settled in her marriage to Mendes—which has taken on a cozy routine in the downtown Manhattan loft the two recently bought and share with their one-year-old son, Joe, and Kate's four-year-old daughter, Mia. Their social life, says Kate, is "people coming over and kids running around, and constantly making food and loading the dishwasher and making more food and falling into bed after a glass of wine. It's bliss." The only chink one can find in Kate's down-to-earth armor, the only J.Lo moment, is a fondness for her acupuncturist and her psychic, whom she took as a guest to an Oscar party.
"It's an interesting time," says Kate with some seriousness. "The reality is, I'm not a little girl anymore. I don't smoke 20 roll-ups a day and sit around in my biker boots and swear at everyone" (though she still swears a fair amount and rolls a lesser number of cigarettes a day from a packet marked cigarettes can cause a slow and painful death in huge letters). "I'm a woman now; really, properly a woman. And I'm doing this thing called life, and pulling it off somehow, and I'm having a really nice time."
The defensiveness in her tone—hey, why not enjoy being on the A-list?—is also part of her Britishness, since she's used to being scythed down by her homeland media for being too tall a poppy. Though she and Mendes still call England home and keep a country house in the Cotswolds, she has sold her London town house to Gwyneth Paltrow and doesn't miss getting up in the morning "and, without thinking, going to the curtain to look outside. [The press] just stood there in lines." Her countrymen were a little hard on her when she split with her first husband, Jim Threapleton, whom she met on the crew of Hideous Kinky, the small independent feature she embraced, "terrified," to get away from the madness after Titanic. Speculation was rife about the power imbalance in the marriage—Threapleton was a third assistant director who, it was surmised, couldn't keep up with his ambitious, fast-track wife.
Her match with Mendes, on the other hand, would appear to have been made in thesp heaven. As precociously talented and successful as Winslet, Mendes is a man who, at 39, has only recently managed to shake off the Boy Wonder label—"He directed Judi Dench in The Cherry Orchard at 24, the jammy bugger!" Winslet points out affectionately—and pulled off an immaculately judged directorial debut in Hollywood in the shape of 1999's American Beauty.
"It was a fabulous dance," reminisces Winslet happily of her courtship with Mendes, who had initially called her to audition for a play he was casting as artistic director of London's Donmar Warehouse theater, after which they kept finding excuses to meet. "For a year we were engaged," Kate says, palpating the air, "a word I find ridiculously old-fashioned." Then, on a whim, they married while on holiday in the Caribbean two years ago, Kate barefoot and wearing a dress borrowed from a friend. The media didn't find out about it until the couple put out a press release five weeks later.
"The sense of equality between us is pretty big," she says, "and it's very useful in terms of how much we can support and encourage each other." Mendes was known for long-standing romances with actresses in the past, among them Jane Horrocks, Calista Flockhart, and Rachel Weisz, and for catering to the insecurities that come with the profession. Winslet confesses to her own moments of actorly angst, but she also has a scoutmistress side. She was the one, says director Marc Forster, who kept the boys—Johnny Depp included—in line on the set of Finding Neverland. Someone who likes to pack two weeks ahead for a trip and ship the bags, Winslet has a maternal bossiness that, say friends, has salved Mendes's own needs. "I'm a typical blackhead-squeezing, spot-getting, irritating woman," Winslet says of her domestic self.
A long with Kate's mum and dad, the pair were together at this year's awards season in Los Angeles, where they were living while Mendes shot Jarhead, a drama about Desert Storm, starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Winslet was up for awards for both Finding Neverland and Eternal Sunshine (including an Oscar nomination—her fourth to date—for the latter), and she allowed herself to luxuriate in the process more than she did in the past. She hired a stylist for the first time and pushed the boat out a little with her choices: Chanel couture for the Critics' Choice awards, a sharp white Dolce & Gabbana pantsuit and diamonds for the Santa Barbara Film Festival, and a periwinkle-blue Badgley Mischka gown for the Oscars. Professionally, she says, she's not particularly competitive and had no expectation of going home with a trophy. "Everyone knew Hilary Swank was going to win. She was so brilliant." But she relished "just being in the presence of all those other successful actors and feeling part of it."
To call Winslet intense would be an understatement. Her passionate presence—what Jude Law calls "her extraordinary enthusiasm and energy"—is part of what makes her such a convincing actress. In the industry, she's famous for being prepared to the point of obsession. The night before a shoot starts, she is, she says, a wreck, literally throwing up with nerves. Actor and director Todd Field, who made In the Bedroom, is about to start filming Little Children, in which Winslet plays a suburban wife who embarks on an affair. He tells the story of how he met Winslet right before the Oscars, when she was shooting the upcoming remake of All the King's Men, the epic Southern political drama adapted from Robert Penn Warren's 1946 novel.
"Kate was sitting in a chair devouring a cigarette and a much-dog-eared and completely ravaged copy of All the King's Men," he says. "It was clear from the pads full of notes around the place that she had been at it for days, and this is what she would continue doing until someone grabbed the book out of her hands and made her go to the awards. As soon as I arrived she put the book aside, and we started talking about possibly working together. But my eyes kept straying to the book and the numerous pads and post-its. Finally I asked her about her role, and at first she waved me off, saying it was a very small part and she had only a few days left of shooting. Then she suddenly grabbed the book and held it up: 'But Anne Stanton is so richly drawn in this. … I just know I'm missing something … something!' "
Here, too, she says, she's trying to loosen up a little. "As an actress I've changed, most definitely," she says, pointing out that you can't disappear into a role 24/7 when you have children to mother at the end of the day. "Acting used to be so crucial to my life and to my soul, and I used to just soak it all up. But almost too much, I think. Because a performance can be affected by overthinking it."
Winslet is unusual for a movie star not only in having achieved the status she has so young; too many actresses get leading-role recognition only in their 30s, by which time they're battling the clock and reaching for the Botox. It's also that she appears to have done so entirely on her own terms, with fame coming as a by-product of seeking out interesting roles and making risky choices. (Of course, her early success in Titanic helped.) Nor has she succumbed to the unrealistic standards we demand from our movie stars. Let me be the first to say it: Kate Winslet is very slim. But she has not beaten her body into submission with the usual regimen of binge diets and micro-lipo that is the least of her colleagues' habits. And her resistance has won her fans who appreciate her "real woman" quality, the sense that there is flesh and blood beneath the corsets. "People can identify with her figure," says one of her favorite designers, the London-based Ben de Lisi, whose dresses jump off the racks after Winslet is photographed in one.
As far as fame goes, Winslet insists that she doesn't care about adulation or riches; she doesn't even care whether lots of people go to her movies. Her expectations as an actress were rooted in the experience of her family: her father is an actor, "the sort of jobbing variety, not knowing where the next paycheck was coming from"; her grandparents ran a repertory company; and her sisters Anna and Beth, respectively older and younger, have careers of a similar stripe. (She also has a brother, Joss, who doesn't act.) Her parents instilled a self-belief in her that is at the core of her being. "No matter what we were doing or wearing and whether we were going through a phase, they would always say, 'You look fantastic,' even though I never did particularly look fantastic, because I was always chubby with big feet."
Mark Ruffalo, who appeared with Winslet in Eternal Sunshine, was struck by her assurance. "She's unerringly authentic to herself," he says, "and she has no real vanity around the work. There aren't many actresses who'll let themselves look that kind of funky and not glamorous in a movie." (She herself blanches at the memory of how plain she had to be as the young Iris Murdoch, though she let the character's personality shine right through the short bangs and ankle socks.) As for her choices, "She has no fear of the future," Ruffalo continues. "There's an interesting type of actor who actually makes fear their friend, just heads into it, and she seems to do that with the diversity of her roles."
This diversity includes the Sadeian Quills and Jane Campion's Holy Smoke, in which she was required to face down Harvey Keitel buck-naked in the desert. One of her own favorites is Eternal Sunshine, for which she tried out a more freewheeling acting style (and kept the blue and orange wigs for Halloween). In the upcoming musical comedy Romance & Cigarettes, directed by John Turturro, she does a hilarious turn as an all-out floozy with a Northern English accent uncannily like Jane Horrocks's. So unabashed is she in her approach to work and life that she even welcomes the aging process. "I'm liking getting older," she says. "People say to me, 'You won't say that when you're 32 and everything starts going south.' Well, I had Mia when I was 25, so things have been going south for quite some time, and I'm fine with it." She's just out of a meeting to discuss a possible movie role in which she would be playing 30. "It would be the first time I've ever played my age. And it just felt good."
Raised in Reading, a town outside London, Winslet went to a stage school, an experience that, she says, "was not brilliant for me. It was competitive and quite bitchy, and most of the kids had very wealthy parents, which I didn't." But she never had any doubts that she wanted to be an actor. Then, at sixteen, when she was literally in the middle of making a pastrami sandwich in the Hampstead deli she worked in at the time, the phone rang to say she had been offered a part in Heavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson's 1994 adaptation of a true story about a pair of underage murderers in New Zealand, one of whom Winslet played with exuberant malice. She never looked back.
An international celebrity from the age of 22, Winslet often seems to have lived a lot for her years. She entered a serious relationship at fifteen with an older TV writer, who developed cancer. She chose to attend his funeral in England rather than the Los Angeles premiere of Titanic. She married at 23 and had her first child two years later. "I come from a long line of breeders," she says cheerfully, adding that she has the biological leisure to consider having "two or even three more." But she admits now that her experience to date has been pretty "bang-bang-bang. Hard-core life and hard-core work. There are definitely moments of fun that an average teenager would experience that I didn't. I haven't taken any drugs, actually. And I didn't do nearly enough clubbing." She laughs. Leonardo DiCaprio, who has remained an extremely close friend, reminded her as the two were starring in the biggest film of its time to make sure to lighten up. "I've consistently remembered that," she says. "I'm always telling myself to stay in touch with what it's like to have fun."
A few days after the knee-gripping incident, I'm waiting for Winslet on the street. Numerous slightly unkempt young blondes come into view who at first might be her, which occurs to me is a good thing if you're an actress seeking to represent recognizable characters. But one is too glitzy, another has implausibly high heels, a third walks differently—Kate has a purposeful stride that often lands her on the school run hot and bothered, she says.
According to her stylist Tanya Gill, she will always opt for ease over glamour. The girl who could wear any shoe in the world favors Stuart Weitzman for award shows. As for the dress, "she might try something on that's really cinched in and the bust looks amazing, but she is going to choose the comfortable gown over the uncomfortable one every time," says Gill.
Finally she appears, in brisk mommy mode, with toddler and stroller in tow, a swinging ponytail, pink skirt to the knee, flowered shirt and Birkenstocks, well equipped with snacks and sippy cups. If you ran into her on the street, you'd be more likely to think, That girl looks like Kate Winslet, than, There's Kate Winslet, so little does she exude the self-awareness of a movie star. During an hour we spend wandering around her neighborhood, only one shopkeeper is sharp-eyed (or uncool) enough to recognize her, coming over all coy and pointing her finger while muttering, "Titanic." Winslet achieves this out-in-the-open position by hiding in plain sight, and she shields her children from what she does as much as possible, dressing for events outside the home and avoiding taking them on set with her. "I don't want them to see me pretending to be someone else," she says.
Staying staunchly in the real world is, you sense, a decision she is determined to stick with. She confesses to a dream she just had in which she underwent foot reduction—she wears a galumphing size 11. "I said, 'Nothing major, just one size,' so you couldn't tell," she says, tickled at the memory. Bring up the subject of real plastic surgery to Kate and she says, "Don't even start me! I just don't understand it." As for the subject of her weight, a touchy one that has dogged her in all her interviews, she's arrived at a philosophical view.
"When I was a teenager, I was very overweight," she says. "I was 190 pounds when I was sixteen. And as an actress, I wanted to play Alice in Alice in Wonderland, not the Ten of Spades or the White Rabbit in costume with buckteeth. There's a difference. And so, over the course of a year, I very, very sensibly lost the majority of the weight. I changed the way I thought about food and my body."
So far so good. But then she says, "It hit me after Titanic that even though I was this kind of normal shape, people were talking about this shape of mine and saying that I wasn't skinny and this was a good thing, and then some people were not very nice to me about it, too. And I just thought, hang on a minute, this is completely fucked up: I'm relatively slim, I eat healthily, I keep fit. OK, well, is it me or is it them?"
To keep on track, she works out regularly—"but no more than anyone else"—and says she is fitter now than she has ever been. Having children, she says, appears to have speeded up her metabolism. And when she feels the creeping pressure, "I just remind myself that I couldn't be 105 pounds even if I tried, and more important I really don't want to be 105 pounds. And also I'm a completely normal shape. Hanging on to that sense of normality keeps me from having an abnormal brain."
Normal is a word that comes up a lot with Kate, who insists it is just her job that is odd. But the real key to her sanity—and her size—she suggests, is her state of mind. "I met Sam … and got really happy," she says with a smile.
She picks up Mia from preschool, a flaxen-haired sprite who is her mother's daughter if her on-the-spot tap dance is anything to go by, and the stroller-caravan is on the road. The woman with no fear of the future likely has a rich one ahead of her. "I think she's going to have one of those great rare careers that go on forever," says All the King's Men director Steven Zaillian. "Call it the Meryl Streep career. She's not some sort of passing fad. She's the real thing." And judging by the good cheer she exudes as she sets out for home, the psychic has made some very positive predictions indeed.
-VOUGE July 2005