Mr Mum and me: a hard working family in Hollywood
March 19, 2006
Eight weeks after her baby was born Kate Winslet was back in the studio. She tells Giles Hattersley how she juggled breastfeeding and her sexiest role to date while Sam Mendes played househusband
In the American Express advert that’s been running for a few months now, Kate Winslet sashays through Camden Market reliving her tortured on-screen life — “I almost drowned at 20”, “by 29 I was in Neverland” and so on. Had ad execs bullied her into dishing the dirt on her real life, Winslet’s breathy voiceover might have gone something like this:
“At 17 I became a movie star — despite being a bit of a porker from Reading. At 20 I was Oscar-nominated. At 21 my first love died of cancer. At 23 I married a non-celeb. At 25 I had his baby. At 26 I divorced him. At 27 I married a real celeb. Then my curves were digitally cropped for a magazine cover — how annoying! At 28 I had a second child, at 29 a fourth Oscar nod, and made my 19th film.”
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For all her supposed devotion to normalcy (bangers and mash at the first wedding reception, general disdain for Hollywood glamour), Kate Winslet has lived fast. Perhaps this is why she has become something more than an actress — a reluctant flag-bearer for a generation of women whose twenties and thirties are a battlefield. Weight troubles. Divorce. Working motherhood. Winslet only recently turned 30, so it’s no surprise that not long into our conversation she drops her voice to tell me: “My last birthday was a blessed relief, frankly.”
Then the lush, period-heroine tones return. “I did so much in my twenties, I crammed so much in, such extraordinary pain. I got married very young and then the divorce, of course. At the time I remember thinking, ‘How am I supposed to cope with this? I’m so young.’ It was personal pain on an extreme level because it was in the public eye.” She sighs. “I love that I’ve managed to gently slide out of the spotlight recently.”
Slide out of the spotlight? Perhaps she doesn’t follow the British tabloids now that she and husband Sam Mendes, 40, spend so much time in America. Scarcely a month goes by without an update on Winslet’s poundage, her supposedly fraught dealings with ex-husband Jim Threapleton, or reports about her steely new Hollywood persona. After all, Winslet is virtually our biggest acting export, and interest will never stop at her front door.
This week she is back on cinema screens, after a two-year break, in the musical Romance & Cigarettes. As the outrageously slutty Tula, a lingerie salesgirl who has an affair with James Gandolfini, she utters not one line of dialogue we could print in a family newspaper, squeezes a post-pregnancy body into fishnets and sings up a storm. It’s the first of five films she’ll release this year.
It’s 8am in Los Angeles when we speak. Normally resident in New York and the Cotswolds, Winslet is currently shooting her first ever film in Hollywood, The Holiday, opposite Cameron Diaz. Isn’t she one of the women in your husband’s enormous harem of celebrity ex-girlfriends, I ask. “That is bullshit,” Winslet shrieks with delight. “I don’t know why people always say that. No way, not Cameron.”
Life, it seems, is less on-set catfights and more mopping up after the kids’ breakfast. Up since dawn, she’s already been to the local coffee shop and built a couple of sandcastles with Mia, 5, and Joe, 2. “We’ve got a little house on the beach,” she admits, careful of any extravagance this might imply. “I’ll stand by the window for you . . . can you hear the sea . . . glamorous, isn’t it?”
Having spent a lot of time in LA recently (her director husband made Jarhead here last year), can our Kate be turning into a Hollywood wife? “Never,” she protests. “If you must know, I’ve just smoked a Golden Virginia rollie. Friends bring packets of it over from England. I’m also sitting here wearing an Arctic Monkeys T-shirt that Sam brought me back from the gig he went to last night.” She laughs. “That’s my husband for you. He waved it in my face at midnight and whispered, ‘Look what I’ve got for you!’”
The über-brained director of American Beauty at a sweaty rock concert? “Oh how little people really know my husband,” she giggles. “And by the way, he doesn’t keep copies of Shakespeare on the bedside table either.” Is he more of a Dan Brown man? “Well er, not quite, but it’s not like I’m married to some professor.” Having young children doesn’t stop them making time for each another. “Oh you’ve got to,” she explains. “It’s so important that we really try to stick to our date nights.” What do they involve? “You know, go to movies, go to dinner.”
This is the life Winslet always takes pains to present — kids, work and a few laughs with her hubbie. “Honestly I really am just a mum. I’m in the playground, I’m in the sandpit, I’m doing the school run and the packed lunches. You can buy Marmite over here now,” she adds by way of evidence, “but the fishfingers are not the same in LA. Mia and Joe don’t like them. The outside is too crunchy.”
Winslet has always felt a need to display her common touch. Why not just relax and be a film star? “I really don’t think of myself as a — and I’m embarrassed to even say these words — movie star. If I was constantly working with a stylist to plan the next outfit for blah, then maybe I’d feel more that way. Don’t get me wrong, that stuff can be fun, but if I did it all the time it would be horrid. It’s easy to lose yourself that way.”
As Winslet tells it, rather than a celebrity mummy she is a mum who makes films. “There’s this myth about working actresses (her euphemism for female movie stars) that they only care about themselves and their careers and will bugger off and leave their children behind for three months. That we think we’ve got 10 good years in us and we’re going to bloody well do it all, regardless. But I don’t feel like time is running out and I must do as many films as possible before my face falls off and my ass hits the ground. If that happens, that happens.”
Unusually for Hollywood then, Mr and Mrs Mendes have made professional glory take a back seat to childcare. “I’m working at the moment,” says Winslet, “so Sam has become Mr Mum, which he loves. We have a nanny, but we always take it in turns to work so there’s always one parent at home when the other is out in the day.”
Which means Winslet has turned down extraordinary work. “Like any mother, my career is always a negotiation,” she says. “I’ve never travelled away from my children and I never would.”
It may be no sacrifice financially, but surely it’s still a sacrifice? “It’s never a sacrifice,” she says instantly. “I mean obviously I’m never going to take a job that’s shooting in Africa for three months. Forget it. That would throw my children completely.”
If Winslet finds it easy to juggle her career, it must be tricky for her highbrow husband. He earns upwards of $1m a film himself. “It’s true that since Joe was born all he’s done is Jarhead, but he feels happy to make that choice.” Come on, it can’t always be argument-free? “Okay, I won’t pretend it’s totally easy. When I’m working, the only difference between me and a mother who works in an office is that my actual daily hours spent at work are longer.”
In fact, for all her purported earth motherness, Winslet was in a rehearsal room blocking out dance scenes for Romance & Cigarettes eight weeks after giving birth to Joe. At a time when most mothers are glued to the sofa and wouldn’t want to leave their baby for more than a few minutes, she was prancing in front of a camera crew in her smalls. That she was even in shape to do so suggests a driven, flinty ambition.
“I would literally feed him, throw on a tracksuit and lump my way into work with massive breasts and rehearse between feeds. (Co-star) Mary-Louise Parker’s little boy was only five weeks old too. In between scenes we could hear one another’s breast pumps through the walls of our trailers.
“One particularly ridiculous moment came when we were filming in Agent Provocateur underwear and ended up running over. I had to put the milk in a freezer bag and get some random set driver I’d never met before to take the milk back to our house.”
In a post-feminist twist that might surprise Candace Bushnell, Winslet even put her lactating breasts to professional use. “I was (coughs demurely) considerably bigger than I normally am, so it was ideal for playing this old slapper. Screw that whole ‘To be or not to be’ shit,” she laughs. “Depending on the scene it was literally ‘To pump or not to pump’. By the end of the sex scene with Jim Gandolfini in the motel (much straddling and jiggling) I was in agony, absolutely exploding out of my costume.”
At least she seems to be feeling more comfortable in her skin these days. Winslet will never win the weight debate, she thinks. She’s either criticised for being too fat or too thin. Joan Rivers once said of her appearance in Titanic: “If she just lost five pounds, Leo would’ve been able to fit on the raft!”
“Of course LA is image-conscious, but it doesn’t get to me in the way it used to,” she says. “I remember coming here at 19 to try and get work. I was reading five scripts a day and was absolutely terrified. My stomach rumbled for two days straight because I was so screwed up trying to be thin.”
Babies put paid to that particular neurosis and she says she didn’t mind showing off her (extremely moderate) baby weight on screen. Now she is determined that a transatlantic upbringing doesn’t get the better of the kids. Mia starts proper school later this year, possibly in New York, though Winslet doesn’t want to say. Either way, there’ll be no ambitious hothousing from mum.
“I just don’t think an hour of piano followed by an hour of ballet followed by an hour of God knows what necessarily makes your child a better person,” she says. “I find all that competitive stuff ridiculous. At the moment Joe likes fingerpainting and Mia likes sticking macaroni on his face. Kids aren’t rocket science. We should relax about it a bit.”
I realise the talk has been much more babies than movies. I suggest that if I called her a bad actress she’d get over it, but I’d call her a bad mother at my peril. “It’s true,” she says. “I find myself talking away like this and it makes me wonder why I feel this overwhelming need to make it all sound okay, to let everyone know Sam and I are still together, that I’m not ditching my kids and buggering off to work.” The vitriolic press response to her first divorce must play a part. “It’s important to me to say we’re all together, that we’re okay, that I’m not some hideous woman, that I’m not a bolter. We’re not actively trying right now, but more kids would be heaven.”
With her existing children approaching school age, doubters will be interested to see if the Mendeses’ seemingly perfect work/life balence can hold steady. Perhaps Winslet will eventually be revealed as much more starlet than everywoman? “Nah, I shouldn’t think so,” she laughs. Having struggled through the trials of life’s first quarter, “these,” says Winslet, “are the good years”, both for a reluctant movie star and her Mr Mum.
Romance & Cigarettes is released on Friday
Source: The Sunday Times
Posed in: News > Romance & Cigarettes > Interviews
