It’s as easy as one, two, three
October 15, 2006
SIOBHAN SYNNOT
WHEN Kate Winslet talks, everything is animated by italics. Exclamation marks abound. Words like “incredibly” and “fabulous” stack up like cucumber sandwiches at garden parties. An accurate recreation of her speech torrent in print would probably burn out the ‘caps lock’ on my keyboard. Yet this whirl of emphatic discourse is hugely beguiling. At her level of fame, most actresses approach interviews with all the enthusiasm of a teenager on work experience asked to clean the kennels. But Winslet gives every sign that this might be the most enjoyable part of her day.
Since she hit the box-office jackpot with Titanic nine years ago, generating the kind of Hollywood heat that rarely happens to British actresses, Winslet has tried hard to hang on to both sense and sensibility. She is quick to stress her unaffected appreciation of her position on the A-list. “I feel like a cracked record, because I keep saying that in terms of my career I feel incredibly lucky, but I really mean it,” she says. “I’m incredibly happy, truly, truly happy and feeling more centred than I have for a long time. I feel calmer, older and wiser.”
Now 31, Kate Winslet retains a luscious milkmaid prettiness even when sparking her Golden Virginia roll-ups. Her blonde hair falls in soft, saluki waves, and like a rollercoaster, she is tall and steeply curved. She is currently enjoying a thrill-ride of a season with three films heading our way between now and Christmas. First up is the period picture All The King’s Men, a big, important awards-season picture without anything big or important to say for itself. Still, that isn’t Winslet’s fault - her role as Jude Law’s southern belle sweetheart is just a subplot. Even so, she gamely tries to talk it up.
“It was one of those impossibly glorious opportunities,” she says. “To work with that cast, that director and a script which was so delicate, powerful and beautifully layered.”
Winslet appears with Law again, as well as Cameron Diaz and Jack Black, in The Holiday, her first glossy romantic comedy, while next month Little Children screens at the London Film Festival, ahead of its UK-wide release.
Little Children is by far the best of the bunch. A smart, wry and wrenching drama, it’s set in and around a suburban playground located somewhere between American Beauty and Short Cuts. Winslet plays a former college feminist, now clueless wife and careless mother, who embarks on an affair with a handsome neighbour, deluding herself that she is a modern-day Madame Bovary.
“This notion of romantic abandon is a fantasy we all have,” says Winslet. “At 14, I watched Dirty Dancing and just wanted Patrick Swayze to take me away, so in terms of love, I am a hook, line and sinker girl. If I’m committed in love, it’s everything.”
But while she can identify with her character’s recklessness, she struggled with her disconnected parenting, lugging the toddler from place to place like a bag of shopping. In real life Winslet has a daughter of six, Mia, from her brief first marriage to Jim Threapleton, and a two-year-old, Joe, with her current husband, director Sam Mendes. The couple have an agreement to alternate their work schedules, so there is always at least one parent at home in New York.
“This woman is nothing like me, really, really nothing like me,” she says. “She’s not the type of mother that I would respect if I should meet her in the playground.”
As Winslet tells it, she is a mother who happens to make movies. “Being a mother does make me respond to different things in different ways,” she says. “It makes me pull away from scripts that have a lot of violence, or anything happening to a child in them. I almost can’t finish reading them, I find them too devastating.
“Watching something like Finding Neverland is odd for me because I noticed that the instincts that I had as an actor, with the boys playing my children, do in fact mirror my own physical instincts with my son, though I didn’t have Joe at the time. I was constantly moving their hair out of their eyes, or straightening up their clothes. I like that, because I am a hands-on parent. When you go home from work and you’re straight into child care and meals, I have that wonderful, constant reminder of what my life is really about. It’s that part of my life, my home life, that I have to pinch myself about.”
THERE’S ALREADY an Oscar buzz around Little Children, and Winslet in particular, since the film’s premiere at the Toronto Film Festival this autumn, but Winslet has been down this road before, a point she gamely parodied in Ricky Gervais’ Extras, where she starred in a film about a nun resisting the Nazis. “I’ve noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust, you’re guaranteed an Oscar. I’ve been nominated four times. Never won,” says this ragingly cynical version of the actress. “The whole world is going: ‘Why hasn’t Winslet won one?’ Schindler’s bloody List? The Piano? Oscars coming out of their arse.”
Gervais first approached her about the role two years ago. Filming took two days, and most of that she says was spent trying to keep a straight face. “I don’t know how they cut it together because we were just in complete hysterics,” she says. More people stop Winslet on the street to say they loved her in that role than for anything else she has done.
“I think to myself: ‘Christ, if I’d known it was that easy, that all I had to do was stick on a nun’s habit, play myself and pretend to have telephone sex, why have I been sweating it for the last 10 years?’”
Why indeed? Once British actresses achieve a certain level of visibility, they tend to get subjected to an intense, generally unfair scrutiny that their male counterparts escape. Emma Thompson’s north London twang and ooh-I-need-a-wee forthrightness have been accused of being a pose. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Kate Beckinsale get ridiculed for transforming themselves into Hollywood glamourpusses, while Keira Knightley is exposed as Britain’s answer to Demi Moore, all good looks but no internal pilot light.
The doughty Winslet experienced her red carpeting when she was younger than any of these. Born into a family of actors in Reading, she always assumed she would be an actress, and retained that confidence even when slicing meat in a deli between stints on an ill-starred sitcom called Get Back.
Before she was out of her teens, Sense And Sensibility had earned Winslet her first Oscar nomination. She was not quite 21 when Titanic made her a global property. At that point she displayed the inner toughness that she tends to play down in interviews and opted for an entirely different career path, turning down the big-money offers and teaming up with Scots director Gillies MacKinnon for Hideous Kinky, a weird, low-budget tale of a hippie mother who bums around Morocco with her two young children in tow.
“After Titanic I knew my life could change, and as a consequence I could have changed as a person,” she says of the time. “I knew I had to get back in touch with myself and remind myself of why I was acting in the first place. And Hideous Kinky mirrored that time in my life. If I hadn’t done it, I’d probably have gone backpacking anyway.”
Everything she has done since then has been pretty weighty - she turned down the lead role in Shakespeare In Love on the grounds that it wasn’t enough of “a stretch”. Even in the post-Titanic years, when she married Threapleton and had her life overexposed and her weight endlessly analysed, she has not used film roles to win herself approval. She could have generated goodwill by accepting the role of Bridget Jones, but instead she opted to play the writer Iris Murdoch.
“I look to people like Meryl Streep and Judi Dench and Helen Mirren,” she says. “I’ve never been a good planner. I can plan my life and kids and everything, but in terms of work, I’ve never been good at it. I like to fly by the seat of my pants. Life is more interesting that way.”
• All The King’s Men is on general release from October 27
Source: Scotland on Sunday
Posed in: News > Interviews
