Independent-minded Kate Winslet put to the test with ‘Little Children’
October 19, 2006
By Amy Longsdorf Special to The Morning Call
Kate Winslet has never shied away from challenges. She spent months bobbing around a giant water tank for ‘’Titanic'’ (1997) and survived a grueling shoot in the Moroccan desert for ‘’Hideous Kinky'’ (1998).
But it was a different kind of test that presented itself during the making of ‘’Little Children,'’ Todd Field’s brilliant follow-up to 2001’s ‘’In The Bedroom.'’ The film, opening Friday in Philadelphia, serves up a deeply troubling portrait of a handful of Massachusetts suburbanites.
Winslet plays Sarah, a wife and mother who begins an affair with a married man (Patrick Wilson) out of a combination of boredom and lust. As Sarah becomes more enmeshed in the relationship, her parenting skills suffer.
It was the notion of playing a bad mother that first made the role a trial for Winslet, who is married to ‘’American Beauty'’ director Sam Mendes and is mom to two children, Mia, 5, and Joe, 2.
‘’I've played mothers before, but they’ve been decent moms,'’ notes Winslet. ‘’I've never played a character who was struggling with being a parent — and I’m not like that myself. It was hard to play someone with a big [personality trait] that I didn’t respect.'’
There was another aspect of ‘’Little Children'’ that also proved problematic for Winslet. One of the central characters is Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley of the original ‘’Bad News Bears'’ ), a just-released-from-prison pedophile whose presence in the community unnerves all of the parents, particularly a former police officer (Noah Emmerich), who takes to harassing Ronnie every chance he gets.
Winslet, 31, admits that the subject of sex offenders made her resistant to the script. ‘’I was initially hesitant,'’ she says. ‘’But once I read it, I was absolutely amazed at how brilliantly that part of the story was handled. Ronnie would do anything not to have this psycho-sexual disorder.
‘’I've never felt that much sympathy for someone like that before. When you watch the movie, you just feel so sad for Ronnie, and that’s down to Jackie’s [Earle Haley] brilliant performance.
‘’But as a mother, how do I feel about that kind of person? I’d be happy to kill them.'’
Ever since ‘’Titanic'’ turned Winslet into a household name, she has seemed to feel more at home in indie films such as ‘’Holy Smoke'’ (1999), ‘’Iris'’ (2001) and ‘’Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'’ (2004). She occasionally appears in big, studio movies like the just-released ‘’All the King’s Men'’ and the upcoming ‘’Holiday'’ with Cameron Diaz, Jack Black and Jude Law. But Winslet doesn’t mind suffering for her art.
‘’At one point on ‘Little Children,’ we were virtually carrying film equipment up the hill ourselves to catch the light,'’ she says, laughing. ‘’I was just fine with that. I can honestly say I love the experience of making indie films.'’
Winslet also loves the experience of going to the Oscars. She was nominated four times (for 1995’s ‘’Sense and Sensibility,'’ ‘’Titanic,'’ ‘’Iris'’ and ‘’Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'’) but has never won.
Now, as the buzz builds for ‘’Little Children,'’ Winslet is trying to stay, as she puts it, ‘’blissfully ignorant'’ of the hullabaloo. She says she never reads reviews or checks out stories about her Academy Award chances.
‘’It’s a sort of a means of survival for me that I don’t bother with any of that stuff,'’ she says. ‘’But I will say that I am unbelievably proud of my nominations. I love the fact that I got the nominations before I was 30. I can’t believe that’s happened. It’s an incredible honor.'’
Source: mcall.com
Posed in: News > Interviews
