Kate Winslet,
Leading Lady
October 16, 2004

By Martyn Palmer, The Times

If there's one actress who embodies the new spirit of British film, it's Kate Winslet, the English rose who managed not to be swept up by fame of titanic proportions

In the fashionistas' paradise of the Venice Film Festival, where even the usherettes look like coiffed, pouting and overdressed Nancy Dell'Olios, our own, very British Kate Winslet is struggling with her feet. The problem is her "plates" are big (like "bloke's feet", she says, holding one up for inspection) and never stop screaming for mercy when she squeezes them into Salvatore Ferragamo stilettos and the like for these shindigs. "Mind if I slip them off?" she asks. Normally, she says, you'll find her slobbing around at home in "jeans and Birkies (Birkenstocks), mashed carrot all down her front. "God, that's better..." she says, flexing her toes now and clearly experiencing a delicious private form of paradise. It's been a long day. This morning she was up at 4am to feed her nine-month-old son, Joe, and give her four-year-old daughter, Mia, a tearful kiss goodbye before leaving for Italy. "I haven't done this for a while, the whole premiere and festival thing. It's weird having to think, 'What dress? What shoes?' And it's the first time I've flown away from Joe. I hate leaving them."

It's now nearly 9pm and Winslet's day is nowhere near an end. When this interview is over she'll go back to her room to "glam up" again - shimmering frock, stilettos, aching feet and all - for a midnight premiere of her latest film, Finding Neverland, in which she plays Sylvia Llewelyn Davies opposite Johnny Depp as J. M. Barrie, the man who wrote Peter Pan. There's already talk of Oscars, and if Winslet doesn't get nominated for this, she surely will for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which she feels reinvented her somewhat. In the meantime, she's curled up on a chair on the hotel terrace where we meet, and needs a reviving drink: "I'm desperate for a vodka and tonic."

Winslet, it must be said, is a breath of pure, untainted air in the heavily charged atmosphere of Venice. Pay her what you like, laud her with rave reviews, give her the full-on limo treatment, she remains essentially unspoilt. She lives with her husband, director Sam Mendes, in California for the moment, but she also remains as English as the expression "bloody hell" (which she uses quite a lot). "I was thinking about this the other day, because, bizarrely, I've never actually made a film in Hollywood. It's nice to remain different and ever so slightly aloof from the hoi polloi of the crazy industry that is film in Los Angeles. I like that - it's cool. It's my little trump card."

In reality, she holds plenty of aces. She is only just 29 - which is remarkable when you consider the life she's had both on screen and off. On it, she's never, ever predictable. She hit the box-office jackpot with Titanic when she was just 22, earning a second Oscar nomination (the first was for Sense and Sensibility, a third would arrive for Iris) and generating the kind of intense Hollywood heat that so rarely happens for Brits. Winslet could easily have taken an entirely different career route and, dangerously, believed all the hype. But what did she do? She turned down the big money offers and teamed up with director Gillies MacKinnon for Hideous Kinky, a small-budget tale of a Sixties hippy who sets off for 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. "I knew I had to get back in touch with myself and I had to remind myself of why I was acting in the first place - because I loved it. And for a while I had to do things that I genuinely wanted to do. That's why I did Hideous Kinky - it mirrored that time in my life. If I hadn't done it, I'd probably have gone backpacking anyway."

After starting out with her first job at 11 (a cereal commercial with the Honey Monster) she made her first film at 17 - Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures. Emma Thompson saw her in that and recommended her to Ang Lee who was directing Thompson's adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. They have remained close ever since. Titanic made her a star, like it or not, but she didn't feel like one then and still doesn't particularly. "I don't do starry things," she says. "For me, acting is very much my job. I have a great family and most of them are actors. For me to have changed would have been impossible because they would never have let me."

It's true, acting is in Winslet's blood. Her parents, Roger and Sally, were both actors, her grandparents ran a theatre in Reading, and both her sisters, Anna and Beth, are actresses.

Winslet couldn't be happier right now, but she has known her fair share of sadness - a former long-term boyfriend, Stephen Tredre, died from cancer, her first marriage, to assistant director Jim Threapleton lasted a little more than a year and broke down amid tabloid scrutiny. She met Mendes at a meeting to discuss working together when he was still artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse. Both couldn't stop telling mutual friends how much they liked each other and a date was arranged.

They married in May 2003 and Joe arrived in December, a brother for Mia, her daughter with Threapleton. At the moment, they have decamped to LA where Mendes is filming Jarhead, a drama set to the backdrop of the first Gulf War, and Winslet will stay at the rented home with the children. She's not particularly a fan of the place but she's determined to make the most of it. And the deal with Mendes is that when one is working, the other is not. "It would be completely impractical, given the hours. There is no way we could both work at the same time and we just don't want to. These are precious times, you know, when your kids are small, and I feel so blessed that I haven't had to work. I just have so much admiration for women who do have to do nine-to-five jobs 48 weeks of the year. I mean, that's an impossible thought for me. I would rather be penniless." Luckily for her, it's not a problem she has to face.

In the past she's been outspoken on the pressures on women working in Hollywood. There's been the well-documented battles with weight, her anger when a glossy men's mag airbrushed a cover shot of her to make her look slimmer. Recently, she's spoken of the toll that motherhood has taken on her body and memorably said that her "boobs were like the ears of a dog". "I like to be healthy, to feel comfortable and confident, and I exercise a couple of times a week. But that's for myself, not for my job. But your body changes when you have children and it's pointless pretending it doesn't. But cosmetic surgery isn't for me. I like the way I'm growing older."

The problem in LA is, says Winslet, that they all spend too much time fretting about their bodies and not enough time having a life. "I sometimes think that in LA people don't have enough to do. In London or New York you go out for a walk, go to a museum, meet a mate for a coffee, take the kids to the park. Here, the focus is on appearance. You see people going for a run at 5.30 in the morning, when I'm often up with Joe. I mean, there's something weird about people running around at that time. You'd never get that in London, would you?"

FilmFirst: For thousands of free preview tickets to Finding Neverland, see The Eye today. Finding Neverland is in cinemas from October 29

Source: The Times