Darling Clementine

With her signature potty mouth and no-holds-barred attitude, Kate Winslet rolls a few smokes and chats up Gotham, telling all about her unorthodox take on stardom, singing while in labor, and strolling through New York with spittle on her shirt.

By Deborah Baer
Photographs by Jason Bell

With her signature potty mouth and no-holds-barred attitude, Kate Winslet rolls a few smokes and chats up Gotham, telling all about her unorthodox take on stardom, singing while in labor, and strolling through New York with spittle on her shirt.

In New York, you can tell a lot about a person based on the neighborhood they choose to live in—especially with a celebrity. Kate Winslet may have starred in Titanic, the most successful movie of all time, but you wouldn't call her Manhattan address ritzy—or trendy— although it's certainly not boring. It's just kind of a pleasant surprise. Can't say exactly where it is for privacy reasons, but it's normal and ridiculously down-to-earth—much like, you guessed it, Winslet herself.

It's a rainy Friday afternoon, and Winslet has invited us to the brownstone that she and Sam Mendes (husband of one year, fellow Brit, and director of American Beauty) have been renting while working on separate projects in the city. He recently finished Broadway's Gypsy, and she has filmed two movies locally: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, co-starring Jim Carrey, which was written by Charlie Kaufman, directed by Michel Gondry, and shot on Long Island; and the upcoming Coen brothers production Romance & Cigarettes, written and directed by John Turturro and currently filming in Bensonhurst.

It's rare that a celeb would allow a journalist into her home, even if it's just a rental, but Winslet is a pragmatic woman. She'd rather not sit predictably, poking at an egg-white omelette at some grungy restaurant, preferring instead to have her kids (3-year-old Mia, her daughter with first husband Jim Threapleton, and Joe, 3 months) within earshot. The English Rose, as she's known back home, is no delicate flower. But instead, she's sitting in her home office, filling out her Oscar ballot, and puffing on the one rolled cigarette she'll allow herself today. She swears like a sailor, laughs wickedly and heartily, and says whatever's on her mind with no hesitation.

GOTHAM: Being a temporary transplant here, do you feel connected to New York issues, like Bloomberg's anti-smoking law?

KATE WINSLET: I always try to steer clear of talking about anything too political, but yeah, most definitely. I always liked the fact that there was a smoking and a non-smoking section in most restaurants here. And if a restaurant was completely non-smoking, you could choose to go or not go. And now you can't go anywhere and just have a drink and a nice relaxing cigarette.

G: Still rolling your own, we see.

KW: My sister came [to visit] in December from England before Joe was born and said, "Do you want me to bring anything?" I said, "Just bring me one packet of tobacco, because I can't get my favorite here." And I just knew when Joe was born that if I wanted to afford myself that little luxury, I was going to want to have my own little special tobacco.

G: You just gave birth in December. Congratulations.

KW: Look at this. I have a fabulous signed CD from Rufus Wainwright because we had him playing when I was delivering. He wrote, "Push!" Rufus was the only thing I could tolerate. Somehow it was distracting enough, but not too distracting, because his lyrics are incredible.

G: You were listening to the lyrics while you were giving birth?

KW: Yeah, literally, [sings] Cigarettes and chocolate milk!

G: So, did vou do the delivery au naturel or did vou get the drugs?

KW: Well, here's the tiling. I've never talked about this—I've actually gone to great pains to cover it up. But Mia was an emergency C-section. I just said that I had a natural birth because I was so completely traumatized by the fact that I hadn't given birth. I felt like a complete failure. My whole Me, I'd been told I had great childbearing hips. There's this thing amongst women in the world that if you can handle childbirth, you can handle anything. I had never handled childbirth, and I felt like, in some way that I couldn't join that "powerful women's club." So it was an amazing feeling having Joe naturally, vaginally. Fourteen hours with no drugs at all, but then I had to have an epidural because I was so tired. I honestly thought I'd never be able to do it. It was an incredible birth. It laid all the ghosts to rest. It was really triumphant.

G: In Eternal Sunshine, the whole premise of the film is that you can have bad memories erased. Would you ever want to do that?

KW: I don't think I would. I think that some of the toughest stuff I've ever been through has been some of the most formative stuff for me. I think you learn from your mistakes and get stronger through the shit times. I just feel like I've been through so much good stuff and bad stuff that's all been incredibly valuable that I'm really grateful for.

G: Clementine Kruczynski is such a great name—and she's such a rich character.

KW: I passionately wanted to play Clementine. She was so obviously completely different than everything I've done before, but in many ways I felt she was very close to me in the kind of zany sides of myself that I've never really been able to express onscreen.

G: She's kind of a bitch, but at the same time...

KW: ...you sort of love her because she does not give a shit. In fact, during that second scene where she invites him back to her apartment and they have drinks, a whole chunk of that scene was taken out. She said, "Do you think I'm repulsively fat?" And he goes, "No, no, no, no." And she goes, "No, neither do 1.1 used to but I'm through with that." And then she talks about how she loves her body and if she doesn't love her body, how could she be at peace with who she is. Which is a wonderful piece of dialogue, but I was pleased that they had taken it out. It made her less neurotic and actually more believable. She was true to who she was.

G: Women's magazines always make such a big deal about your weight. It's annoying.

KW: I know, I know. It's something I get asked all the time. But at the same time I think, well, maybe I asked for it, really. Because I sort of came out and stalled talking about how important it was for my body to be a normal shape and all these things that are sort of boring to me now. Maybe I should have never said anything in the first place, but whatever.

G: Let's not even dwell on it. Let's talk about the winter beach scenes in Montauk. Because as soon as summer is over, most of us forget about the beach. It was so lovely to see! It made me miss my house on Fire Island!

KW: We've completely fallen in love with Fire Island! We have friends who have a house in Ocean Beach, and they kindly lent it to us for a week in November before Joe was born. It's so wonderful. It's kind of blustery and real. It was freezing cold, but that's how we love it. I love getting blown around by the wind.

G: Usually when Jim Carrey does a movie, it's a 'Jim Carrey movie." But this film is equally about your character. His performance is so subtle.

KW: I was really impressed with how he acknowledged that he needed to be someone completely different from anyone he'd been before. He was very determined to nail that and get rid of anything that had been seen in any other character that he's played. That was massively important to me, as well. I don't like the idea of remanufacturing the same old character or going back to the same set of emotions that I used for whomever. But with Clementine, it was a massive emotional departure. 1 could explore so many other places because it wasn't a period film, which obviously I'm most used to. I loved playing her so much that at the end of the day 1 would actually be quite depressed to put my own clothes back on. I'd be like, "I wear too much black!" I loved the costumes so much that I asked to have them all. The wigs are upstairs in a box.

G: You should wear them out and about in the city because you never seem to be captured on Page Six. !G: Your life seems to be distinctly intertwined with famous directors. You're married to Sam Mendes. But you've also worked with biggies, like Peter Jackson [Heavenly Creatures], Ang Lee [Sense and Sensibility], and Richard Eyre [Iris .

KW: There's this little thing that I do. Which is to take a Polaroid of me as each character that I've ever played. And I have each Polaroid in a frame. I was just updating it last summer and as I was going through it, I was looking down the list at these directors. I was going, "Fuck, I've worked with some great people." It was the biggest kind of ego boost. I just went, "Fucking hell, I'm so lucky!" But Sam and I have never worked together, so I have no idea what he's like to work with.

G: Word on the street is "workaholic."

KW: He's not anymore. He finished working last May and hasn't done anything since. He's developing a whole bunch of stuff, but it's been great to just have him around. He's well aware of the fact that he spent much of his life just throwing himself at work—and he's loved doing that—but he loves other things now.

G: You.

KW: People who see Sam, who haven't seen him for a while, say, "My God, he's so different. He's just so happy and more relaxed." They always talk about this furrowed brow that he permanently had, and now the little furrow is gone. Everyone asks, "Are you and Sam going to work together?" I don't know. I'm sure we might do it at some stage, but we haven't really talked about it in any serious detail.

G: But (hen everyone will want to rip you to shreds. Do any married couples get away with working together?

KW: Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward got away with it. You put enormous pressure on yourself. I don't think that Sam and I would disagree on a lot of things in that situation. Even if I did disagree with him, I would still do what he wanted to do. It's very much part of my job to respect whatever vision the director has, even if I think it's crazy. But I think about what it would be like, and I honestly think that we would have such a laugh. No one makes me laugh like Sam. We're obsessed with Waiting for Guffman. I drive Sam mad because I do all the dialogue, all the songs, do all the dance moves.

G: You should be in a Christopher Guest movie.

KW: I would absolutely die to be in a Christopher Guest movie! But I'm sine they'd never have me. I'm too much of a face, and he likes to have those kind of indie actors. Titanic being the exception, I would completely consider myself to be an indie actor! This is going to make me sound like a nerdy fan.

G: Speaking of nerdy fans—full disclosure time—I saw Titanic, like, 15 times.

KW: Really [laughs giddily]! I've only seen it twice. Some of my films, like Hideous Kinky and Holy Smoke, I've only seen once. It's wonderful to see the film all put together, but beyond that, I have no desire to go through it and be confronted with some kind of analysis of how I played that part. It's there, it's done. I watched Jude again with a girlfriend of mine last year and that was the second time I'd seen it since it came out when I was 21. It was such a shock to see how I had created that strange character and how I had to be in a film so harrowing and depressing. I love the process. That's what's important to me. Even things that haven't done well at the box office. Sam is so jealous of the muscle that I seem to have for not reading reviews. I just don't do it. I put it straight in the bin. If it's bad, you can't go back and change it. If it's something good, I don't want to think that I'm something clever or special I don't want it to seem like I'm disinterested. It's just a sanity preservation thing.

G: Your next movie is J.M. Barrie's Neverland with Julie Christie and Johnny Depp. Now that is one hell of a cast.

KW: Julie Christie is incredibly sexy. She'd show up in the makeup trailer in the morning and 1 would just think, how canyon wear a knee-length skirt and be in your fifties and have bare legs and little sandals on your feet? And it's all completely subconscious. She doesn't even think about it. And Johnny Depp. I just love him.

G: Is he as shy as he comes off in public?

KW: He is quite shy. He keeps to himself, and he's a fiercely private person. But this is how Johnny and I connected. Johnny has a very British sense of humor. He's like a European man in an American body. He doesn't have an American sense of humor at all. He loves this comedy sketch show called The Fast Show, which is a huge, passionate thing of mine. So we used to sit in his trailer and watch endless episodes. Johnny is the one who got me started on The Osbournes, as well. But honestly I could talk about Johnny until the cows come home. He's the most wonderful dad. His wife Vanessa [Paradis] was around with their kids, so Mia. and Lily-Rose would play in his frailer on lunch breaks. Johnny started Mia on this obsession with tattoos.

G: What are you going to do when she turns 18 and starts getting the tattoos?

KW: I don't know. As a parent, you think about all these terrible things your child might do, like having their clitoris pierced. I've been trying to gauge or plan how I'll respond—and you just don't know. The one thing I can tell you I won't do is go mad. Then they just resent you.

G: Do you want to have more kids?

KW: Sam definitely does. A week after bringing Joe home, he said, "Can we have more of these?" I was, like, crossing my legs, saying, "Let's just see about that, darling." I think we probably will in three or four years time. I come from a long line of breeders.

G: So, is your life what you thought it'd be at this point?

KW: When I was younger, I definitely had an image of what my life was going to be like. I was going to get married, have four children, I was going to live in England but not London. 1 had all these plans and look at me now. I'm 28 years old, I'm on my second marriage, my children both have different dads, God knows when I'm going to have more kids, fuck knows where we're going to live. Sticking to one tiling or staying in one place is like death to me. My life couldn't be more different then what I thought, but 1 couldn't be happier with the way it is. [G]

Source: Gotham Magazine, March 2004 Issue