Kate Winslet - Dissenting Adult

May 2004

By Edward Helmore Photographs by James White

There are things you might think of asking an actress, but when it actually comes to it, you just wouldn't. Some arise out of curiosity, some out of wishing to demolish the bizarre conditions ot the celebrity inteniew and the gamesmanship both paities must enter into for it satisfactory conclusion. Conventions are set and there's no benefit to revealing an extravagant highly individualised personality -- save that for the camera, when the only requirement will be to demonstrate an alluring visage. With Kate Winslet, who is talking amiably about her career by way of promoting her new film -- the exceptionally good Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- there's no temptation to provoke, to break the spell, by asking something along the lines of, "So, Kate, answer me this: what causes pip in poultry?"

Besides propriety there are several reasons why you would not embark on so misbegotten an undertaking (even should such stray thoughts frequent your mind at breakfast, even in Los Angeles, where it's uncommon to think of anything much at all). It's not a question to ask in a general, leading way in a general leading way. In any case, Winslet is preoccupied with her swelling bosoms and nursing her newborn baby boy, Joe, who is currently keeping his mother and father, director Sam Mendes, up for much of the night. Although Joe does not make an appearance, he is never far from centre-stage, and lest anyone forget him between his three-hourly feeds, he's decorated his mother's collar with an offering of baby vomit. Then again, it might be dribble. "No, no," says Winslet, inspecting the crusty, white mark. "It's most definitely sick."

It's unlikely that a US actress of similar standing would turn up at breakfast with puke on her collar. The US model, particularly one who lives in Los Angeles, would be far more invested in further an image of perfect professionalism; displaying a highly goal-orientated aspect, an overall sculpted and hard-polished package. But Winslet is not like that. She's direct without being bossy, down-to-earth and attentive, with an open face and the luminosity of skin that comes from growing up in a damp climate. While her counterpart would deploy flirtatiousness as a tactic, Winslet does not As a mother of two (her daughter, Mia, is three), she's following her biological imperative, her priorities are set and there's no sign of ditziness: no seepage between her professional and private lives.

But of course she knows the type. "I really pride myself on not being particularly judgemental about other people, but you can spot it a mile off," she confides. "When you see a person completely incapable of separating those two worlds, you're forced to imagine that their own personal world isn't that full. So they have to fill it with luxuries and attention." For Winslet, at the still tenderish age of 28, life is perfectly full as it is. She is accomplished beyond her years and -- as anyone familiar with her script knows -- thrice- nominated for an Oscar. She's been in countless films, and you don't need to have seen all her performances to get the drift -- classic English-literature lady (Sense and Sensibility), twisted schoolgirl (Heavenly Creatures), brainy novelist (Iris), hippy mother (Hideous Kinky), saucy laundry girl (Quills), to name but a few. And although it took what seemed like a lifetime for the ship to actually hit the iceberg and sink, we retain the memory, either directly or through osmosis, of Winslet as Rose DeWitt Bukater, clutched in the embrace of Leonardo DiCaprio, heading into the wind 00 and towards disaster - on the prow of the Titanic.

Winslet arrives at the discreet corner table of a Santa Monica hotel armed with more than a comprehensive and highly regarded career as an actress. She is by nature an optimistic person, mannered and able in ways in which British women tend to excel and with barely a trace of grandiosity. But the scars of fame are easy to detect.

She possesses a buiit-in editing machine developed in response to the add-ons, the programme extras of her success. There's a lot more to being a movie actress than acting and, while she sits comfortably in the lineage of a string of British character actors (and is pleased to be recognised as such), she is less enthusiastic about the byproducts of success. Namely, since we're on the subject, the intrusiveness that comes with the fame. "Rewind the clock a few years and I would have been freaked out at coming to Los Angeles at all. I was terrified of being photographed in my swimming costume and having some horrible thing written about me. But now I've had so much shit levelled at me I honestly don't care."

But she does care, and whilte it's a familiar refrain to hear successful people retroactively complain about attention when, unlike the rest of us, they get paid according to how much attention they receive, Winslet has some justification for feeling put out. Like many in the public eye, she has been useful as a carrier of our own personal and social neuroses. Her rise to fame coincides with teh mushrooming of public interest in or at least media coverage of - film stars. A glance over her press clippings makes the preoccupations of a certain strain of British life become clear. There's weight: "She's proud of her non-twig figure. She's a curvy 5ft 7in woman - and she's at peace with her physique", according to Glamour (plus, "She shed her baby weight healthfully"). Happiness: "It isn't something that just - hello! 0 falls in her lap. She creates it." And, of course, clothes: "She's a wash-and-go woman!"

As an actress who was propelled to fame at 21 and then consciously throttled back on megastardom to take smaller, more considered roles, she recalls being enveloped by that magnitude of fame as a scary experience "There were people who would say to me, 'Isnt it wonderful? Your life has totally changed' And I'd say, 'No, it's not fucking wonderful at all. It's terrifying. I don't know what I'm supposed to do.'" In retrospect, she says, "I could have just said, 'Oh, fuck it. I'm going to become a nightmare prima donna for a few years. But I had the wherewithal to realise that I could never top Titanic. I needed to put my feet back in my world, so I chose the smallest thingI could find." What she did, in fact, was to cut loose on the showboating and flee to Morocco to make Gillies MacKinnon's Hideous Kinky, a film she credits with giving her the space she needed to diffuse the weight of expectation that had been thrust so unexpectedly on her shoulders. Without it, she says, "I swear to God I would have lost my mind. There was so much pressure on me to do the next big thing, to embrace being this two-time Academy Award nominee."

The Big Ship film is now in the far distance, with thousands of fathoms lying between it and her latest offering, a compellingly romantic film of which she is justifiably proud

Directed by funky French video director Michel Gondry and taken from a script by Hollywood's golden-boy writer Charlie Kaufman (whose credits include Being John Malkovkh and Adaptation), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind concerns the mysteries of memory, specifically romantic memory - how it determines so much of who we are, and what we would be without if we lost it. It is a profound and honest take on an age-old theme, and true to life in ways that have rarely been touched on in film before. Winslet's co-star Jim Carrey plays Joel Barish, a man who finds that the woman he loves, Clementine Kruczynski (Winslet), has had experimental surgery to erase her memories of him. In his sadness, he elects to do the same but finds that, as the top layer of memories of their relationship are erased, those lower down - of a time when they were a blissfully happy couple - resurface, and he pursues her again, his memories being constantly erased behind him alongthe way. In effect, he's recalling the relationship even as he's forgetting it.

As fantastic and heady as its premise is, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is ultimately a tender film, one that elicits both the wistfulness that old relationships can evoke once they are safely in the past, and the sense of pathos and waste associated with those less securely stored away. But its real masterstroke is the way it invokes the abstraction of romantic memory, and how the mysterious and childlike qualities of human recollections are our memories' greatest asset "It's profoundly honest about relationships," Winslet says, "about how it just isn't possible for every day to be like the first day you ever met. And I felt it true of relationships I've had in the past."

For Winslet, the movie is a departure from her own script, too. Carrey, who displays convincing acting ability here, plays the romantic, while she is the steelier, more earthbound of the pair. "I'm thrilled about it," she says. "It's a leap to do something completely different. Strong female roles are not easy to come by, so Clementine was a blessing. She's feisty, quirky, ridiculous and neurotic."

The movie's reversal of traditionally perceived romantic gender roles is, in her opinion, true to life - not always, perhaps, but certainly sometimes. "It is true that men can be profoundly romantic, and often much more so than women," she says. "Sam has done things that have swept me off my feet, like whisking me off to Venice for my birthday two years ago. It was the most romantic thing that's ever happened to me. I'm completely slushy about the whole love thing. I think it's a woman's privilege to do that."

So it's less with weariness than with experience of being badly burned that Winslet extends herself to the maw of the entertainment press. Scrutiny of her relationships and subsequent harsh judgements of her performance in the role of divorced mother of a young child plainly hurt her. If she wasn't essentially private by nature, her experiences would still have created a desire to keep her life closed off. If she and Mendes so wished, they could be the Posh and Becks of the silver screen, but the pair are too knowing to take up the Faustian bargain of naked self-promotion.

Signs of a backlash against celebrities, set against a time when commerce and culture are becoming almost indistinguishable, are growing. Winslet has noticed it too. "Celebrities are being given a tougher time than ever before," she says. "It's less about the work actors do and more about who they're dating, who they're marrying, how many dads their kids have. There are so many horrifying celebrity magazines now. Ten years ago it was just Hello!, now it's OK!, Up Close, Up Your Arse or whatever."

At the same time, actors themselves seem to have been complicit in allowing themselves to be buried beneath theblandness of so much produce. As wonderful as it is to be recognised for your talents, Winslet concedes that the current fixation on the red carpet has come to seem a bit demeaning. "It is kind of tragic that it's become about what shoes you've got on, what dress you're wearing, who did your underpinning, how long it took to get ready. When you realise you are massively on-show and massively photographed, you think, 'Oh God, this is about being a show pony.'"

In other words, not much of an existence. "Having a life is really important to me. Ifyou're an actor and you don't have life experiences, then where do you get your stuff from?"

Winslet's experience of being marked down as a bad mother when she divorced husband Jim Threaplcton and took up with Sam Mendes has left a bitter taste in her mouth. "I was looking at raising a child all on my own, and no one was more surprised than me to meet and fall in love with Sam so soon. Of course, the press blamed my divorce on the fact I'd met Sam and we'd had an affair. No one will ever know what really happened because I don't want my daughter to read it in the press clippings."

Divorce is hard, but what she didn't need, she says, was to be "painted as some devil-mother who didn't give a shit about her child. When it's all bullshit, it's hard to swallow. I've always been able to take the good with the bad. but when lies are written about you, about me as a mother, about how I live my life, it makes me want to commit murder. It was a horrible, horrible time." Nowadays, Winslet, Mendes and the children divide their time between London and New York, where they enjoy the privacy afforded by American life. They live in a measured, domesticated fashion, and Winslet has cut back the amount and type of work she takes on. No exotic locations, no longshoots. "The most important thing in my life is my children, that they are happy, well- adjusted and secure." It's not hard to detect that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind marks an upswing in personal satisfaction for Winslet. She has another film out later this year - a period piece about J M Barrie and the inspiration for Peter Pan - but it's Gondry's romantic drama that's likely to advance her career and extend her range as an actress.

In this movie, as in her life in its broadest sweep, she's reached a place of professional and personal happiness. Look closely and you may see a different aspect to Winslet. For someone who lives partially (but not exclusively) through her work, and by her choice of roles, one detects a personal trajectory. Her role in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind represents a woman who has come a long way. "Clementine," she says, "is me really feeling happy, truly unleashed and free for the first time in my life."

'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' is out on 30 April

Source: British Esquire

Scans by Allan