On an unseasonably sweltering October afternoon, in the merciful cool of a darkened sound studio inside Manhattan’s famous Brill Building, Kate Winslet is standing before a wooden lectern, making spidery notes in the margins of three sheets of paper. Maybe 10ft ahead of her, projected onto a mid-sized cinema screen, is a close-up of the face of the comic actor Jack Black, frozen mid-exclamation. Winslet is about to begin “looping” the introductory voiceover that will be heard above the opening credits of The Holiday, a romantic comedy from Columbia Pictures, in which she stars with Black as well as Cameron Diaz and Jude Law.
Apart from me, Winslet’s only audience is composed of two sound engineers. Through our headphones, we can hear and speak to the film’s writer-director, Nancy Meyers, and its editor, Joe Hutshing. They are in Los Angeles, three hours and more than 2,000 miles away, and a live feed allows them to watch the same images and listen to the same sounds at exactly the same time as us.
What none of them can appreciate is how beautifully Winslet is lit. From where I’m sitting, the lamp illuminating the pages of her script is casting a golden aura on her face, her chin upturned towards a microphone as she readies herself for another run at the same lines she’s been speaking for the past hour or so. She looks composed and expectant, but also quite excited. She’s clearly enjoying herself.
Winslet’s scrawled imprecations to herself are blunt and to the point: “Perkier”, she’s written next to one phrase; “NO!” next to another. Further self-directions include “too much emphasis", “more hurt”, “CRAP!” and “too wistful”.
There’s a Shakespeare quote right at the beginning – it’s one of the first things the audience will hear – and both Winslet and Nancy Meyers are worried that, as the star puts it, “it sounds like a quote with a capital ‘Q’: a bit too RSC.” “Can we do that again?” she asks, not for the first time. Then, “Are we doing one more for shits and giggles?” And again, “That was just plain old shit. Can we go again?”
Winslet has kicked off her flat shoes and tied her hair back in a ponytail. She’s wearing a tight green tank top and skinny black jeans by Rag & Bone. She is a very kinetic performer even at this, the least physical aspect of acting. When she speaks a line to her satisfaction, she performs a silent karate kick and punches the air. When she’s frustrated with herself, she gets down on her hands and knees and pretends to pound the floor.
There’s a steely resolve, too, that reveals itself when Meyers and her star debate a line that the actress decides she wants removed from the film. There’s no argument, nothing even close to it, but each woman puts her point in turn, and Myers eventually concedes. Winslet’s character will not have to lean out of the window of a Los Angeles taxi and gush, “ at those flowers!” Or even, “Look at those !”
During a Nancy Meyers loo break, Winslet removes her headphones and she and I sit together on a sofa at the back, smoking. She’s still rolling her own, but she promises she's cut down. “Do I seem the same person in here as I did out there?” she asks me. She seems genuinely curious to know the answer, as if she might have something invested in it. “Yes”, I say, because she does, “you seem exactly the same.” “Good,” she says. “I thought I was.”
The prevailing wisdom about Kate Winslet, both outside and inside the film business, is that despite her huge fame, her great wealth, her considerable beauty, her celestial marriage to Sam Mendes, her position as what the Americans call “a powerful role-model for young women” and her extraordinary, ripe talent, she's incredibly “normal” and “down-to-earth”.
My day with her started not face-to-face, but in the more familiar position – for me, anyway – of gaze-to-screen. I watched her on Live with Regis and Kelly – the big American morning magazine show. Winslet was promoting her film and she was, I thought, extremely gracious, as Kelly made her second – and, to these ears, painful – play at mimicking her accent. Winslet came across as a good sport, although I fancied I could see flickers of discomfort. And she did look glamorous, elegant, even a little severe, in her skinny jeans, cropped, tailored black jacket and high black heels, with her hair pulled back.
By the time I found her, no more than an hour later, in a suite at a Park Avenue hotel where she was having her photograph taken for the , the transformation back to casual Winslet had begun. She was complaining about the heavy make-up she was wearing – “I feel like you can hardly me” – pulling out fake eyelashes and clowning for me and her publicist. After an introductory encomium on her hometown football team, Reading FC, she prepared for her photograph by removing two of the photographer’s stickers from his bag of film rolls and sticking them on her vest, one over each nipple: “exposed” now inscribed on each breast. “Well,” she said. “It’s nothing you haven’t seen before.”
This is the Kate Winslet we might have expected: an unassuming, unaffected Home Counties girl, unexpectedly transported to the very top of the Hollywood A-list. Cheeky, charming, maybe a bit actressy and intense but all things considered a thoroughly good egg. When I ask her, during the interview proper, whether she really is as normal as everyone thinks, she says she is. She is, she concedes, in the rare position for someone of her celebrity of having a public image that is an accurate representation of the private person. “Do I sound like I’m patting myself on the back, saying that?” she wonders.
I tell her she’s lucky, because lots of famous people I’ve met seem relatively sane but that’s not reflected in the press or on television, where they’re regarded as egocentric nut-jobs. “I’m lucky all over,” she says. “Of course, I’ve been dealt some rough cards, certainly at the beginning of my 20s. But the trick is not to change yourself because of what somebody else thinks.” She’ll come to the struggles of her 20s a bit later, but for now she says she is proud of the fact that young women have someone to look upon who doesn’t try to conform to the improbable strictures of contemporary physical aesthetics or behave in a way that’s likely to push Lindsay Lohan off the covers of the celebrity weeklies. “I know I may be the only person beating the normal drum,” she says, “but I’m afraid I’m just going to carry on.” It’s not that she doesn't have to fight to maintain her equilibrium, she says. It’s just that more often than not, she wins.
Winslet was up at 5.30 this morning, making packed lunches for the kids – Mia, who has just turned six, and Joe, who’s three – then laying their clothes out for her husband to help them into while she had her hair and make-up done. She will work all day today and when I later leave her outside her apartment in Chelsea, at around 6pm, she’s already thinking about what she’ll be cooking for supper.
Still, it’s a tricky word, “normal”. After all, one woman’s run-of-the-mill is another’s out-of-this-world. And if we understand normal in the sense of “commonplace” or “average”, then I think that despite her protestations, Kate Winslet isn’t really normal at all. Which isn’t to say that she’s weird, or a liar; just that she’s exceptional. There’s certainly nothing normal about her talent. Todd Field, who directed her in her recent film tells me, “There's normal about her. She’s rare and fine and peculiar. When people say she’s normal what they’re referring to is that she doesn’t run around trying to get her picture in the papers or on TV. What’s interesting is what she is – grounded and with her head screwed on.”
Jude Law, who stars alongside her in and who also worked with her in , calls Winslet’s ability “astonishing”. He tells me, “She takes it very seriously but also remains very calm and good-natured. She’s not all about showing you how hard it is. When Kate’s on screen, her acting’s effortless and she’s absolutely dedicated to making it as real as possible.”
Her life isn’t normal, either. She is someone who is watched, followed, fantasised about. They’re outside the hotel now – the paparazzi and the autograph hunters – and when we make our escape, the cries start immediately: “Kate! Kate!” As we approach the car she whispers to me, “Just keep walking.” From nowhere, someone flashes a camera at us and I feel suddenly protective. “Get in,” she says to me, opening the car door. “ get in,” I say, hesitating, trying to be gallant. “Just she says, more determined, and as I do, she turns back and allows the photographer his picture, and signs her name for the kids who have been waiting for her since her TV appearance five hours earlier. Is this normal? It is for her.
Kate Winslet says she can recall quite clearly the first time she realised she wanted to be an actor. “Horrifyingly,” she says, “I was five.” The following story is typical of Winslet, I suppose, in that it combines a determinedly quotidian setting with a disarmingly earnest sentiment and a breezy, potty-mouthed delivery. “I was sitting on the loo, with my feet dangling over the edge, waiting for a poo, basically. And I can hear my mum in the kitchen, just going about her normal business, pots clanking and taps running and ‘Rog! Your socks are in the sink!’ You know, life, basically.” She understood, she says, while listening to this performance, that this is what acting is. “The penny dropped,” she says. “Acting’s just being real.”
Winslet is from a theatrical family. Her father, Roger, is an actor; both her sisters, Anna and Beth, are actors; her uncle, Robert Bridges, worked widely in the West End; and her maternal grandparents ran the Reading Repertory Theatre. She started acting in amateur productions at The Hexagon in Reading when she was nine, and won her first professional role at 11, dancing alongside the Honey Monster on a TV ad for Sugar Puffs. She went to theatre school at Redroofs in Maidenhead; her first screen performance, when she was 15 and “very overweight”, was in an ITV drama called . Two years later she went to New Zealand for three months, on her own, to make her first film, , directed by the then relatively unknown Peter Jackson.
“When I came back to England I felt like a completely different human being,” Winslet says. “For some reason I’d just never thought, ‘Oh, my God. It’s going to come out and people are actually going to pay to go and see it.’ When we went with to the Venice Film Festival, that was my first taste of being photographed and interviewed. It was amazing, but just so weird and unreal. Fuck, it was exciting! It still didn’t turn my head, though. It didn’t make me think I was going to be person now.”
The following year, in 1995, Winslet played opposite her enduring mentor Emma Thompson in the Ang Lee-directed Sense and Sensibility. It won her her first Bafta and the first of four Oscar nominations, at the age of 20. She followed it with turns as Sue Bridehead in Michael Winterbottom’s in 1996 and as Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh’s big-screen version of Hamlet. It’s not so much the case now, but at this stage her beauty did seem somehow old-fashioned, “period”: the wide eyes, the full lips, the characterful nose, the thick, dark eyebrows, the pale, creamy skin, the figure slightly fuller than those of her aerobicised American counterparts. These traits, presumably, did not go unnoticed by James Cameron, who was seeking a young actress to play Rose, the heroine of his blockbuster-in-the making, Titanic.
The unprecedented success of that film – it still holds the record for biggest box-office gross of all time was seriously discombobulating. “It was genuinely overwhelming,” she says of the experience. “People would say to me, ‘How are you going to cope? Your life’s going to change.’ I would say, ‘My life’s going to change.’ I was very defensive about it. But the truth is my life did change. Completely. Who I was managed to pretty much stay the same deep down. But I definitely thought, ‘Fuck. I’m going to have to navigate my way through this. And I did that by myself.”
Her major decision, which turned out to be a good one, was to temporarily abandon Hollywood and disappear into the north-African desert to film a British production, 1998’s . “There were lots of huge offers with big shiny pay cheques, but I wasn't ready,” she says. “For whatever reason, I knew I could run the risk of burnout, and I wanted to be acting for a long time.”
Her decision foreshadowed the eclectic career to come, in which Winslet has earned herself a reputation as arguably the most gifted screen actress of her generation, playing a series of spirited, independent, sexually and socially adventurous women, in challenging, offbeat films: one thinks of the brazen eighteenth-century laundress who tangles with the Marquis de Sade in ; her performance as the young Iris Murdoch liberated, questing, possessed in the wonderful Clementine in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind; and her character in bonking the neighbourhood hunk while her husband’s at work.
Winslet turned 31 the day after our interview, and she says that leaving her 20s behind has made her pause for thought. Her previous decade, she says, was tough in many ways. “I lived my 20s at a pretty furious pace,” she says. “Those years were pretty hardcore. I really think you’re trying to figure out who the hell you are through most of your 20s. The difficulty for me was I had to do that very much in the public eye.” She was married for the first time at 23, to Jim Threapleton, an assistant director who is Mia’s father. They divorced in December 2001 – an event she describes now as “unbelievably sad” – and if the relationship since has been occasionally strained, she says that it is now “better than it’s ever been”.
In 2003, she married the prodigiously talented theatre and film director Sam Mendes in the West Indies. Their son, Joe, was born the following December. They live between New York and the Cotswolds, where she and her brood spent this past summer. “It’s really been an amazing last couple of years,” she says. As for the second Mr Winslet, she offers this: “Thankfully, I have a husband who literally takes my breath away every day, he’s just so fucking great.”
She says there’s every chance that she and her husband will collaborate on a film, “probably in the next two years”, although at present she has no idea what that film would be. “It’s almost like there’s a big part of him that I’ve never had proper access to. Quite honestly, I just think we’d have a massive laugh.”
Riding through Manhattan, she takes a call from Mendes and updates him on her and the kids’ day. They quickly fall into the kind of shorthand baby-talk common to lots of couples. She calls him Sammy, with a sort of ironic lisp. “Sorry you had to hear that slushiness,” she says, hanging up. Despite this openness, Winslet says she has to fight to guard her family’s privacy, “to hang on to the things that are normal and vital to me and the things that will make my kids regular kids.” It's one of the reasons they spend so much time in New York. I love it that I don't feel so watched here,” she says. “It’s relatively paparazzi-free, compared to London, where an activity like going to feed the ducks is immediately abnormal because you’re trying not to let the kids know there are seven photographers hiding behind the trees trying to get a picture of you flicking your knickers out of your arse.”
If one includes the current animated children's film in which she voices a rat called Rita, will be the fourth Kate Winslet film to hit cinema screens in the past three months. She was luminous but inexplicably underused in . But in the excellent her character’s story dominated the film. Another adaptation, this time of writer Tom Perrotta’s slightly hysterical satire of a conservative New England community, presented Winslet with what she considers her most challenging role to date, as Sarah, an adulterous housewife and inattentive mother.
It’s during our discussion of that character that Winslet becomes momentarily upset. Sarah is someone who feels that she's failed at everything: work, marriage, motherhood. Dowdy, disappointed, desperate, but also selfish and solipsistic, she’s a real departure from the confident women Winslet has often played. “I felt so sorry for Sarah,” Winslet says. “And yes, there were some things about her that I related to. Not necessarily things about me right now, but things in my past, when I was flailing around, searching for happiness. Part of the female make-up is, you want to find a man and you want to settle down. That’s what ended up crushing Sarah.”
“Could that have been me?” she wonders. “Well, yeah. Definitely. When you’re unhappy you make some terrible decisions and then you get that smack in the mouth, a huge moment of realisation like, ‘What was I thinking?’ I've had those.”
She understood, too, her character’s excitement at seducing the local stud. “I was the girl who never got the boys. I was the chubby one who never got asked to dance at the disco and would end up slow-dancing with a mate in my pink puffball skirt. To put it bluntly I did have to dig into parts of my past, the child who was sort of…” At this point she’s staring into the middle distance. And then, very quietly, she starts to cry. “Sorry,” she says, looking inconsolable. “Kate, please don’t get upset,” I say, feeling wretched and a bit panicked, and placing a hopelessly inadequate hand on her knee.
“Fuck it,” she says, wiping away tears and steeling herself to stop. When she’s recovered a bit, she says, by way of explanation, that in playing Sarah, “I realised that maybe in some profound way there’s loads of things that I haven’t actually dealt with. [Sarah] is someone who is very close to me, very close to my heart, the things that I don’t like to hang on to, or haven’t wanted to... That’s the great thing about acting. You kind of learn things about yourself that you perhaps wouldn’t otherwise know.”
Has the process been cathartic? Is this what the crying is about? She’s not sure. “I’ve never had therapy. Looking back on the past 10 years, maybe I have been able to explore all those things that perhaps I’d buried that a great therapist would have made me deal with.......” She trails off. Bursting into tears is not typical behaviour, she says. “I’m not an emotional wreck and doing a very good job of covering it up. But when I’m allowed to indulge like I am now, then this stuff does come out. But then acting’s like that. Acting’s hard. If you’re trying to do it properly,” she says, “it makes you vulnerable. When you’re an actor you have to confront your true feelings every single day. And that’s pretty exhausting. Then you have to go home and make dinner.” Nevertheless, she remains committed to her profession.
She tells me a story from relatively early in her career, when she was sitting in a rehearsal room with a group of well-known actors: “The director asked us, ‘Who do we act for?’ Almost everybody said a family member or their mother. And I realised I was going to be last to answer, and I said, ‘Quite honestly, I act for myself.’ Everybody said, ‘That's so brave.’ But I don’t do it to please somebody, or to make somebody love me more or respect me more. I'm not looking for approval. You can’t please people all the time. And the only person I have to blame if it all goes tits-up me.”