KATE WINSLET
She is the youngest person to get five Academy Award nominations, but has never actually won. Now with two Oscar-worthy films about to be released, could this be Kate Winslet’s time at last?
KATE IN WAITING
She is the youngest person to get five Academy Award nominations, but has never actually won. Now with two Oscar-worthy films about to be released, could this be Kate Winslet’s time at last?
KATE WINSLET IS LATE. Only by half an hour, mind, which hardly counts in celebrity-land. Her tardiness is explained by a late night arrival into New York from LA, a restless, jet-lagged night spent staring at the ceiling and an early rise to get the kids off to school, but she bursts into hubby Sam Mendes’s office in downtown Manhattan looking flustered. And apologetic – again, quite novel for celebs.
“I’m sooo sorry,” she gabbles, dumping her bag to pump hands. Winslet’s assistant suggests coffee, gratefully accepted, and the 33-year-old actress leads the way into a comfyinner chamber to collapse on a sofa. “I’m gasping,” she confides, digging out a pouch of rolling tobacco and a pack of green Rizla.
This is the Kate the British public know and love. Never mind the five Oscar nominations by the age of 31, or the small fact that she was the star of Titanic, the biggest blockbuster in movie history. What makes Winslet so damn likeable is that she can still appear to be one of us, an ordinary mortal who smokes and swears.
“People are going to ask ‘Did you have a body double’ – all that crap,” she begins, talking about her naked (emotionally as well as physically) role in The Reader, based on Bernard Schlink’s celebrated 1995 novel. It’s one of two Oscar-tipped movies out in the coming weeks. This one sees her playing Hannah Schmitz, a closed, complex heroine who has a love affair with a 15-year-old boy. “I’ve never had a body double in my bloody life. I’ve never even been offered one!”
It’s a typically bold role for Winslet to take on, and filming love scenes with a teenage boy is the least of it (“David’s not a kid,” she states, inhaling deeply. “He was 18, very much a young man. And the love that our characters share is extremely genuine.”) More problematic is that Hannah’s job takes her to the death camps during World War II; she’s later tried in court to determine the extent of her complicity in the extermination of hundreds of Jewish women.
“I realised that while it wasn’t my job to have people sympathise with Hannah, it was absolutely my job to give people the option to understand her,” explains Winslet. “Did I understand her? Yes I did. And I sympathised with her too, which is morally compromising. But to say I sympathise with her does not mean I sympathise with SS guards. Absolutely not.”
Tough roles, tough questions – Winslet doesn’t dodge them. Indeed, it’s hard to think of another actress who could have played Hannah directly after tackling April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road, a bold dissection of suburbia and the American Dream, directed by Mendes (American Beauty, Jarhead) and co-starring her Titantic beau, Leonardo DiCaprio.
April offers Winslet the chance to explore giddy emotional highs and crushing lows in a controlled drama that chisels into the hairline cracks of a seemingly swell 1950s marriage.
She sighs and lights another cigarette. “With April, her interior world is so much bigger and so much deeper than her exterior world,” she says, part wistful, part pained. “Of course, the great tragedy of it is the parameters of her life never allow her to indulge in her deepest emotions. That was the thing about April Wheeler that touched me so deeply. And I’m so different to her; I’m a happy, positive person, and if something isn’t working I don’t sit around and go, ‘Oh, maybe…’ I just go, ‘F**k it…’ and I change things, sort it out.”
But what people really want to know is this: how was it reteaming with DiCaprio? And this: how was it being directed by your husband for the first time? But Mr DiCaprio first…
“We really just slipped back into it,” she says, grinning widely. “We’ve built up a trust and a mutual respect for each other’s work over the years, so we were really excited. There were no boundaries. We could do anything, scream at each other… I’d say to Leo, ‘Just go for it. If the chair hits me, just carry on…’ Our hope is that people will love Frank and April in the same way they loved Jack and Rose. And the truth is, if the fact we were in Titanic puts more bums on seats, then it’s great.”
And working with Mendes?
“It was really, really amazing. Honestly!” Her grey-green eyes cloud over, suddenly serious. “It was all of the things I hoped for and more. I would sometimes look at him with other actors and think, ‘God, that is so clever’. He was quietly getting them to tap into something they weren’t planning on doing. And he would do it with me as well. He’d turn us all inside out!”
Not that he got it all his own way, mind. “The big adjustment that Sam had to make was realising that I take my work home with me, I really do,” she continues. “I just can’t let it go, whereas Sam is really good at compartmentalising. He needs to switch off. But we’d get home and as soon as we walked in the door I’d say, ‘Oh my God, I’m so glad you said that thing…’ And he’d say, ‘Woah, babe, hang on, let me have a cup of tea.’ And I’d literally wait for him to finish his tea and then I’d say, ‘Anyway, and another thing…’ And it would go on! He eventually said, ‘I can’t switch off, can I?’ And I said, ‘I don’t think you can…’”
Winslet exudes confidence. A mother of two (Mia, aged eight, with first husband Jim Threapleton; Joe, now five, with Mendes), she confesses to becoming happier in her own skin with each passing year. Today she looks radiant in tight jeans and a midnight-blue cardigan, her blonde hair pulled back from a face that’s both powerful and beautiful. Talking, listening, even rolling a cigarette in her lap with practiced precision, she fixes you with large cloudy eyes that never lower, never waver.
It wasn’t always this way. Attending Redroofs Theatre School in Maidenhead at the age of 11 (she comes from a family of actors – maternal grandparents, father, both sisters and younger brother), she was promptly nicknamed ‘Blubber’ by the other girls. At 16, Winslet stood 5ft 6in and weighed 13 stone. The highlights of her burgeoning career included a Sugar Puffs commercial and an episode of Casualty, with most of her time spent riding the train from Reading to London to strike out at auditions.
Now she can smile at the memory. “For many years I was the fat kid who didn’t get the audition, or I was at the end of the line because my name begins with W and they’d run out of time and I wouldn’t get to go in at all, despite having spent seven quid on the train fare up to London,” she sighs.
Then came her Big Break: the New Zealand shoot of Heavenly Creatures for Peter Jackson, then renowned for lowbudget splatter flicks like Bad Taste and Braindead. The 17-year-old Winslet, like the movie, won rave reviews, but it was a long two-and-a-half years before she landed a follow up role as Marianne Dashwood in Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility – and her first Oscar nomination, aged 19.
From there it was full steam ahead, striking that iceberg on that ship – and her second Oscar nod – in 1997, before consciously eschewing stardom and blockbusters to act in such testing leftfield fare as Hideous Kinky and Holy Smoke.
“Growing up, I looked up to actresses like Meryl Streep and Judi Dench and Susan Sarandon,” she explains. “Their faces moved and their bodies jiggled in ways that they should. They were playing real parts and they were absolutely honest. To me, that was a beacon. It’s not about airs and graces and it’s not about being a movie star; it’s about acting.”
Her peers in the Academy certainly saw her qualities, again shortlisting Kate for her performance as a young Iris Murdoch in Iris, and for her spiky, punky Clementine in Michel Gondry’s wildly innovative comedy-drama Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. A fifth nomination duly arrived for her portrayal of a rundown housewife who enters into an affair with the local dreamboat in Little Children.
One problem: from her five nominations she has no wins… and it bothers her. “A lot of people think I’ve actually won,” she huffs. “They’re like [swings into a faultless LA accent], ‘So what did you win for?’And I’m like,‘No, no, no, just let me remind you, I have this really great habit of not winning a f**king thing!’” But surely it can’t eat at her that much? Didn’t she poke fun at the whole sorry circus in an episode of Ricky Gervais’s Extras, suggesting she need only play a Holocaust victim to guarantee taking home a Golden Baldie?
Winslet cracks up. “Oh my God, I’m not like that at all!” she cries. “I have a very level head – I know what it is, I know what it means, that from the outside looking in it can seem superficial – but it’s my peers who are voting, people who I really admire who have been around for years, working really hard and forming solid opinions about films and actors and directors.” She nods solemnly. “If someone like that ticks your box? It means a lot.”
Well, she’s doubled down this time round, looking a hot favourite to finally land that elusive gong for one or other of The Reader or Revolutionary Road. So, if she does win…
“Let’s just get the films out!” she shrieks, descending into horrified giggles. Sure, we don’t want to jinx it, but c’mon… what are you going to say, up at that podium? Do you make a joke out of the whole Extras diatribe? How can you possibly face up to the Academy after lampooning them so mercilessly?
She grins mischievously. “This is the moment when Kate does something that is completely unnatural to her and says” – a pause, theatrical and perfectly weighed – “I’m not going to answer that!”
