Chatty Kate keeps it real

Chatty Kate keeps it real

With Kate Winslet having a husband called Ned Rocknroll and a son named Bear, you would not expect her to be as real as she comes across.

The 39-year-old English actress took a break from a school run in London for her two older children last October to talk to the press about her new film with Josh Brolin, Labor Day.

As the interview rolls along, it becomes evident that she, really, just wants to talk about life and all that, instead of peddling the usual publicity spiel.

"Is it just me that's boiling? Pheurrgh! You can't open that window?" she exclaims.

Then, gesturing at an Australian reporter, she bellows: "By the way, you have amazing hair. God, I'd love some of that. It reminds me of Eternal Sunshine, although it wasn't my real hair in the movie, but I got to keep all the wigs. Hooray!"

And so it begins.

Winslet is blonde, buxom, two months from having her third child who would be called Bear - her first with third husband, Ned Rocknroll, who is also Richard Branson's nephew. She is also happy to yammer away about anything under the sun.

"After I had my daughter Mia, who's now 13, I knew I was doing Iris when she was going to five months. It was good to know there was something to think about after the first few months," she continues, referring to the 2001 movie about the writer Iris Murdoch.

"It's great to get your creative brain moving again."

After zigzagging her way through highlights of her career and personal life (thrice married, first to film-maker Jim Threapleton and then director Sam Mendes, with a child each from both marriages), she launches straight into what she found most interesting in her latest work, a collaboration with Jason Reitman.

"Accents - I love doing accents," she says of playing Adele, an American single mother with an agoraphobic condition who finds love with an escaped convict over the course of a wistful, fleeting weekend.

"It isn't something that just comes like that. I can do a generic American accent now without having to think about it too much, but to shape it and mould it, that takes an amount of time, because your mouth makes different shapes," she elaborates.

"So much of the character is built working through scenes, putting the accent together. I realise I gain so much just through that process, and unconsciously I end up learning all my lines again."

Twenty years ago, Winslet put on her best upper-class voice for the first time onscreen as murderous schoolgirl Juliet Hulme in the critically acclaimed Heavenly Creatures (1994).

The film, directed by a young Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, proved to be the career launch pad of many, including Winslet, then 18.

To date, the actress has swanned through blockbusters from Titanic (1997) to comedies (Carnage, 2011) and period drama (Revolutionary Road and The Reader, both 2008) as well as more than her fair share of independent movies (Hideous Kinky, 1998, and Holy Smoke, 1999).

Although she says "I don't think I set out to hope for fame, but to hope to get a job", she became famous anyway.

Alongside Rose in the Titanic, most viewers will remember her as the cherubic Marianne in an adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense And Sensibility (1995), opposite fellow English actress Emma Thompson.

"I've certainly been really lucky in a sense that I've managed to still enjoy really challenging roles with great directors and roles that are talked about," she muses, before reeling off again.

"I think it's sort of dipped in and out, there have been quieter times and busier times. Rather than staying on top, I think I've been able to stay balanced.

"You look at this Miley Cyrus thing and wonder what she's up to, and you think, who's helping these people? I've been so lucky, I've been dealt equal measures of great roles and success and really lovely life cards too."

Any skill involved on her part?

"F***, I certainly hope so," she says.

Winslet is well known for over-preparing her roles, learning her lines backwards and forwards, reading up and conjuring different make-believe backstories and alternate worlds for the characters she has inhabited.

For Labor Day, she speaks of going back "into the past, but being aware of that and burying it, hiding it somewhere".

"I do work hard when I do work, and I really really love it. And I'm quite private about it too, which is something I do when I get older," she says.

"I'm not precious about it at all, but I still am underground about it. I'm exactly the same person I am and I am professional and I am prepared. It doesn't matter whether you've got a big part or a small part or a non-speaking role. There is no such thing as a small part."

The actress prides herself on being able to slide easily in and out of work and play. This comes from the desire to remain grounded, if only for the sake of her children.

"This wonderful movie business, it isn't my whole life you know," she explains. "Yesterday morning, we were driving the children to school. I was turning to them: Mummy's staying in London tonight, and tomorrow morning your friends might see something in the papers. And my daughter's going - this is weird. This is so weird."

Having grown accustomed to motherhood herself, the actress found lots of time to bond with her young co-star in Labor Day, 15-year-old Gattlin Griffith. Rule No. 1: Ask questions. Rule No. 2: Ask them all the time.

"Anything. Ask me anything at all," she says.

"No question is stupid, this is the only way to learn, and the only way I learnt, and for me to be able to share what I have learnt."

If there is one downside to all this, it is her very human incapacity for dealing with images of herself at home. Winslet reveals she watches anything she has filmed only once.

"The two experiences of shooting a film and watching a film are so completely different, they are worlds and worlds apart, I sometimes don't feel the need to see the film. I honestly can't imagine what on earth I would gain from that."

And she has a slightly curious relationship with her domestic television set.

"It's hard seeing oneself anyway onscreen, it's kind of euuurggh… I've gotten over that but, still…

"Every now and then, I see a trailer and think, Whoa! Mummy, what's Neverland? Eek! Weeurghhhrrrrhrhrrrh! No, quick, quickly change it!... Masterchef? Good! Phew!"


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