Despite all her accolades and awards, Kate Winslet cherishes her ‘normal’ life as wife and mother
Enough with the suffering. Kate Winslet’s killing herself for an Oscar.
The 33-year-old actress has gone down with the Titanic for James Cameron, lost her memory in Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” endured an unhappy marriage and a lingering pedophile in Todd Field’s “Little Children,” played the Alzheimer’s-doomed poet Iris Murdoch in Richard Eyre’s “Iris,” and courted heartache as Marianne Dashwood in Ang Lee’s “Sense and Sensibility.” These pedigreed performances have earned Winslet five Oscar nominations and five Golden Globe nods, but the awards themselves eluded her.
This year, Winslet has upped the ante by becoming suicidal. First, there was her performance in husband Sam Mendes’ adaptation of Richard Yates’ novel “Revolutionary Road,” playing April Wheeler, a wife unmoored by life in 1950s suburbia; then, a turn as an illiterate former SS guard in Stephen Daldry’s ” The Reader,” based on the novel by Bernhard Schlink. Both scored her an extraordinary two-time visit to the Golden Globe dais, but it’s her nuanced and Oscar-nominated role in “The Reader” — also up for best picture — that has made her the odds-on favorite at the Academy Awards.
“You don’t win two, you don’t win . . . two!” crows Winslet about the Globes, leaning back in her chair as she rolls a cigarette. She’s returned home to New York after the ceremony but before the Oscar nominations announcement and is clearly enjoying her victory lap. “Losing in those situations has been such a natural place for me, so to now have both of them? To say I’m shocked is the understatement of my life.”
Winslet, who was raised in Reading, England — among an acting clan that she is quick to say “are not the Redgraves” — is known for keeping her head when all about her are losing theirs. She arrives for a photo shoot near the home she shares with Mendes and their children, Mia, 8, and Joe, 5, in jeans, a baggy sweater and camera-ready makeup she’s done herself; her two outfit changes were snatched from her closet and donned without the help of a stylist or assistant.