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“THERE WAS A REAL FEARLESSNESS IN HER,” SAYS KATE WINSLET OF THE ICONIC ACTRESS, DAME ELIZABETH TAYLOR

“Which in old Hollywood perhaps didn’t feel quite as prevalent. Now, actors and actresses can bend the rules a lot. Back then, there did seem to be a rule book, and there was some expectation in terms of how glamorous women should look. There’s a sort of coolness and aloofness to the way [Elizabeth Taylor] would look in posed photographs. In candid snapshots she was really quite soft, and she would really screw up her face. I do that as well.”
Beauty standards, and antistandards, are on Winslet’s mind today. I’ve met her for coffee at a Chelsea café; she’s sleek and animated, a smart and chic city mom (and currently the face of St. John), wearing leggings, a blazer, and gold ballet flats. She is a professional, and she has little patience for the voracious tabloids that dominate English newsstands—particularly when it comes to her family. “A friend of mine had said they’d seen a picture of me and my children in some magazine or other,” she recalls. “And you could see both of the children’s faces very clearly. I said, ‘That’s not right, this is the U.K., you’re supposed to blur out the children’s faces.’” The experience led her down the dark path of Googling herself, “Which I have never done, because I can’t imagine anything more disgusting. And up popped this whole article: ‘I’m sick of Kate Winslet’s lies about weight loss and Botox.’ Please look at my face. Please study it. Look! Look!”

Appearances aside, the Oscar-winning star of The Reader—she’s had four nominations and is only 35—has never shied from putting herself out there, whether it’s furrowing her brow for a reporter or appearing girlishly psychotic (her debut, Heavenly Creatures), casually nude (Titanic and Little Children, among many others), or emotionally raw (in nearly every performance, the latest being HBO’s adaptation of Mildred Pierce). Now, with that long-awaited Oscar on the mantle—and after a challenging year in which she separated from the director Sam Mendes and faced the ensuing press scrutiny—she has come to feel another kinship with Taylor. “She was very strong in her head and in her heart, not just in the exterior, and I suppose I am,” says Winslet. “To me, she hid vulnerability fairly successfully, and I do that too. We all have vulnerable sides. I think for a long time I pretended I didn’t have one, and I definitely do. The last couple of years, I really had to pay attention to that. The great thing about acting is you can fling it all into the mix of the part.”

As for the latest catapults: Winslet has two big movies coming out this year, and she’s coming off great reviews for Mildred Pierce, the five-hour HBO adaptation of the classic ’40s novel and film. (Winslet still hasn’t seen the 1945 Joan Crawford original, claiming it would have put too much pressure on her.) The story—of a single mother who falls for the wrong man and sacrifices everything for her driven, ruthless daughter only to be betrayed by her—had personal resonance for Winslet, who grew up in a family of stage performers and could relate to both maternal support and youthful drive. “As a child, I was extremely self-sufficient,” she says. “At the age of 9, I knew I wanted to be an actress. I had that sort of determination that I can imagine, in a 9- or 10-year-old girl, for a parent must have been fairly disconcerting. ‘That’s what I’m going to do, you do know that?’ I didn’t know how on Earth I was going to pull any of that off, but I was just sure of it.”

Mildred also included another buzzy nude scene, which Winslet shared with Guy Pearce. “I hate it!” Winslet laughs on the subject of disrobing on-screen. “Listen, make no mistake, I just get on it. I just go in and say, ‘Oh fuck, let’s do it,’ and boom. If you complain about it or procrastinate, it’s not going to go away. It’s a profoundly bizarre thing to do. As actors, you talk about it all the time. You can be literally tangled in sheets, and you turn to the other actor and say, ‘What the fuck are we doing?’ Dear Mum, at work today, I had so-and-so’s left nutsack pressed against my cheek. It’s sort of unethical if you think about it in those terms.” In the past, she’s vowed she won’t do more nude scenes, “Which definitely makes me the hypocrite of the decade,” she says. “I’m just going to stop saying it.”

Her next project is Contagion, a Steven Soderbergh thriller about the breakout of a global pandemic. It features an ensemble cast including Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow. Winslet plays an intelligence officer; she researched the part in military labs and at the Centers for Disease Control. “Everything I learned was terrifying,” she says. “Literally everything. There wasn’t one single thing that didn’t scare the living daylights out of me. And what’s interesting about these people is they don’t shake hands. I’m telling you, you will start questioning whether you want to shake hands with people. It’s definitely going to freak people out.”

After that, she’ll star in Carnage, alongside Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, and Christoph Waltz. Shot in Paris, it’s Roman Polanski’s adaptation of the lauded Broadway play God of Carnage, about two sets of parents who lock horns when one of their children bullies the other. “At first I thought it was almost wrong to put those characters on celluloid, because it had been done so brilliantly [on Broadway],” says Winslet. “I was really intimidated. We all were. One of the actors asked me, ‘How was Marcia Gay Harden? She was amazing, wasn’t she?’ And I would say, ‘Yes,’ and she’d say ‘Fuck, fuck, don’t tell me that. Tell me she sucked!’ ‘Well, she didn’t suck.’ ‘We’re screwed.’ We would say that all the time.” The Broadway production incorporated, among other things, a climactic vomiting scene. It’s been retained for the film version; Winslet gets to do the vomiting. “Projectile,” she clarifies, having just come from a looping session.

That work done, she’s taking some time off at her new home in the English countryside. “To tell you the truth, I’m at odds about being famous,” she says. “It’s very difficult to say that and not make it sound like I’m complaining or being ungrateful for what I have. But the truth is, gone are the days where you can just do your job and have your life. And when I’m not doing my job, I want not to be doing it. I don’t want to be in the public eye in those moments. I want to be able to give my children as normal a life as possible. They need to take the bus, the subway, muck around on the playground without having five paparazzi take their picture. I don’t want those memories for them. I didn’t sign up for that.”

Has she thought about an escape? “I haven’t,” says Winslet. “I don’t want to be running and hiding. That’s not me, that’s not who I am. I like being in the city. I like the diversity that my children are exposed to every day. I love the way their brains work. Joe [her son] turns to me the other day and says, ‘One day, I will have a girlfriend. But I might have a boyfriend. If I’m gay.’ He’s 7! And I said, ‘You might have a girlfriend or a boyfriend, darling.’ And he said, ‘Which would you prefer?’ And I said, ‘My love, that would be entirely up to you, and it doesn’t make any difference to me.’ But that he knows! It’s a real privilege. Talk about the best education.”

Among Winslet’s future plans: to play a man on-screen and do theater. But her Oscar recognition has not inspired particular confidence that she can take on any role. “I hope I’m shitting myself over the characters I play for the rest of my life,” she says. “Because the day I go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s going to be a piece of piss,’ why fucking bother? If you do that, you do not learn. I hope I’m always learning something. So I won an Oscar. It’s amazing. I’ve got that for the rest of my life for a performance I’m proud of. It nearly killed me. I’m really proud of the film. That’s it. Moving on.”
Very Elizabeth Taylor indeed.

Kate Winslet in New York, May 2011
Contagion is out in September 2011 from Warner Bros.
Carnage is out in November 2011 from Sony Pictures Classics
 

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