kate winslet fan.com
Marie Claire magazine UK edition
KATE WINSLET: The truth behind those tears
Marie Claire’s June 2009 issue contains an interview with Kate. Article contains swear words.
Critically accliamed - check. Fabulously rich - check. Happy family - check. Perfume endorsement - check. What more could any actress wish for? An Oscar, of course. In her first major post-awards interview, Kate Winslet opens up to Harvey Marcus about the private torments that have driven her to the top.
I TELL HER THAT I THINK I HAD A PANIC ATTACK LAST NIGHT, HAVING WOKEN UP AT 3AM WITH A HEAD FULL OF FEARS
Kate Winslet is here primarily to talk about her role as Lancome’s face of Tresor, yet she listens intently and, when she speaks, her empathy is almost maternal. ‘I went to the
Revolutionary Road premiere,’ she says, ‘and I was so knackered that in the middle of the night I think I had a panic attack. I’ve never had that before.’ This exchange is taking place in the penthouse suite of Downtown’s SoHo Grand Hotel, and I’m not entirely unaware of the irony; the two of us discussing the depths of despair while located so high against the backdrop of New York’s morning skyline. She’s not giving this up for show. I think Kate Winslet actually cares how I’ve felt for the past six hours or so, and it probably says more about her than anything else you’re about to read. ‘I really thought, “What’s going on?”,’ she remembers. ‘But it was just tiredness… just tiredness.’
After five Oscar nominations, dating back to 1995, and her
Sense and Sensibility shortlisting when still only 19, someone finally said to Kate Winslet, ‘And the Oscar goes to…’ She won. Best Actress for
The Reader. She wanted it so badly, and she’s not ashamed to admit as much. ‘There’s nothing bloody wrong with wanting it at all. And anyone who says, “Oh, I don’t know, oh, I’m on the fence… it’s absolute crap. Of course they want it, deep down. Of course they do.’
There were tears when she won, but not nearly as many, I feel, as she deserved to allow herself. In a recent website survey, Marie Claire readers voted Winslet their most inspiring woman. They weren’t, I’m pretty sure, among those who unfathomably sneered at her Golden Globes acceptance speech. She is, quite rightly, unapologetic for her reaction to picking up Best Actress (
Revolutionary Road) and Best Supporting Actress (
The Reader). ‘Look, it’s amazing,’ she recalls. ‘I’d never won a Golden Globe before and I’d been nominated since I was 19, you know. And then to get two! I am who I am. I’m too emotional to lose and I’m too emotional to win – I’m not very good at it.’
I wonder if the tears, the outspoken desire for success, went against some quaint idea of what it means to be British, and what piqued them, the Daily Mail readers, so much was the fact that someone perceived to be so British could behave, well, could behave so like them, the Americans. ‘Yeah,’ she says, simply. She should, by all rights, be lauded for her achievements. After all, she came from nothing. Really. Born in Reading, she has two sisters, Beth and Anna, and a brother, Joss. Both their parents were actors, but of the struggling variety, and often the family found it hard to pay the bills. ‘Oh my God,’ she recalls. ‘We were supported through the majority of my schooling by an organisations called the Actors’ Charitable Trust.’ Her mother, Sally Ann, spent more time serving pints in a local pub than delivering lines; her father, Roger, almost lost his foot in a boating accident when she was 11. ‘They operated on him for 18 hours. From then on he was a disabled actor, so the little work that he was getting – like an episode of Casualty, Crimewatch – even that started getting less and less.’
I say I don’t understand how she’s not regarded as some kind of working-class hero and she’s quick to respond: ‘Because I speak nice.’ But the working-class background? ‘People don’t believe that. People literally think I’m lying.’ She then recounts a story of an audition that took place when she was 16; the experience plainly still hurts. On hearing her accent, the director refused to believe she was from Reading. She remembers his exact words: ‘He went, “I hope you’re not as dishonest in your work as you are about your own life,” I was shocked. My dad was very much a struggling actor and spent more of his life as a postman, as a member of a tarmac firm, as a van driver. He’d sell Christmas trees. Anything. That was my dad. We had these dreadful second-hand cars that would always die a death, or we’d go on holiday to Cornwall, come back and it would have been nicked. It’s like a Joe Orton farce, my family.’