Kate Winslet is enjoying her 12^th Golden Globe nomination in the category Best Performance by an Actress in a Limited Series for Mare of Easttown, the acclaimed HBO series for which she has already won an Emmy. She plays police detective Mare Sheehan in a small Pennsylvania town, investigating a murder while trying to keep her family and her life from falling apart. All this with no hint of makeup: Mare – and Winslet – is who she is without any pressure to look pretty or to apologize to anyone for her temper, and in doing so, has the audience falling in love with her. As they fell in love with Winslet, then 21, in Titanic (1997), the mega-hit that made her famous, along with her best friend Leonardo DiCaprio (the two worked together again in Revolutionary Road, in 2007).
Winslet was born in Reading, England, on October 5, 1975. She is married to Ned Abel Smith with whom she had her third child, Bear, now 7. She also has two children from previous marriages: 21-year-old Mia by her first husband Jim Threapleton and 17-year-old Joe by her second husband, director Sam Mendes.
“The discussion about how Mare looked blew my mind,” says Winslet, talking to The Guardian about her TV series. “People were asking, ‘Did Kate gain weight? Didn’t she look frumpy? Wasn’t that brave of her?’ But why should that be brave? I suppose because it’s not how leading actresses are represented. Maybe Mare will be the tipping point and we’re going to stop scrutinizing women on screen quite so much.”
One of the most respected and admired actresses of her generation, Winslet is a seven-time Oscar nominee, winning in 2008 for the Holocaust drama The Reader, and a double Emmy-winner for two HBO shows, Mildred Pierce (2011), and now Mare of Easttown. A four-time Golden Globe winner, she won twice in 2008 for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama for Revolutionary Road (directed by then-husband Mendes) and Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in Any Motion Picture for The Reader. She also won Globes for Mildred Pierce in 2011 and Steve Jobs in 2016. She received her first nomination in 1996 for Sense and Sensibility, the year before Titanic.
Winslet is proud to be ‘middle-aged,’ as she defines herself, and says she never felt so ‘cool’ to be a woman as she is today. “Middle-aged women have long been underestimated, disrespected and disregarded in the film and television community, and now that’s changing. I feel way cooler as a fortysomething actress than I ever imagined I would.”
She went completely un-Hollywood for Mare of Easttown. According to the New York Times, Winslet purposely had a certain eyebrow makeup technique to make her face look heavier and sought out clothes that were in line with her character’s tough demeanor. “Whenever we’d find something unflattering, we’d be jumping up and down like, ‘Yes! We’re wearing this,” Winslet remarked. “There’s a sloppiness to her, and there’s a looseness to how she sits and how she walks and just how she holds herself. Her body posture is totally different to mine. I actually stand quite upright.”
As an actor, Winslet doesn’t stop working; she doesn’t mind the brunt of the craft. We saw her recently in the film Ammonite and she has a major role in the already filmed Avatar 2, now in post-production, the long-awaited sequel to the 2009 sci-fi/fantasy in which she was reunited with her Titanic director James Cameron for the first time in over twenty years.