| Kate Winslet Articles & Interviews Jane April 2004 |
| Pictures from this article; |
| Kate’s Body The poster girl for “curvy” tells Stephanie Trong about being eaten alive over her weight, her marriage…nothing’s off-limits. Kate Winslet has just given birth to a farmer. Or so she speculates as she coos at the adorable baby boy in her lap. “Joe’s sturdy. A lot of babies, you feel like you’re gonna break them. He’s holding up his head very early—he’s got a really strong back.” Joe is currently building that strength as he suckles his mother’s breast. At only six weeks old, he’s almost 12 pounds. “He’s enormous!” shouts Kate, 28. I’m sitting across from them at her feet on a wicker ottoman in the New York town house Kate temporarily rents with her new husband, Sam Mendes, the father of Joe and awesome director of American Beauty and Road to Perdition. Did I mention that she’s breast-feeding in front of me? Unsure about the etiquette here, I intently stare into my notebook. Not that I wouldn’t want to check out Kate’s goods: Every girl on the planet has deified her since she came on the scene, playing a teen murderer in 1994’s Heavenly Creatures, then degrading tough-guy Harvey Keitel in Holy Smoke! and, you know, sinking the boat with Leonardo DiCaprio (FYI, she’s only seen Titanic twice). Kate is also one of the very few superfamous starlets who actually have curves on them—and nowhere on her list of important things to do would you find “starve or exercise to the point where your pelvic bones protrude alluringly over the top of a low-slung skirt,” which seems to be a typical Hollywood aspiration. “With me, more than anyone else, there is this complete obsession with my body. Is she fat, is she thin, is she that?” Kate says, exasperated. In the beginning of 2003, things got out-of-control when British GQ airbrushed her image so much that she resembled a freakishly tall twig on their February cover. At the time, Kate made a kick-butt public statement, saying, “I do not look like that. And more importantly, I don’t desire to look like that.” She rants a lot about this to me later, but for now we’ve just met, and it’s rude to be all, “What’s up Kate? People call you fat a lot. Thoughts?” It’s 9:30 a.m., and we’re the only two customers in a café staffed by a comely gentleman playing Belle and Sebastian on the stereo (this is the prelude to our trip back to her house to give Joe his brunch). It’s a dreary day, rain pouring down, no doubt reminding her a bit of her birthplace of Reading, England. She arrives looking more like a mom than the upstart who used to compulsively roll her own cigarettes during interviews: no makeup, hair pulled back in a scrunchie, a puffy black winter jacket with the hood up and black boots, only the boots are more snow and rain than Dr. Martens. “What you see is pretty much what I end up wearing every day, because this will all soon be covered in sick,” Kate says. Which is actually pretty punk-rock in its own way, letting someone puke on you all day. When I commend her on being such a rebel, Kate replies, “I’m not so much now because I have children and my life is very, very different. I’ve never been a raver or a massive party-going freak, but in terms of choices I’ve made creatively and just not toeing the line, I guess I have been a little bit more rebellious.” Kate’s other bundle of joy is 3-year-old Mia (or Mee-er, if you have an English accent), a carbon copy of Kate except “she has her dad’s eyeballs,: which are an insane shade of blue. Mia’s dad is Jim Threapleton, to whom Kate was once married, but is so obviously not anymore. Kate and her men: everything’s cool “It was much more drawn out than the British press has ever said,” Kate says about the transition from Jim to Sam, starting in fall 2001. “But as far as they were concerned, it was like a second. So of course they claimed we’d had an affair and all this kind of stuff. That I was spending my life going to premieres and theater openings and that I didn’t actually raise my child and that she lives with her father,” Kate says incredulously. “I was so upset, I remember falling to my knees and crying for hours. Because I can’t bear for Mia to be out of my sight for more than a few hours at a time.” Yeah, those tabloid reporters can be a pain. “No one should be judged like that,” she adds. Anyway, the point is that somehow Kate and Co. saw their way through that horrible maelstrom and now everyone gets along fine. In fact, Jim was just in for a visit two weeks ago. “He, Sam, Mia and I were all standing in our kitchen having coffee,” Kate remembers. “I just stood there thinking to myself, ‘If you’d have said to me two years ago that this was gonna happen, I never would’ve believed you.’ The situation is that good.” Of course, some of this bliss is probably leftover glow from her and Sam’s secret and impromptu wedding last summer while they were on a three-week vacation in the Caribbean. “What was so nice about it was not only that we managed to do it secretly, but also that we had been engaged for a year anyway and no one knew,” Kate says. Okay, one friend knew, but if you divide the momentousness of this secret by the amount of energy it takes to hold it in, that doesn’t really count. “A girlfriend of mine was there, and two friends of Sam’s and then Mia,” she remembers. “It was the last week of the holiday when we were in Anguilla and my girlfriend turned to me and said, ‘What are you two doing? For God’s sake, this is perfect. Just do it here—do it, do it!’” That was Monday, and by Thursday they were married. Only there was no ring for Sam to wear—Kate was already wearing a substitute band, a gift from the previous Valentine’s Day. “He’d probably kill me for telling this story,” she says, laughing, “but Sam got on a boat with a friend to go to a bigger island and they bought the ring. And to this day he paid for his own wedding ring and I still haven’t given him the money.” One look at their wedding photo back at the house and I’m pretty sure Sam doesn’t give a flip. It’s a heavenly shot taken just 10 minutes after they tied the knot, blown up from a simple point-and-shoot camera. Sam is standing knee-deep in the beautiful sea and carrying Kate, who looks gorgeous in a simple white wrap dress with her feet just barely dangling in the water. Kate and her childhood: the love-in On our walk to the house—only after Kate has had a second latte, this time politely asking if the waiter could make it stronger—it is still pouring. I try to cover her with my umbrella, but Kate walks in a strong sense of purpose—fast, talking, unaware of the water dripping on her head. We cross a street against a red light, but then she grabs my arm like only a vigilant mother would and says, “Bloody hell, hold on, there’s a car coming.” On this short jaunt I learn that she hates and is scared of dogs—especially little yappy ones—and that she lives her life by the philosophy “You can only do your best and your best is good enough.” Back in her living room, I pry about her upbringing: “So, I’ve heard that you had a hippie-ish childhood.” “A little bit, yeah. We did a lot of running and dancing around at open-air music festivals,” Kate describes. “My parents weren’t strict. It wasn’t that they were completely liberal and let us do whatever we wanted—we were very respectful of our mum and dad and understood we were to be trusted. If we said we’d be back at 10, we’d be back at 10.” The “we” she is referring to are her two sisters, Beth and Anna (both actors), and brother, Joss, who is currently in England. When I asked why she never talks about him in interviews, she tells me she does but the writers always leave him out. So here’s a huge shout-out to Joss, who Kate describes as 23, about six feet two, virtually fluent in Italian, completely single and having a “profoundly fantastic understanding of women.” Anyway, the way I picture teenage Kate is like Clementine, the absurdly spontaneous and green-blue-orange-colored-hair girl she plays in her new movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s a philosophical/psychological love story cowritten by Being John Malkovich’s Charlie Kaufman in which her character has a former boyfriend (Jim Carrey) permanently erased from her memory. In this world, much like on floor seven and a half, such things are possible. “She’s the definition of a free spirit,” Kate says excitedly. “I was as zany and crazy as her when I was younger. That’s the thing I thought was so wonderful about Clementine—that she was able to stay that way until she was 30.” Indeed, Kate says she had so much fun playing the character that it was boring to be herself at the end of the day. “The clothes she wears, even though some of them are completely disgusting and insane, a lot of them were just fantastic.” So fantastic that now that the picture’s wrapped, Kate’s having her whole wardrobe (thrift-store coats with faux-fur collars and cool ‘70s snow boots) sent from the set. Another reason Kate had so much fun with Clem was that she felt like she finally nailed an American accent. Of course, no I’m like “Say something!” The next thing to come out of her mouth, in a perfect American accent, is, “Okay so it’s 11:20, I have to leave here at 12 to go for a waxing appointment.” It’s downright scary…that she waxes. Just kidding—her accent. Kate and the scale: our fascination Joe’s just finished is meal and Kate’s now bobbing him up and down on her lap, staring into his eyes, trying to make him laugh by saying in baby talk, “Porky, porky…” “Are you calling him porky?” I ask, cracking up. “Yes,” she says, and then turns back to Joe in her baby voice, “Mean mummy, mummy’s mean.” Okay, people, clearly she’s joking and the baby cannot understand a thing—it’s totally in the same vein as saying, like, “Ooooh, cabbage head. That’s right, who’s got a cabbage head?” But it makes a nice segue back to Kate’s weight. Around age 10, when she was a stocky little girl at St. Mary’s school in Reading, other kids used to call her Blubber and lock her in the art cupboard. “I was always a strong character inside,” she says. “I never let myself get badly bruised…because I always knew I had something that those kids didn’t have, which was that I loved acting.” Indeed, between the ages of 11 and 16, she got up every morning at six to make the half-hour commute to a theater school. Kate describes the scene as competitive, where the girls were always playing the “who could be the prettiest and who could be the thinnest” game. They didn’t like her. “They could not understand why I was getting jobs and they weren’t when I was the fat one,” Kate says. When she left that dump (description mine), Kate went on Weight Watchers with her mum. “It makes me sound hypocritical, but for me, personally, at that time, I wanted to lose a bit because I was overweight. You want to be able to run around, and when you’re heavy like that…I just lost a sensible amount.” That was around the time she got her first big break with Heavenly Creatures and the film roles just kept on comin’. As did the controversy surrounding her figure. Still at her feet (once home, she changed from her boots into Adidas shell-toe sneakers with silver stripes—that just seems like something you’d want to know), sitting on that funny ottoman, I ask if it is true that James Cameron called her Kate Weighs-a-lot on the set of Titanic. “No, absolutely not. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that,” Kate replies. Nice person, whoever started that rumor. “They talk about my body as though I’m the Elephant Man and have these terrible distortions that need to be covered up. It sends out such a wrong message to young women and it really pisses me off.” As for the infamous British GQ cover, Kate tells me she and the photographer, a good friend, were both really excited about that shoot. ”It was a big deal for me to wear racier clothes than I normally would, and I felt so pleased to have more of a shape and to be taking these shots. I have the Polaroids from that day and there’s nothing wrong with them, nothing. I have a flat stomach anyway, but they made it completely concave. And on the cover, they stretched the image and made me look six feet tall and 108 pounds.” Then, within the same week as all the British GQ madness, the gossip columns were saying that Harper’s Bazaar had pasted Kate’s head onto their fashion director’s thinner body for their January cover. “That was total fabrication bullshit. It was completely my body,” Kate says, acknowledging that “magazines always retouch a little bit, get rid of stray hairs, cover up blemishes, maybe shave a tiny bit off your hips—whatever the hell it is they decide to do.” But it’s the British GQ type of thing that makes her mad. “When they literally distort an image to such an extreme extent—young girls buy these magazines and they actually think that people look like that and they don’t. It’s a computer-generated image.” She’s half-distracted by Joe as she sifts him on her lap to make sure he’s comfy. “There’s a very small percentage of women in this world who can eat whatever the hell they want and remain a size 6. Most of us aren’t like that.” She’s right. I see it every day—the calorie-counting, the restrictions, the work. “Can I just say, look at me? I had a baby six weeks ago. I feel great,” Kate says. I look, and now that her breasts are put away, I notice what’s most striking about her shape is that it’s so healthy “normal” that I woul d never even think to single her out for her size. As for her perfect skin, that’s another story…. |
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