Perfecting the illusion

In her latest film, she plays a woman desperate to forget her past, but Kate Winslet says she has no regrets - she's a great mother, with a great career and a wonderful husband. So why does she feel the need to tell us that everything is rosy, and why, by her own admission, does she feel so insecure? She talks to Suzie Mackenzie of love, loss and wanting to be liked

* Suzie Mackenzie
* The Guardian,
* Saturday April 10 2004
* Article history

Kate Winslet

Kate Winslet: 'I am insecure. If you ask me, everybody is' Photo: AP

I remember an afternoon, in the early autumn of 1999, sitting in a bar on the Grand Canal in Venice. Opposite, the harmonious symmetry of the magnificent Basilica della Salute was almost enough to blot out the lopsided chaos created by coffin-loads of American tourists as their gondoliers punted them by. It was one of those near-perfect days, and I was just thinking, this is Venice - sublime and ridiculous both - when on to the outside terrace walked Kate Winslet with her husband of one year, Jim Threapleton. (Winslet was attending the Venice Film Festival to promote her new film, Holy Smoke, written and directed by the Campion sisters and co-starring Harvey Keitel.)

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2. Release: 2004
3. Country: USA
4. Cert (UK): 15
5. Runtime: 107 mins
6. Directors: Michel Gondry
7. Cast: Elijah Wood, Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Wilkinson
8. More on this film

They sat at a table reserved for them at the back of the terrace, from where they could observe without being observed - a kind of organised privacy. And they looked, as all young lovers look, completely self-absorbed; maybe she talked more than him and, maybe, he seemed self-conscious, even shy. At one point, she dropped something and, as they both bent down to retrieve it, their heads banged together and they burst out laughing, though it must have hurt. Framed through the window where I was sitting, they looked like a picture postcard, both of them fair and with that shine of indestructible youthfulness. They looked, in other words, as though they imagined it would never end. Of course, it did, two years later, almost to the day, when Winslet's spokesman announced their separation: "Their daughter Mia will remain first priority for both of them." A bland counterpoint to Winslet's declaration when she first met Threapleton on the set of Hideous Kinky: "When you know it's the right thing, you know . . . "

It was this memory that came to mind as I watched Winslet's latest film, the curious and fascinating Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind - an intelligent analysis of the nature of love posing as a romantic comedy. Its central theme is forgetfulness - whether, in pain, after the end of love, it is preferable to choose amnesia over experience. Winslet plays Clementine - kooky, insecure enough to be still dyeing her hair blue at 30, someone who skids along on the surface of life. Jim Carrey, a mighty and blessed clown, is Joel, the beleaguered simpleton who wises up. When he discovers that, after their break-up, Clem has had him clinically erased from her mind, he determines to do the same, only to discover, mid-process, that it can't be done. His mind resists it, or maybe it's his heart. In a series of beautifully welded flashbacks, we pursue Joel's thoughts into his past, back to his germinal impulse, his love for Clem.

Charlie Kaufman, who writes, and Michel Gondry, who directs, take the idea as close as they dare to sentimentality - the film employs all the tired old vocabulary of romance. It knows what we choose to remember - a night spent gazing up at the stars together. But it also knows that there are deeper memories that we don't choose to remember, memories that threaten to explode those illusions we employ to survive. In one unforgettable, ravaging moment, Joel accuses Clem of sleeping with people just to make them like her. She protests, "I don't do that." Can we survive the impact of reality on illusion, the film asks. And its resounding answer is, well, we can try.

Kate Winslet is not beautiful, but she has an enchantingly radiant face that tempts you to say that she is. She is smartly dressed, in one of those pinstriped trouser suits that can be thrown on without thinking - and that, I imagine, she will throw off the minute the interview is over - with tangerine-, or should that be clementine-, coloured shoes. She enters the room a bit fast, with an air of no-nonsense. "It's hot in here. Let's turn on the air-conditioning." Which she does, immediately followed by, "Normally, I'm no good at things like that." Her accent, oddly, is northern. She rolls a cigarette, simultaneously apologising. "I allow myself two a day." The accent is now gone. She talks excessively fast, in gulps, as if she would rather be somewhere else, as indeed she would.

At one point, a baby is heard crying in a nearby hotel room and she becomes visibly distressed. "Is that Joe? Can someone find out if that's Joe?" Joe, her son by her second husband, the theatre and film director Sam Mendes, is just three months old and she is still breast-feeding. She is voluminous on the subject of being a mother for the second time at the age of 28. "I think of myself as a mum who finds the time to go to work. I have to check myself for baby sick before I walk out of the house in the morning. I am really a mum ... I know I am a great mother." She defends herself against imagined criticism. "I was reading to Mia the other night and I thought, 'I need to tell her I am going to work and might have to leave the house before she gets up'. I said, 'Babe, you know mummy's got to work tomorrow.' And she said, 'Don't be silly, mummy, you don't work, you take me to school.' " Before suddenly checking herself: "I hate the fact that I'm sitting here forced to justify who I am as a parent, what I do. How my child is happy. How it's all fine now. It's ridiculous."

And it is - not because she's anxious about her young children, but because no one is forcing her to do this, the impulse is all her own. It is as though she is constantly anticipating ambush. I think the point at which I liked her most was when she suddenly said, apropos of nothing, "I am insecure. If you ask me, everybody is."

In the past, she says, "I had a tendency to speak before I thought." She has never hidden the fact that, during her divorce, she nearly went under, that she was hurt and confused by what she calls "the flak". Until then, she had always thought that she was liked. "I thought I was good at dealing with the press." She presented an image of success, youth. Glamour, yes, but unaffected: her wedding reception was held in a pub, they drank beer. Hers, the tabloids proclaimed, was a "perfect marriage". And she colluded with that - right up until the point when it came crashing down.

Recently, she admitted to an American magazine that she had lied about the caesarean birth of her daughter, saying publicly that it was a natural birth. Then, when her audience turned treacherous, resented the illusion being shattered, she was amazed. "The things that were said. That I was a bad mother, that my daughter didn't live with me. How she was with her father all the time. All these things . . . they really did nearly kill me."

Of course, she coped. She always has coped. Of her experience of being bullied as a fat girl at school, she says, "I think it made me stronger." And her treatment by the papers must have felt like bullying. Then she met Mendes, and she found herself not worrying so much about how she was seen. "We knew that they would say we had been having an affair. We weren't stupid. Though, of course, it wasn't true." In a recent television appearance in the US, she cried because she was so happy.

When I ask her now what she means by love, she replies, "Love to me, God, this is so difficult . . . To me, love is when you meet that person and you think, 'This is it, this is who I'm supposed to be with.' " She says this for all the world as if she has never said it before. And you have to wonder if there isn't some lack of self-awareness here, something that leads her to keep offering up this perfect version of events. But I don't think this concerns her. What matters is that the happy image is intact again. She has found a part.

This idea of what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget is central to Kaufman's film, and to Winslet's role in it, but she won't talk about forgetfulness, or at least not in any meaningful way. When I ask about the role of Clementine, and whether it was cathartic to play her, she retreats behind a veil of rosy-sounding cliché. "You don't leave people behind." The question everyone is asking her now, she says, is, "Would you erase anything?"

"And the answer is, No. I really wouldn't. The good and bad things are what form us as people . . . change makes us grow. To have one foot in the past, to hang on to the what-ifs, to say if I hadn't done that or he hadn't said this . . . all these things are pointless. I really believe in, move on, live and let live, forgive and forget." So it is there, forgetfulness, after all.

If in person Winslet can seem insecure, it is this seeming weakness that is her great strength as an actor. More than anything, she is a chronicler of our own social insecurities and self-doubt. All her characters are in search of that elusive goal, happiness. All are characters in search of a part.

From the outside, the trajectory of her career looks smooth, even easy. She won her first film part, in Heavenly Creatures (1994), at the age of 17, against 175 other actors who auditioned. Prior to this, she had done "bits" in soaps while working part-time in a delicatessen."I couldn't believe I was in a film and it was such tremendous fun." It is an interesting film to look at in terms of her career, because she played it before she was fully formed as an actor. Based on a true story, it is the tale of two adolescent girls, Pauline and Julia (Winslet plays Julia), out of touch with reality, who form a cloistered, imaginary world of their own. (That conflict between illusion and reality again.) When the outside world intrudes - the parents try to separate the girls - they plot and then murder Pauline's mother, crushing her to death with rocks. It's a compelling story, it was well received and it brought Winslet to notice. But, looking back now, she is not, in fact, particularly good in it. If a definition of acting is to embody a role, Winslet's technique here is to attack her part with a hysteria bordering on the monstrous. Julia is brittle, but there is one extraordinary moment, as the murder begins, when the camera falls on Winslet and we see her suddenly step back from the brink, the consequences of her actions written in the confusion on her face.

This is what Ang Lee must have wanted when he cast her in her next role, as Marianne Dashwood in Sense And Sensibility. A great director, he found a way to harness her precarious hysteria, while keeping the confusion. In this film, she is not simply a blundering idealist: her frailty endangers her and everyone around her. There is an argument that she played the part too well, that she made the undercurrent too dark. (She went on to play two tragic figures, Sue Bridehead in Michael Winterbottom's Jude, and Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet.) But Lee's film kept its glossy sheen, the dialogue sparkled, there was a balance between surface and depth. In 1995, for this part, Winslet became the youngest female actor to be nominated for an Academy award (she was 19). "It was the changing point, really. It made me realise that people like what I do. It gave me confidence. I think any form of self-expression is half confidence, half sheer hard work and, maybe, a bit of talent thrown in." She is not being disingenuous here. She means it. "It is really hard work."

If something looks easy from the outside, most likely it is not. She was brought up in a family of actors. Her father is an actor, both her older and younger sisters, Anna and Beth, act. Her grandparents on her mother's side founded the Reading Repertory Theatre. She has consistently and often spoken affectionately of her background, as she does now. "We all get on. We're the kind of family that gets together for Sunday lunch. I see my younger sister all the time." It is clear there wasn't much money when she was young, and just as clear that her father was not successful - he had few parts. But this isn't the point. "I come from a family of hard-working actors who relish it when they do go to work and take part-time jobs in between." Acting, as she knows, is a harsh world, and frequently one in which talent is not employed as it should be. Her father never gave up acting. He carried on, looking for parts. "That is what you do as an actor. You struggle. So that's the life I imagined I would lead." This is the reality of acting, and it is something she has known since she was a child. She didn't think it would necessarily produce a sense of security. But then, as she says, "Insecurity is what actors work with all the time."

The success of Titanic made her a star, and in one of the highest-grossing films of all time. Its director James Cameron knew it would make her a star, and he gave her a star's entrance - that moment when she walks down the stairs to greet Leonardo DiCaprio's Jack. She looked as stars are supposed to look - her own woman and, of course, a man's woman. Julia Roberts couldn't have done it better. Anna Campion, who wrote Holy Smoke and worked with her shortly after Titanic remembers how ambivalent Winslet was about her success. "I think to her it was a shock, then a pleasure, then a drag. But she could handle the attention. Kate is good at that. She understands that she is a movie star now."

Following Titanic and a second Oscar nomination, Winslet was offered handfuls of studio leads, all of which she turned down. (Reportedly, she declined Gwyneth Paltrow's role in Shakespeare In Love, though she tells me it would be "unsisterly" to confirm or deny this.) Most people were surprised when she chose a small film, an adaptation of Esther Freud's Hideous Kinky (1998), to follow her blockbuster. "The point was I could choose. That was the luxury Titanic afforded me. There was tremendous pressure on me to do something 'big', but I ducked it all. I had to. If I hadn't, I would have burned out by the age of 25. So I ran a mile - back to where I felt safe again." She has had the same British agent since she was 15. "The same American agent from 18." She has never had a manager or a "business attorney".

Hideous Kinky was not a great part, but it took Winslet out of period drama and into the modern day. Her character, Julia, is naive, irresponsible, a lost soul moving around Morocco with two small children in search of herself. She is a kind of precursor to Kaufman's Clementine, but without any of Clem's endearing edginess. Winslet says that she liked Julia's "itinerant quality". "I think I wanted to be Julia, travelling, no worries." (In fact, she has misremembered the part - Julia is perpetually riddled with anxiety.) Anyway, she can't have wanted to be Julia that much, because it was on the set of Hideous Kinky that she met Threapleton. They married a year later.

The Campion sisters' Holy Smoke (1999) was Winslet's last good part before the fallout from her marriage break-up in September 2001. In a way, the role is another reprise of the lost soul in search of meaning. She plays Ruth, a cult member in India, kidnapped by her family and brought back to Australia to be "de-programmed" by the spivvy Harvey Keitel character. The film turns into a battle of wills, which Ruth wins. In the end she has all the power, and it frightens her so much that she runs away. (Much as Winslet herself had done after the success of Titanic.) It was the first time, Winslet says, that she consciously set out to play an unlikable character. "Jane Campion taught me that." Campion asked her, "Do you need to be liked?" "And I said, 'Yes, but I don't really care. I don't care if I'm criticised.' She said, 'Do you want an audience to like you?' I said, 'I think I do. I like to make nice people.' 'Well, forget it,' Campion said. Ruth's not a nice person. You'll have to get over wanting to be liked." Winslet says: "I will always be grateful to her for that."

There are bound to be echoes of autobiography in any actor's work. Maybe that is why it is so hard to like Enigma, a bland, code-breaking drama, or the execrable The Life Of David Gale, films into which Winslet put very little of herself. Iris (2001), based on John Bayley's memoirs of his wife, the novelist Iris Murdoch, she says, wakened her up. "I think I had been dormant in myself for some time. Mia was just six months old, I could afford four weeks on Iris and it was a gift, really."

The gift, she says, was to play someone removed from her own world - and at a time when her own world was beginning to dissolve. "She was someone completely unlike me and unlike my life. I don't mean I used it as a place to hide. I know some actors do - they put their personal pain into their work. I try not to do that." She came to like Iris. "I liked the fact that she didn't judge others. And she didn't judge herself. At least not beyond the limits of what she knew she was capable of." This is a realist speaking: you carry on, you do what you can. Which is, you could say, the moral of Titanic. In that film, the illusion and everything that was built on it, including Jack and Rose's romance, founders, it gets sucked into the depths. Only Rose, clinging resolutely to the surface, survives.

But maybe it doesn't have to be this way. There is a wonderful scene at the end of Eternal Sunshine where Joel confronts Clementine. He wants to start again, she is not so sure. Clem, who can't bear confrontation, who can't bear failure, who'd rather simply forget, is surprised. She, for all her surface eccentricity, is far more conservative than he. It will happen again, she tells him. I'll get bored with you and I'll leave you again. That's who I am. That's OK, he reassures her. It really is OK. And why not? Go back into the illusion, this time knowing it is an illusion? It may not be perfect. But really it is OK

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind is released on April 30.

Portrait by Jason Bell