Kate Winslet - ‘I remember thinking: I do not want to be famous’

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1:05Welcome to How to Fail, the podcast that believes that learning how to fail actually means learning how to succeed better. Would you like one of my celebrity guests providing you with personal advice? Well, you can get just that because every week my guest and I answer your questions and celebrate your failures in failing with friends. It'll be something like this one with actual Kate Winslet. can't believe I get to say that who is my very special guest on How to Fail this week. It's possible that it might not go the distance anyway because perhaps she will realise that she does need a bit of space from it and she will come back to you so I would just trust in that a little bit more.

1:47That is the best piece of advice I've ever heard anyone give. Do join in by following the link in the podcast notes or look out for my call outs once a month on Instagram. and you can listen to How to Fail on Amazon Music or just ask Alexa, play How to Fail with Elizabeth Day on Amazon Music.

2:10If T.S. Eliot could measure out his life in coffee spoons, I can measure out mine in Kate Winslet roles. I mooned over her Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility as a teenager about to sit her GCSEs. I went on an ill-fated first date to see her in Titanic. My male university friends all had a crush on her in Iris. In my 20s, living in a house share, one of my favourite romantic comedies was The Holiday. A troubled first marriage was reflected in Revolutionary Road. And so it goes on, through The Reader and Eternal Sunshine and Steve Jobs, right up until her riveting performance in the HBO detective drama Mayor of Easttown in 2021.

2:52too many iconic roles to mention in the short space of this introduction. Suffice it to say that according to critics Winslet is variously the best film actress of her generation absolutely fearless terrific intelligent focused and seemingly devoid of ego. Marion Cotillard her co-star in her latest film Lee a biopic of war photographer Lee Miller put it this way I look at her work and I never see her actually playing a role. I always see her being a person. Winslet has received an Academy Award, two Emmys, five BAFTAs, five Golden Globes and a CBE. Her work has also earned her a world record for holding her breath for seven minutes for a film scene shot underwater in James Cameron's sci-fi sequels to Avatar.

3:44It is, by Winslet's own admission, a long way from where she started out. In her words, the fat kid at the back with the wrong fucking shoes on. She was born in Reading, Berkshire, into a family of jobbing actors, and money was often tight. Winslet and her siblings were eligible for free school meals, and she left education at 16 to work in a cafe, barely able to afford the train fare to London for auditions. But her talent was notable from a young age. At 11, her first paid gig was dancing opposite the Honey Monster in an advert for Sugar Puffs. Now 48, Winslet's titular role in Lee also marks her first time as producer.

4:26It was a passion project she was determined to get made. And although it took eight years to do so, Winslet says, frankly, I've been through a lot. So there are corridors of emotions I can access that I simply didn't have when I was younger. Kate Winslet, welcome to How to Fail. Such an amazing introduction. Well done. Did I get anything wrong? This is what I'm always terrified of. No, you didn't get anything wrong. I love that thing the critics said about me. I'll take that. That's very nice. Because you don't read reviews, do you? No, I don't. No. There is one thing that you might have missed out, which is that, did you know I actually have a Grammy?

5:04Oh my goodness. Which is totally bonkers. And I 1 ,000 % shouldn't have this Grammy at all. And I'll just quickly tell you the story. so yonks ago after Sense and Sensibility Patrick Doyle the composer had written a beautiful piece of music with Wynton Marsalis and there were some spoken words that had been put to it and Emma Thompson phoned me one morning she's like hi darling it's me I've got a call in a favour I'm so sorry I've lost my voice what's the matter lost my voice lost my voice anyway Pat Doyle needs a replacement I can't go and record this thing this afternoon. There's no money. It's just a favour for a mate.

5:44Do you mind? Cut to the whole thing won best album for spoken word and I won a Grammy. That's epic. Poor Emma Thompson gave up a chance for a Grammy. I don't think she even knows that, to be honest. I don't think she even knows that that's what happened. But yes, thank you. That was a very, very kind introduction. I cannot tell you what a pleasure it was to write because I genuinely mean that. I have seen so much of your work and we are more or less the same age. And it's always a pleasure to do an interview where you realise that your life has been part of the research. Like I went to see your movies because I love you as an actor.

6:23So it came very, very easily. But tell me a bit about those corridors of emotion that you can access now that you are in your 40s. Well, I think just the more you go through life, the more you experience it and show up for people and go through the shit and hold other people's hands as well as having your own hand held by others. And I've gone through versions of, you know, tricky stuff, I guess, and not just once. And so I think what happens then as an actor is that emotions that you try and reach just simply become much more freely available to you the older that you get because you've lived more.

7:03and it means that you know things like method acting just don't really even come into my head because sometimes it is just there and sometimes it isn't like case in point you just mentioned mayor of east town the amount of stuff i had to create and embed in myself in order to portray a woman who was living with excruciating grief on a daily basis and hiding it from everybody it was really hard and became extremely painful and I still think oh it's gone I've got rid of it but then just this morning I was asked to do something where I was watching past scenes of films I had done and commenting had to comment on them for something and they showed the scene in Mare where she discovers that her son has killed himself and I just burst into tears as I was watching I was like oh god oh no and it's so it's all sort of still there um and I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing or just a weird thing but sometimes it does get they do you know these things sometimes they do get stuck to the sides and other times depending on the character you can just shrug it off and walk away and go and have fish and chips with your family you know well I also wonder if because your career has been so distinguished and fairly lengthy now I mean I said your first pay gig was aged 11 you cover similar territory but sometimes from different viewpoints so you won an oscar for the reader where you were playing a former ss guard and now in lee you do this phenomenal portrayal of lee miller the female photographer who was one of the first on the scene at the liberation of the dachau concentration camp and so you're witnessing that portrayal of history from different angles.

8:53And I wonder how difficult the Dachau scene was to film. Everything about Lee was really hard, I'm not going to lie. Sometimes that's just the case. You know, independent filmmaking in any capacity is really difficult, often because you just don't have as much budget as you'd like, which then in turn means you don't have as many weeks to make your film in as you really would ideally love. So we had that type of situation every single day, which is great and fun when you've got the right energy and being a producer on that film, I was able to step in with both feet and just sort of bring everyone with me.

9:25And sometimes you just have to do it with a big smile on your face and look at everyone and go, no tears, it's going to be a great day. You just decide that and go and bring everyone along for the ride. And so there was a lot of that on Lee. But that sequence, the Dachau sequence, was excruciatingly painful, in particular for Andy Samberg, who plays Davy Sherman in the film, because he is Jewish and he didn't want to see the set and he didn't want to walk around it. He didn't even want for us to have to establish shots by way of a rehearsal. So often you will just mark something out so cameras know where they're going to be or know what they need to hide in the background if they can see cables or bits of the set that aren't meant to be in.

10:11And we said to Andy, it's absolutely fine. The whole thing is going to be handheld so we'll just roll the cameras and we'll just walk in. And it was very, very, very hard for him because, of course, our set is a recreation of a camp. But nevertheless, it was terrible for him to have to go through that. And for my part, so much of who Lee Miller was, she was stoic, to say the least. She was brave, not fearless, but she was unbelievably brave and determined. And she was determined to reveal the truth, to tell the truth. and to give a voice to people who just simply didn't have one in the same way that I now feel I often want to speak up for people who are from lower socioeconomic communities and might not be able to say something for themselves just simply because they don't have that platform.

10:57That matters to me. And so playing Lee, I was surprised actually daily and startled by just how similar to her I really did feel as a woman in the world, as a middle-aged woman and the courage she had as a middle-aged woman to go to war by herself. She had completely reinvented herself from a former version of who she once was as a model, as a Vogue cover girl, as the girlfriend and muse of Man Ray. She was so done with that part of her life and wanted to become the truest version of herself that she believed she was meant to be. And that's part of the reason why we wanted to make the film because Lee Miller is known as the Muse of Man Ray, the ex-cover girl.

11:40Well, she hated that. She famously said, I'd much rather take a photograph than be one. You watch, when people start reviewing the film, reviewers will say, ex-muse of Man Ray, ex-Vogue, cover girl, model, la la la, worked for Condé Nast, blah, blah. People will just say it because that has been at the forefront of her narrative. So we wanted to change the narrative and put it in a place that was the most profound decade of her life and defined who she truly was and who she stayed. She remained that resolute, stoic, brave woman who simply believed in revealing the truth. I feel that with the film, we have done that.

12:21And our hope is that for those who don't know that much about Lee Miller or who have never heard of her, this will define how they now view her moving forward. And so I do feel proud to have made the film, whether people will like it, see it, feel indifferent about it or love it. I really don't know, but I feel enormously proud of what we've done. You absolutely should. And it will have me thinking for a very long time. And I went down a whole rabbit hole of Lee Miller's work as a result of it, having known a bit about her. But as you say, not enough. You say that you could see a similarity between yours and Lee's character.

12:58and part of that being, I imagine, a commitment to truth and to showing the truth, whether it be emotional, factual, physical. But one point of difference, I think, she says, only just having met you, is that Lee had a complicated relationship with her son, Anthony. And it struck me that you've played a number of complicated mothers in riveting ways. Little children is a favourite role of mine. But in your real life, my impression is you're a very loving, open mother and you have constantly turned down film roles to spend more time with your children. So how does that feel when you're playing a sort of emotionally repressed mother?

13:39It's always very challenging, especially when my own emotional impulses is to be warm and embracing and yeah as you say I you know I'm extremely present for my family and continue to not work for the sake of just keeping things steady and in a sort of domestic rhythm which is very important for everybody and also which I had to do certainly when Mia and Joe were much younger because I had had two marriages and they had two different fathers and whilst those situations have actually always been really okay. Still, it meant that I had to be there constant, as any mother does, but it's much harder to pull off when you have a career.

14:21And there are certain things that, you know, I may have wanted to pursue, but knew that it was wrong at the time and would have been thinking of myself and not actually the immediate and most important thing, which of course has always been the kids. So it is challenging playing tricky mothers. I don't like playing mothers who are just unkind or unsympathetic. And I did find that very challenging when prepping for the film, really, because I spoke to Anthony Penrose so much. He was a creative consultant on the film. Of course, Lee Miller's son. He was heavily involved in the construction of the story and the script.

14:57And we cared very much about what he felt, what he was comfortable with, if anything was missing, if we had written too much of one thing and less of another. And it was completely invaluable for me to have him as a friend and confidant and collaborator. And in fact, the day before I went to start shooting, I couldn't believe the moment had really come after so many years of putting this film together. And I had all kinds of things I was meant to do that day, not least packing and just organizing myself for the time that I was going away to shoot. But I had, you know, like, I had to go and buy new football boots for bear and I had to take the dog to the vet there's a whole load of stuff and I just was a mess that day I just was all over the map and my husband said to me what what can I do and I said I think I just got to go to Farley's again and Farley house is where Lee Miller lived when she was married to Roland Penrose and actually where she subsequently died and where there is a there is an archive the archive is there it's an internationally respected art archive but the house is still there and exists as a museum it's in East Sussex near Lewis and I had spent so much time there across a number of years seven eight years in and out of the archive just being with Tony and I just had to go again I said I've just got to go back one more time makes me emotional even to think about it oh my god and so I went and I saw Tony and we both burst into tears because we couldn't believe we'd actually got to that place of like my god we're gonna go make the film it's really happening and I think I just wanted his blessing one last time it's so funny and we went back into the archive and we touched everything again and all the real all the real items that had belonged to Lee I just wanted that last and we were actually giggling a lot as well you know I just think I needed that last fix of just really holding the fabric of her and taking it away with me and that's very unusual when you're playing a real character to have a family member who's actually there to you know literally and metaphorically hold your hand and I've had I had that consistently with Tony and I just feel so grateful I mean he's her son and he's in his 70s now and he shared so much with me that isn't in any book and probably wasn't a part of any conversation he's ever had with anyone and I was enormously enormously grateful for that.

17:18We'll come back to Lee because it informs some of your failures which I'm so grateful for you taking the time and putting the thought in because they're really excellent oh my god

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18:38The first failure is to do with your failure as you see it to stand up to media scrutiny, particularly when you were a younger actor and people were very unkind about your body tell us about this well I look back on it now and I just think my god how first of all how would the people around me letting that happen you know and of course it's different now there are social media platforms like x and of course instagram and things none of which I have but you often will hear that someone has defended somebody else publicly on social media. And that didn't exist, of course, back in the day. But it's just this very strange thing that used to happen to young actors and actresses.

19:27There was almost this assumption that you were fair game, that your privacy was automatically not something you should expect to have anymore, and that you were almost asking for it, certainly from the British press. And I was always a very normal shape. I'd never had any issues with my own physical self. I wasn't worried about my physicality. I felt well. I felt strong. I felt clear headed about my physicality. and it was only when suddenly the media decided that I was overweight when I was a size oh my god I don't know 10 12 14 12 again 14 again 10 again 12 again whatever I was a young person living life and just being normal and so what it what happened was that it made me it made me reactive and defensive now it is a movement it's a movement that I feel part of thank god but it's a movement that I feel proud to sit back and kind of go okay well I know that I was at the very beginning of all of this a very very long time ago but maybe I could have accelerated the beginning of that movement had I really stood up for myself myself more and had I stood up for myself more and been clear and called people out for abusive language actually it may have in turn given other actresses the inspiration to do the same and that would have advanced that movement I feel just a bit more and anything where women stand together and are using their voices en masse is only ever a great thing.

21:18And I just wish it had come sooner. I think you'll be incredibly hard on yourself. And I appreciate it. But from a personal perspective, I think you have done an enormous amount to normalise not even body positivity, but kind of body neutrality, that sense that my body's great, it's strong, it can do stuff. Now let's leave it aside and concentrate on more important things. And I think we also underestimate at our peril how difficult the 90s were i mean they were sort of they were the bad lands of people having constant opinions and those being splashed across the front pages of our tabloids for women who were constantly confused by the messaging of whether to be ladettes or sylphs and in the midst of that you're still a teenager so your first role is a major role is 17 in heavenly creatures sense and sensibility I was 19 you were 19 yeah it's ridiculous so obviously there's going to be fluctuation and hormones during that time but the point is I was I was actually little anyway yes I mean I remember I remember having my measurements taken for sense and sensibility and I remember the costume designer saying to me cool 26 and a half inch waist I don't think I've been that since I was your age and I remember thinking oh is that even a I wasn't even aware of like Like what was a small measurement or in a big measure?

22:33I didn't even have, I didn't have a clue. But I do remember I was, I was actually quite, I was fairly petite. Yeah, you're right. The 90s, you know, that strange, strange time where it was thought that women were all meant to be a certain size. And how on earth the media could have been so negative. And not just about how people looked and how women looked, but in general, you know. And it's one thing about this country that I do wish would change, and perhaps it is a little bit. But in America, whatever people may or may not think of America, and it certainly depends on where you're from, but Americans on the whole are really great at celebrating each other's achievements and saying, good for you.

23:16You did such a great job. I hope you're proud of yourself. They'll say lovely things like that, whereas here it's like, well done, well done. And it's just say it quickly and walk away. and certainly mainstream media in the 90s did nothing other than try and knock people down and God forbid you should be young and successful. It was almost as though they would come at it with this attitude of, okay, so you think you're clever, do you? I've never thought I was clever at all. I've always thought I was lucky and had to keep working hard to stay in the game. And so it was a really rough introduction to what it was like to be famous.

23:55And it put the fear of God in me. I remember thinking, I do not want to be famous. This is terrible. This is absolutely awful. Stop it now. I really remember feeling that. And after Titanic, actively making choices to do the smallest possible things I could find whilst I was still learning who I was, learning how to act. You don't walk into this business and know how to do it all. You learn on the job. And I hadn't also been to drama school like RADA or I hadn't been to any of those places. There never would have been the funds for something like that or for me to even fantasize about something like that.

24:31And so I really did learn on the job and still do. And I just know that after Titanic, I really just needed the space to just figure out who I was as a performer and not to feel pressured into saying yes to things just because there might have been a large salary attached to it. Fortunately for me, I've never been motivated by finances somehow. How bad did it get during this period of Titanic where you're experiencing global fame and experiencing people saying mean things about you? Is there a moment from that time that really sticks in your mind as being representative of how bad it was? I remember hiding in the cupboard once yeah because I could hear the paparazzi shouting outside my flat gay gay gay and I just didn't know how to switch off the sound so I got in a cupboard I'm so sorry you went through that I know it was really rubbish actually they should really they should really feel ashamed of themselves how did you find your sense of self amidst that who did you turn to or was it an internal job Well, I've always been so incredibly fortunate to have had a great family.

25:49My dad is an absolutely hilarious larger than life character who's always been an out and out realist. And my mum, she did everything that one could ever hope a mum would do. Cook great food. You'd walk into the house and there'd be wonderful familiar food smells wafting through the air. there was always a Sunday lunch and usually about 16 of us sitting around a table. Just great chat. I mean, I think it was an adjustment for all of them, for sure, when I suddenly became famous, because there's that moment where I think they were all really afraid, well, was I going to change? And what are we going to do about what's going to happen now?

26:23It's definitely a strange moment for any family, I think, because it's such a surreal, weird thing to happen. And my siblings were just, you know, they always just treated me the same. And so I think that was a great leveller. and I always had that. I've always been fortunate to have great friends and actually somewhere in there even then I didn't know how to look after myself. I knew that if I could just get away to nature, throw myself into the sea, go for a long long long walk, get blown around by the wind then I would feel fitter for things and that always worked and still does for me. so we've spoken a bit about the roles that you have said yes to and the choices that you made and I suppose if I were to pick a through line it would be something to do about women's freedom both the presence and the absence of it but I wonder what connects the roles that you turn down is there something that you read in a scripture like absolutely not for me yes I cannot cannot cope with anything that has child abuse in it of any kind or an injury to a child or or losing a very young child I just simply can't I can't go but I just have to stop reading and it doesn't matter how great the role might be and how amazing the director might be or the writing I'm just like I'm sorry I just can't because I know that I will go through that and it will get stuck in there and I don't want that for my life um and so sometimes I will turn something down there was something that came up actually a year and a half ago which was flipping brilliant and is going to get made with somebody else and she will be extraordinary much better than I would have been anyway actually um but that was a hard one to turn down and it was it had some of those themes in it I thought I just can't do it is that since you've become a mother or has that always been the case um that's always been the case going back to this idea of body scrutiny with mayor of east town oh just the best piece of television ever um you there was there was a lot of scrutiny paid on your lack of makeup and how sort of quote unquote brave that was oh my god that was so annoying because first of all i had loads of makeup on i i mean i really did i mean if it had just been completely me with a totally naked face my skin is quite irregular actually i have a little bit of rosacea here and there.

28:47You know, there's only so many bags you want to actually have under your eyes. And so, I mean, it wasn't loads, but I did have makeup on my face. Yeah, I did. The other thing we did do with Mare too was we added eyebrow. So my own eyebrows to look at me, they're quite kind of like a fashion shape and they're always really nice. And that's just the eyebrows that I got. Thank you, mum. I don't touch them. But it's interesting when you when you add eyebrow or you break it up a bit it almost breaks up the entire appearance so we did that every single day that was a conscious decision that we made obviously I didn't have any mascara on that would have been ridiculous but there were things that we did to make me just not look completely like me and the hair that was a wig an absolutely brilliant wig and we decided in the process Ivana Primorak and myself who was the hair and makeup designer who I've known since the reader she's brilliant she recently did Barbie she's phenomenal she and I work in a very collaborative way where we really do discover the hair and the face through a lengthy process that can often go on over a number of weeks and we'll try something out let it sink in take lots of pictures have a little look try something else and then we started looking at we just started looking at images of women from that particular part of Philadelphia where it's set and the one thing that we noticed a lot was that they all had regrowth so what does that tell you, it just simply tells you that that's a person who just doesn't have the money to go to a hairdresser's necessarily, and certainly doesn't have the money to go to a hairdresser's that often.

30:21And I thought, my God, actually, if we built in this idea that she hasn't colored her hair since her son killed himself, that makes a lot of sense. It made a huge amount of sense. And then, of course, it's not just about the hair. It's about the mental, emotional attitude towards her physical appearance and her opinion of herself and how little she had started to care about her appearance this idea of sort of bravery though is interesting in this context and i think it came up again when you were filming lee so you i understand had three hematomas on the first day of filming you have major injury four yeah oh my god it's like your awards there's always one extra there's always one extra for another broken toe oops to match the other one and you pushed on through yeah and there's a scene where you're famously recreating this photograph which is a surrealist picnic and you're topless and you hadn't been able to exercise and I understand someone said gosh are you sure you're quite brave doing that yeah how do you feel about that word brave in this context fucking annoying brave is going to the front line brave is being an nhs nurse during covid You know, that's brave.

31:34It's not flipping brave to go topless or have no makeup or no Botox so that you can move your face around and morph it into different characters. That's not brave. That's just being a real person. So the use of this word brave, I think it's only because they just haven't come up with a better word yet. Maybe we can come up with one for them. Yes, honest. Honest. Where are you now with your body? I'm great with it. I think I look flipping amazing. You do? Thanks. So do you. Oh, thank you. But we have to say this to each other. We do. We have to own it. This is the thing, right? So we're so conditioned women in our 40s to think, okay, well, I'm creeping closer to the end.

32:15You know, you think you go into menopause and you're going to stop having sex and your boobs are going to sag and your skin's going to go crepey and all these things. First of all, so what? And secondly, it's just conditioning, you know? I think women as they get older become juicier and sexier and more embedded in their truth and who they are and are more powerful and more able to walk through the world and care less and that is an empowering thing and so I say to my friends all the time you look amazing look you god you look fantastic don't you feel great and just like you did then you were like oh thank you you were almost shocked to be paid a compliment by another woman.

32:55So we have to just do it. It's very important. And it doesn't mean you look great slash you've lost weight. That's the other thing is that women often think, oh, do you think so? Oh, well, I have actually been exercising a lot recently. The interpretation of the compliment is you think I look thinner. Yes. So I'm not doing any of that anymore. Yeah. So when I see my friends, I'm like, oh, you look amazing. You look so well and happy and god your skin looks clear you look bright and you know there are different ways of paying a compliment and also I think the same goes for when we compliment our children particularly girls and any mother who's listening please remember that I said this there is so much negativity that young girls are hearing from the world just because how the world is but also because very sadly so many of them are on social media and are exposed to an unnecessary level of negativity every day of their lives.

33:50If we do not tell them that they are beautiful and that we are so proud of who they are, they might not hear it from anyone else. So you have to say it. And there's also a way of saying to your child, I love you and you're amazing. There's that, but there's also, do you know what I love? The way you see the world and the way you dress with so much pride. I just really admire that. That will land on a teenage girl's ear much better than, you look lovely, darling. That's in one ear and out the other because they expect us to say that and they've heard us say it a million times before. They're saying, my God, you look so strong and vibrant.