'We waste so much time being down on ourselves': Kate Winslet reclaims the frame (2024)

It is gloriously sunny when I catch the train at Victoria, but by the time we pull into Chichester, the sky is grey, and on the nearby beach, the wind is whistling and blowing silky sand into our faces.

Kate Winslet and I are huddled in her family beach hut, sipping takeaway coffee and trying to keep warm. I am wrapped in a blanket she’s brought from home, she is wearing her son Joe’s quilted jacket, and we are watching crocodiles of windswept primary-school children plod past in hi-vis vests. They peek in curiously, and Winslet leaps to her feet. "Do you want to have a look round?" she invites.

The accompanying adult does a comical double-take. "Oh my God! I recognise her! That’s the actress! Oh, what was she in?" she stammers excitedly, as if Winslet weren’t there. "I’ll give you a clue, I was in a film about a boat," offers Winslet. "No, no, you weren’t in a boat." A pause. "Bridget Jones!" she announces, triumphantly.

"That happens to me a lot," Winslet says, after the school party moves off. "They can’t figure it out."

To be fair, Winslet has dressed to be anonymous. I’d missed her myself in the station car park, where she turned up to collect me after her yoga class in leggings and trainers, hair pulled back into a messy bun and black-framed glasses on her nose.

And like all great actresses, she has a protean quality; her most recent outings range from a harassed middle-aged mother in the 2019 award-winning Channel 4 drama I Am Ruth, to the immaculately tailored and emotionally labile tyrant at the heart of this year’s HBO series The Regime.

Winslet’s new biopic Lee takes us somewhere else again: she plays Lee Miller, the fashion model turned artistic photographer who became a war correspondent during World War II, documenting the Normandy invasion and the horrors of the concentration camps.

Ironically, the image Miller is perhaps most famous for was taken by her friend David Scherman, though she composed it. It shows her in Hitler’s bathtub, washing off the filth of Dachau on the night the dictator committed suicide. "I think the opportunity was too damn irresistible," says Winslet. "She knew that was a scoop. I’d have done it."

The film, which Winslet produced and helped to fund, is clearly a passion project. "Did it move you? Did it make you cry?" she asks eagerly. I say, truthfully, that I think her performance is extraordinarily powerful, and underlines Miller’s courage and determination. "Lee’s phenomenal stoicism and mission to reveal the truth because so much was hidden – of all the characters I’ve ever played, I was genuinely inspired by her and in a lasting way," says Winslet. "Post-#MeToo, we have a much greater perspective on what women in the public eye had to put up with. My hope is that, at the very least, the film will show people who Lee really was and what she went through, and hopefully redefine how a younger generation understands her, so that she isn’t continually viewed through the male gaze."

The film was slated to come out last year but was held back because the actors’ strike would have meant Winslet couldn’t promote it as she wanted to. She clearly feels a kinship with Miller, who struggled to be taken seriously as an artist, often dismissed as the "muse of Man Ray". Her wartime achievements were considerable: her pictures of liberated concentration camps are searing and, although women war correspondents were routinely banned from the front line, she was the only photojournalist at St Malo in 1944 to witness the American assault on the port – an achievement for which she was later arrested. After the war, suffering from PTSD, she hid all her work in the attic of her East Sussex farmhouse, where her son discovered it after her death.

"It’s so interesting, because in all the letters I read, and her personal diaries, she was never down on herself, or critical of men. I admire that so much," says Winslet. "We label women all the time – it drives me mad. If you think about how Lee’s described, it’s: 'outspoken', 'headstrong', 'determined' – these big, fat words... We don’t describe men as ballsy or outspoken, because men just say whatever they want to say and do whatever they want to do, and it’s expected and permitted, but when a woman does that, we slap her with a label, and it sticks. No! I’m just saying what I think, I’m just being honest!"

So how would Winslet describe herself? She ponders for a minute. "The first word that springs to mind is 'open', and the second is 'grounded'," she says. "It’s very hard to stay grounded. I did, but it was a fight."

A fight that she still conducts on a daily basis, it seems, often by rejecting the perks that accompany her leading-lady status. When filming Mare of Easttown, the critically acclaimed 2021 HBO drama in which she played a bereaved small-town detective (and won an Emmy), she insisted on having the same size trailer as everyone else.

"I really do believe in equality and team effort, and you can only create that atmosphere if everyone’s the same on set," she says. "The most important thing is doing the job, not all the things you have around you. As long as I’ve got a kettle and a loo, I’m good."

It’s not hard to see the roots of this egalitarian approach stemming from her upbringing, when she and her siblings were teased for qualifying for free school meals. "The kids would say, 'don’t stand near her, she’s free!'" she remembers. "Just make everyone the same, how hard can that be?"

Winslet grew up in a two-up, two-down terraced house on a main road in Reading, which she shows me on her phone, recalling how the windows rattled when the double-deckers idled outside. Her father was an aspiring actor; her mother looked after the four children. Winslet remembers it as a happy childhood: "My parents were very positive people, they always made the best of things, and every weekend we would all pile into the car and go and run around in fields and jump into rivers."

But when she was 11, her father was in a serious boating accident. "He lost his foot – it was severed by a coil of rope. That was extremely awful – " she wells up. "It was reattached by miracle surgery, but that was phenomenally hard, and at that point, we were supported by the Actors’ Children’s Trust, and they helped with things like school uniforms. I am one of the most unlikely success stories," she says.

Though money was in short supply, both her parents understood the world she dreamt of joining – her maternal grandparents had run the repertory theatre in Reading. "The sense of it not being a pipe dream was wonderful," she says. "I’ve always been so grateful to my parents that they took that dream very seriously." She remembers her father driving her to the station aged 17 to audition for Heavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson’s 1994 matricidal coming-of-age drama. "I said to him, 'Can you imagine if I got the part?' And he just put out his hand as he was driving, and he said 'You’ll get it'. And I just thought, yes, OK, I’m going to get it.

"It was a quiet, humble sort of confidence that I’ve always tried to hang on to, and only ever see this as a job that I love and that I want to do as well as I possibly can."

Such a level-headed approach must have served her well in coping with the fanfare and scrutiny that accompanied her starring role three years later in Titanic, at the time the highest-grossing film ever. Her performance as the tragic heroine Rose shot her to international fame, and it’s still perhaps the film with which she’s most closely associated – even the confused fan we encounter earlier comes back to shout "Titanic!" at us through the beach hut’s doors.

Winslet is still close to Leonardo DiCaprio, her Titanic co-star. She tells me about a dream she had when they were filming 2008’s Revolutionary Road, in which she gave him a paperweight engraved with the words: 'Wherever you go, I will go too,' and he produced a ring engraved with the same words.

"I told him the dream and he cried," she says. He actually cried? "Let’s say he was very moved. And at the end of the shoot, we’d gone and done it for each other." She still has the ring. "We’ve known each other a long time! I’ve known Leo longer than I’ve known my children and my husband!"

Superstardom at 21 proved a baptism of fire. Besieged by paparazzi at her north-London flat, she used to climb over the wall into the garden of her neighbour, the chef Giorgio Locatelli, and spend her evenings with him and his wife Plaxi. "Food and friends and family, that’s all I need. I had to hang on to that."

Nevertheless, tabloid criticism wore her down, to the point that she recently revealed she had developed an eating disorder. "There was a lot of bullying of me that went on in the media, and that did get to me," she says. "Look at all those years in my twenties when I was all sorts of different shapes and sizes."

A weaker personality might have been destroyed; Winslet pushed back. I remember the brouhaha in 2003 when she called out a men’s magazine for digitally slimming her down on its cover; women in the public eye had previously been expected to be silently grateful for the attention.

"I do feel a huge sense of relief that women are so much more accepting of themselves and refusing to be judged," says Winslet. "Because I don’t know a single contemporary of mine who grew up seeing her mother looking in the mirror and saying: 'I look nice!' My mother never did: it was always, oh God, I don’t think I can wear this, do I look hippy, does my bum look big? We waste so much time being down on ourselves and I’m just not doing it ever again."

Before embarking on Lee, she says she stopped exercising altogether, so that her body would look authentically soft. "There’s a bit where Lee’s sitting on a bench in a bikini... And one of the crew came up between takes and said: 'You might want to sit up straighter.' So you can’t see my belly rolls? Not on your life! It was deliberate, you know?" Doesn’t she mind looking less-than-perfect on screen? "The opposite. I take pride in it because it is my life on my face, and that matters. It wouldn’t occur to me to cover that up," she says.

In the beach hut, I study her beautiful features as she nibbles on a pain au chocolat; there is no sign of the cosmetic work many of her peers would consider routine. "I think people know better than to say, 'You might wanna do something about those wrinkles'," she says drily. "I’m more comfortable in myself as each year passes. It enables me to allow the opinions of others to evaporate."

Indeed, this seems like a fruitful time for her, both personally and professionally, with several upcoming projects she is "incredibly excited about", including an HBO series, Trust, based on a Pulitzer prize-winning novel and directed by Todd Haynes, with whom she worked on the 2011 miniseries Mildred Pierce. "I’m very fortunate to be in an industry where there are so many wonderful older actresses who are absolute role models. I really value that – and I quietly hope that I might be in that pocket for some people as well."

Winslet turns 50 next October and plans to celebrate with a trademark lack of razzmatazz, perhaps by cooking dinner for friends. "I don’t like big parties, and I can’t stand surprises," she says. ‘"And I want to spend the year doing 50 remarkable things, whether that’s a particular hike I’ve never done, or a place I’ve never been, acts of kindness – I’m gathering a little list."

Otherwise, life will go on as normal in the West Sussex village where she lives with her two dogs and her family. Since 2012 she has been married to Ned Abel-Smith, a nephew of Richard Branson, whom she met holidaying on Necker Island and describes as "the kindest and best of men". They share a 10-year-old son, Bear, and Winslet has two older children, Mia and Joe, from her previous marriages to the directors Jim Threapleton and Sam Mendes.

Daily life sounds pretty normal as she describes it: she does her own supermarket shop, takes the Tube and, when I ask how she indulges herself, replies: "butter and cheese".

Padlocking the hut, she tells me: "I really do just want to live my life with sincere intentions and a decent amount of good grace." And the superstar chameleon heads back to her car, blending in effortlessly with the oblivious daytrippers.

'Lee' is in cinemas from 13 September. The September issue of Harper's Bazaar starring Kate Winslet is available on newsstands from 8 August.