Kate Winslet Pushes Her Characters, and Herself, to the Edge

As a young star, she endured Hollywood’s brutal treatment of women. Now she’s putting her resilience and grit on full display.

Kate Winslet was standing in front of a microphone, breathing hard.Sometimes she did it fast; sometimes she slowed it down. Sometimes the breathing sounded anxious; other times, it was clearly the gasping of someone who was winded. Before beginning a new take, Winslet stood stock still, hands opening and closing at her sides; she looked like a gymnast about to bound into a floor routine. Every breath seemed high-stakes, even though she was well into a long day of recording in a dim, windowless studio in London.

Winslet was adding grace notes to scenes of herself in “The Regime,” a dark satire created by Will Tracy, a writer and producer on “Succession,” that began airing on Max in early March. Winslet plays Elena Vernham, a dictator ruling precariously over an imaginary Central European country, and she was in the studio rerecording (as is common practice) lines that needed improving, including snippets of Elena’s propaganda: “Even if the protests happening in Westgate were real, which they are not” and “He’s still out there, working with the global elite to destroy everything we’ve built.” Sometimes Winslet laughed out loud after delivering a line, and sometimes she fell completely silent, absorbed in watching a scene of herself with her new recording looped in. “God, she’s such an awful, awful cow,” she said at one point, sounding appalled but also a little awed.

The part of Elena, a despot on the verge of a nervous breakdown, is a departure for Winslet, who has chosen, over the course of her career, a wide range of characters who have in common an intrinsic power. Elena is erratic and grasping, with a facade of strength that covers up a sinkhole of oozing insecurity. Winslet gave a lot of thought to how Elena would sound: She chose a high, tight voice, the sound of someone disconnected from the feelings that reside deep in the body. Elena has the slightest of speech impediments, a strange move she makes with her mouth, a hand that flies to her cheek when she is under real stress — those tells are her answer to King Richard’s hump, the body politic deformed.

Onscreen, as Elena, Winslet is coifed and practically corseted into form-fitting skirt suits, with lacquered fake nails. The day she was recording, in early January, Winslet might have been any woman at the office: blond hair, a hint of roots starting to show, jeans of no particular timely style that she occasionally tugged up from the waist, a black V-neck sweater she occasionally pulled down at the hem. It’s only when you look directly at her, face to face, that you see the extraordinary — the dark blue eyes, the beauty marks (not one, but two), the elaborately curved mouth.

As Winslet recorded, Stephen Frears, one of the show’s two directors, guided Winslet with considerable understatement from his seat across the room: a half-nod here, a thumbs-up there. “Was that all right, Stephen?” Winslet called over after one take; she peered over in his direction, expectant, obedient, professional. Frears, who directed “The Queen” and “Dangerous Liaisons,” among others, was silent, with his eyes closed, his head back. Winslet and a few members of the production team waited for his approval. As the moment stretched on, it seemed that Frears was not deep in thought but deep in sleep. Winslet appeared to register a brief moment of surprise, then smiled and moved on — all right, no problem.

Winslet is not precious or easily rattled; on set, over the years, she has broken a toe, suffered hypothermia and fainted, but very little slows her down when she’s shooting. She’s not a fan of a lunch break. Her sturdiness works its way into her performances onscreen: Even in many a period drama, Winslet, for all her femininity, conveys the impression of someone who could hold her own in a street fight. On one occasion when she actually found herself in peril, during a house fire at Richard Branson’s home in the British Virgin Islands, Winslet, efficiently assisting the evacuation, picked up Branson’s nearly-90-year-old mother and carried her down several stairs. (Winslet is married to Branson’s nephew, Edward Abel Smith.)

Winslet’s practicality makes her eminently relatable, but it comes with a forceful energy. A friend commented to me that Winslet’s patent resilience makes watching her — even in a film about a shipwreck or the Holocaust — an experience in which the viewer’s stress level never interferes with an appreciation of the work. “I don’t worry about her,” she says. “She will turn up OK. Even if she has to eat acorns all winter.”

The day after her dubbing session in London, Winslet and I met near her home on the coast of England; she had decided we would visit a local beach. When I entered her car, I noticed on the floor of the back seat a bowl of half-eaten oatmeal that had clearly been there for some time, a sight that made my heart leap — I somehow felt immediately absolved of all my own car-food sins. “There’s just stuff rolling around the back of the car, clink, clink, all the time,” Winslet said. “Sometimes I look in the back, and I’ll see, like, three apples.” At least, she would console herself, the intention was that apples be eaten. The procurer of those apples would be her husband, who goes by Ned, and their would-be consumer the couple’s 10-year-old son, Bear. (Winslet has two other children: a 23-year-old daughter from her first marriage, to Jim Threapleton; and a 20-year-old son from her second marriage, to the director Sam Mendes.)

The sky was cloud-covered, the air wet and chilled. The temperature hovered around 38 degrees, so we loaded our arms with blankets and traipsed in the direction of a white weathered beach hut a short sprint away from the water. Winslet’s hut is just one of thousands along the shores of the United Kingdom — on many beaches, they go on for miles — some of which have been passed down within families for upward of a century. (This one once belonged to Ned’s grandmother.) Winslet pulled on a lock, and the door swung open to reveal a mostly empty, unheated room with a few beach chairs, a skim board hanging on the wall and a bench in back, which is where we would sit and talk for the next several hours, covered in blankets and eating pastries Winslet bought that morning. Winslet also had her bathing suit with her. “I might go in for a swim later,” she told me.

Winslet is a devotee of cold-water swimming, which she has enjoyed not just near her home but also in Alaska and Norway, where, she told me, the water was dotted with ice. Cold-water swimming is popular in Britain, but it seems especially well suited to Winslet, who prides herself on stamina: For the 2022 movie “Avatar: The Way of Water,” Winslet, after considerable training, managed to hold her breath underwater for an astonishing seven minutes and 15 seconds (some Navy Seals never break three minutes). On set, she has little interest in the creature comforts that some stars expect: During the filming of “Mare of Easttown,” an HBO limited series from 2021, Winslet’s only real ask of Mark Roybal, one of the show’s executive producers, was that he replace the extra-large trailer he had intended for her with one the same size as those of her colleagues. “I’ve seen her literally pulling cables, moving props,” Roybal says. “It’s crazy. She’s not far from who she was when she grew up. That’s who she is.”

Winslet was raised in Reading, an hour west of London, in a working-class neighborhood where, she has said, many of her friends were aspiring to be flight attendants and hairstylists. Unhappy at her local school, she enrolled at age 11 in a private performing-arts school, offsetting some of the cost with voice-over work and a role as a teenage sleuth on a television series. Her father, an aspiring but ultimately unsuccessful actor, worked for the postal service and sold Christmas trees; when Winslet’s performing-arts school ended for her at age 16, she took a job slicing deli meat until her former principal suggested that she audition for a part in a movie based on the true story of two young girls who colluded in murder. Why did the principal think of Winslet? “I looked like the girl,” she told me. Winslet was desperate to win the part. “I wrote letters to the character,” she said. “You chant. You pray.” It turned out that the resemblance was important to the director, Peter Jackson, who wanted an unknown in the role. “That’s the lucky-break moment,” Winslet said.

The movie, “Heavenly Creatures,” set her career in motion, but she was still a fledgling actor. When she was brought in to audition for a small part in the 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility,” Winslet pretended she thought she was there to read for the more significant role of Marianne, younger sister to Elinor, played by Emma Thompson. Thompson, who also wrote the screenplay, ultimately championed Winslet’s casting. “It was immediately apparent to me that Kate would absolutely capture the quintessence of Marianne,” Thompson says. “She came in — 19 years old, I think — and had all the passion and the wide gaze of a youthful and optimistic spirit, a soul that believed the best in people. I rushed past her in the corridor, needing a pee, and she said as I came rushing back, ‘I know I can do this,’ and I think I might have said, ‘I know you can.’” The two women grew so close that Winslet kept, for many years, a souvenir of the last day of shooting — the box of an apple strudel that they feasted on for consolation as they tearfully prepared to part ways. (When Thompson turned 40, Winslet gave her the box for her birthday.)

In late 1995, Winslet was passed a long treatment for a film called “Titanic,” the printout of which she recently found in storage, discovering that she had written on the front page, “I love this.” The part of Rose in “Titanic” catapulted her into the realm of the 20th century’s great cinematic heroines. More endearing than Scarlett O’Hara, less thorny than Erin Brockovich, Rose is a Juliet-like figure in love with love who subverts the plot, surviving tragedy instead of succumbing to it. Since then, Winslet’s best performances are of imperfect women who persevere, who are flawed enough to do real damage but still evoke from the viewer deep, sometimes uncomfortable sympathy. In her role as Hanna, a former Nazi prison guard in “The Reader,” for which she won an Oscar, Winslet employs a forceful physicality that the viewer eventually understands as the unyielding rigidity of a woman who can’t make sense of complexity. She pulls off a more exuberant high-wire act in her portrayal of Clementine in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” a character whose fervent soul spills all over the place. When she meets Joel, the halting figure played by Jim Carrey, Clementine is careering as fast as the train on which they’re talking; she veers dangerously close, emotionally, to going off the rails altogether, with just enough charm and smarts to pull herself to safety, to keep Joel, and viewers, more intrigued than alarmed.

Winslet seems to relish pushing her characters — and herself — to the edge. Todd Haynes, who directed Winslet in “Mildred Pierce,” an HBO limited series about a divorced mother during the Great Depression, recalled one scene she shot in an evening gown on a rainy, frigid night in Queens. After the first take, Winslet, drenched and chilled, screamed out, elated, “This is what we get to do with our lives!” Winslet’s response did not surprise Haynes, given the roles she’d chosen in the past. “I think the pain that she sometimes endures is part of the thrill and excitement that she fully embraces in her work,” he says. “Kate wants to be put in places she’s never been before and be fearless about it.”

Moments like that, Winslet said, do thrill her: “It is living at the absolute edges of the physical lengths to which one can go to feel the most exhilarated and alive,” she said. Women who take risks interest her. In an upcoming biopic, “Lee,” which Winslet produced, she embodies Lee Miller, a onetime model who emerged from a traumatized youth to become a significant World War II photographer. But Winslet also clearly sees the discomfort she experiences on set as an inevitable part of moviemaking, something she has chosen to embrace rather than bemoan. “Still never to this day would I say: ‘I’m cold. I have to stop,’” Winslet said.

I’m cold, I thought to myself. I have to stop. We’d been sitting in that unheated shack, the ocean waves growing louder as the tide rolled in, for almost three hours, as if Winslet, in this instance too, would never be the one to suggest a break. Every so often, labradoodles, cocker spaniels, retrievers, dachshunds and their owners trotted by the aperture of the shack’s open door. The number of people walking their dogs seemed to have picked up, even as the day got colder; Winslet theorized, without resentment, that maybe word had gotten out. Finally, we agreed it was time to go, but by then it was too late for Winslet, who had plans to visit a new godchild, to go swimming.

If only I’d brought a bathing suit, we could have both gone, I said as we left, meaning not a word of it. Winslet brightened at the thought: We’d go tomorrow, she assured me — she could lend me a bathing suit!

Some measure of Winslet’s fame is tied to her beauty, but she seems intent on deflating its importance, using her influence to convey the message that women have value beyond their looks. In “Mare of Easttown,” Winslet, who played Marianne (Mare) Sheehan, a small-town detective grieving a dead son, refused to let editors retouch so much as a wrinkle. A “global ambassador” for L’Oréal Paris, she appears in an ad in full hair and makeup, then pins up her blond strands and starts wiping her makeup off, all the while speaking to the viewer with the urgency and focus she would give to any climactic monologue. “To believe that you are worth it is something we can all help each other to do,” she says. “And perhaps as we all walk through the world, we can show up for each other without judgment.”

Winslet came of age in the era of waif-chic, which has made her all too expert in the subject of harsh objectification. After her role in “Titanic,” public scrutiny of her body was so chronic and exacting that it threatened to consume her. The British tabloids tracked her weight as if it were a matter of national security; Joan Rivers cracked wise about Winslet sinking the Titanic. In a 1998 Rolling Stone article, Winslet said that she was a heavyset teenager who “sensibly lost the weight doing Weight Watchers. End of story.” She now openly acknowledges that at one brief point in her life, she struggled with an eating disorder. “I never told anyone about it,” she said of that time. “Because guess what — people in the world around you go: ‘Hey, you look great! You lost weight!’” For that last bit, Winslet slipped into a pitch-perfect American accent — Los Angeles, maybe a film executive. “So even the compliment about looking good is connected to weight. And that is one thing I will not let people talk about. If they do, I pull them up straight away.” (For the sake of simplicity, I will direct the reader to assume that curses have been edited out of any Winslet quote on the subject of weight, celebrity or tabloids.)

In the hut, I had wondered aloud to Winslet about the impact of Ozempic on all this. “I actually don’t know what Ozempic is,” Winslet said. “All I know is that it’s some pill that people are taking or something like that.” I told her that Ozempic — which apparently has not yet saturated English culture as it has in the United States — was a very in-demand diabetes drug now commonly taken off-label for weight loss.

“But what is it?” Winslet said, her mouth full of pastry. I went on: It was a shot people took that dampened their interest in food. Winslet looked appalled — as if I’d just told her that millions of Americans were voluntarily injecting themselves with something that made them feel dead inside when they looked at a sunset. “Oh, my God,” she said. “This sounds terrible. Let’s eat some more things!” She made a show of eating more of her pastry, crumbs tumbling onto the blankets.

Together we watched a short video highlighting Winslet’s early career; at one moment, seeing red carpet shots of herself the year after she won the Oscar for “The Reader,” Winslet commented sharply, “Look how thin I was.” This was not Winslet yearning for that moment; it was Winslet feeling sadness for that former self, a young woman who was separating from her second husband and could barely eat from stress, watching her private life become the subject of entertainment-news headlines.

What Winslet accepted as the norm back then she now understands as small cruelties that she is relieved her younger counterparts no longer have to endure in quite the same way. Although a few actors of Winslet’s age have scoffed at what they perceive as the preciousness of intimacy coordinators, Winslet thought her entire experience as a young actor might have been different had they been available to her. “I would have benefited from an intimacy coordinator every single time I had to do a love scene or be partially naked or even a kissing scene,” she said. “It would have been nice to have had someone in my corner, because I always had to stand up for myself.” And often, she didn’t — she felt that whatever was being asked of her was simply part of the job. She has a litany of unspoken objections she wished she had felt empowered to make: “I don’t like that camera angle. I don’t want to stand here full-frontal nude. I don’t want this many people in the room. I want my dressing gown to be closer. Just little things like that. When you’re young, you’re so afraid of pissing people off or coming across as rude or pathetic because you might need those things. So learning to have a voice for oneself in those environments was very, very hard.”

On set, she rarely felt empowered to complain, even when the conditions were difficult. In a 1997 Los Angeles Times article, Winslet, still exhausted from the seven-month shoot of “Titanic,” described the experience as an “ordeal,” recalling two moments of filming in the water that sounded distressing in her telling (though she emphasized to me that she was never in danger). When I spoke to the film’s director, James Cameron, he said that although the set was extremely safe, he might have given Winslet more space to raise whatever subjective concerns about the work she was feeling at the time. “You have to sort of be given permission before the fact,” he said. “I can’t say, sitting here today, that I made that abundantly clear.” He described Winslet as “a force of nature,” adding that “when someone projects that kind of energy and that kind of power to the people around her, it’s difficult to see when they’re in trouble emotionally.”

Like many of her characters, Winslet considers herself a survivor: She survived two public divorces, and she survived the paparazzi, packs of men who chased her in cars or staked out her house. (When she was a new mother, she would put on a hat and sunglasses, hand her baby over a wall to the next-door neighbor, climb over the wall herself, then take the baby through the backyard gate and get on a city bus, where, she swears, no one ever recognized her.)

It’s clear that some of the strength Winslet projects — her nothing-stops-me attitude on set — is a defense she built up, by necessity, years ago. “I was already experiencing huge amounts of judgment, persecution, all this bullying,” she said. “People can call me fat. They can call me what they want. But they certainly cannot say that I complained and I behaved badly. Over my dead body.” To object, especially for young women, was to risk a ruined reputation. “I would not have known how to do that without people in power turning around and saying, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, you know, her again, that complainer,’” Winslet said. “I would rather suffer in silence than ever let that happen to me, even still today.”

To Winslet, as a mother, it’s a particular horror that the public body-shaming once reserved for celebrities is now a trial that any young woman with a phone might go through. For British television, she recently made an improvised film, “I Am Ruth,” with her daughter, Mia Threapleton, about a mother trying to understand the unraveling of her teenager; behind the closed door of her bedroom, amid the privacy of the world of her phone, Threapleton’s character is enduring bullying on social media in response to revealing images she has posted of herself. With “I Am Ruth,” Winslet became an Everymom, opening her up to interactions of a different kind. “I’ll go to the grocery store, I’ll go anywhere, like walking down the street, and people will stop me,” she said. A parking attendant put her hand on Winslet’s arm and started to weep; Winslet knew intuitively it was about “I Am Ruth.”

In her roles, and in her own life, Winslet has moved, sure-footed, from the role of ingénue to the role of the fierce protector. Roybal described Winslet as an advocate for the crew on “Mare of Easttown,” someone who would personally call the executives if she felt there was some inequity on their part. While shooting “Mare,” Winslet sat in the trunk of a car where the then-19-year-old Angourie Rice would be filming a kissing scene, so Winslet — a safe, big-sister figure — could personally pass on notes from the director coming in through a radio.

By the time she filmed “Mare,” Winslet had decades worth of emotional experiences she could readily access. “In the beginning,” she said, “I would rummage around my emotional toolbox and pull out something that had actually happened to me. But that stopped working for me at a certain point. I don’t know why. As you get older, you live more life; you have more real experiences that you add to the emotional toolbox without realizing that you’re doing it. And so sometimes, as you get older, quite honestly, emotions are easier to access because they just simmer below the surface all the time — because there’s just so damn many of them.” Winslet’s scripts are heavily covered in notes laying out the emotional marks she would need to hit.

The hazard of watching Winslet as Mare is that her acting is so nuanced that you suddenly see others’ elsewhere as telegraphed semaphore (the bitter wife, her arms folded across her chest; the disappointed teacher, mouth tugged downward). In a scene from “Mare” in which Winslet tries to tell her grandson’s pediatrician about her travails with her son, Kevin, who died by suicide, she is reflecting not any one thing but instead the several conversations her character seems to be having simultaneously: one with the pediatrician, one with her past self, as she drifts in and out of being present, and another with her current self, as she struggles to control the frustration she feels at how little the doctor can grasp of this painful history. Watching Winslet, we don’t see a protective mother; we see our own mothering, the depth of our own complicated feelings about the mistakes we’ve made, the gap between all that we feel and all that can’t be easily said.

Winslet seemed uncomfortable talking about her process, not so much because she feared it would sound pretentious, but because it was personal. Long after “Mare” was finished shooting, Winslet wept in interviews when talking about the character’s loss of a son; she couldn’t stop reverting to those emotions she so carefully internalized, any more than she could clear out all the lines of dialogue that have lodged themselves in her consciousness, no matter how much she would like to forget them.

“I finally realized I needed a bit of therapy” to move on from playing Mare, she said. “You actually change something in your brain chemistry about how you think — you know, it’s very, very strange.” She would be at the store buying jeans and realize that she was buying the jeans that Mare would wear — awful-looking jeans, in fact. Her children would sidle up next to her at the house, on days after filming that had left her depleted. “Kevin’s not real,” they would whisper, as if letting her in on a secret. “And neither is Mare. It’s just pretend.” Being an actor, of course, entails coming all too close to the knowledge that for someone in the world, that suffering, that pain, is real. Winslet’s empathy — a protective instinct that extends to her characters — is part of what makes her performances so powerful.

The day after our talk in the hut, Winslet and I headed back to the beach in her car. On our way over, Ned, already waiting there with Bear, called to check in. “The sun is shining,” he told his wife. “It’s really special. But I think everybody got the memo. So — quite a few people.” Ned’s subtext was clear: She would not have a lot of privacy. “Great!” Winslet said, then laughed, not quite a nervous laugh but a sendup of one.

At the beach, Bear was kicking around a soccer ball with his dad. Chatty, funny, smiley, he told a story about the time his dog peed on his favorite soccer ball — he cocked his leg just so, a bit of brilliant and spontaneous mimicry, which I observed again when he put on the voice of his older brother, urging him on in a bit of daredevilry.

I changed quickly into a suit that Winslet lent me and put on a long fleece-lined coat made just for this winter-swimming business, and then there was no more avoiding it: I joined Winslet at the shore. We hesitated briefly, and suddenly a pack of young men were walking by. “Oh, there really are a lot of people,” she said, and for a moment I thought I saw a look of real distress on her face. I remembered she told me that she left New York in 2010, after living there for many happy years, in part because the paparazzi seemed to be picking up their focus on her: She noticed herself looking over her shoulder too often and decided it was time to get away.

Winslet quickly whipped her head around and trained her eyes back toward the ocean. It would clearly be better to move forward than stand paralyzed and exposed on the shore, so in we went. A step, then another — she jog-walked her way into the water, and I had no choice but to follow.

“You have to commit, Susan!” she called out. I managed to pull my focus away from the daggers of cold and look up in the direction of her voice. Fifteen feet away, she was submerged up to her chin. Her eyes were closed. She was far enough out from the shore to be unrecognizable to the public. The water hid her. She breathed in and out slowly, meditatively. A minute passed, then a few more. And then she was up, cursing, cursing the water, cursing the whole idea, laughing, heading toward shore.

Jack Davison is a British photographer known for his black-and-white portraiture. He last photographed Cate Blanchett for the magazine.