Playing for keeps
“I have to be honest, this lockdown is different to last time, isn’t it?” sighs Kate Winslet as she joins Attitude via the medium du jour, Zoom (other internet video call platforms are available) for the first UK press interview for her much buzzed-about new film, Ammonite (reviewed on page 125). “I think we’re all truly feeling the collective ‘we’re over it’ and desperately wanting that light at the end of the tunnel.”
You might think that swapping the traditional movie junket surrounds of a plush five-star London hotel for lockdown home working might be an unwelcome adjustment for an actor who’s spent more than two decades firmly among Hollywood’s A-list elite, but Winslet, 45, readily admits that the experience of conducting her recent press engagements from her home on the English south coast has been “lovely” – something that probably has a lot to do with the fact a freshly brewed mug of tea has just been dutifully delivered to her hand by her husband of nine years, businessman Edward Abel Smith.
While the pleasure of home comforts is offering a change of pace for Winslet, the Oscar-winning star is also engaged in the professional juggling act currently being performed by parents across the land: “[For] my little one, Bear, who’s only seven, it’s quite weird because I’m here and yet he gets these sort of manic, five-minute snatches with me,” the mum-of-three reflects, adding with a warm bark of a laugh: “Some days I just don’t see him at all, I’m just running in and out… grab a tampon and run! It’s completely mad. But we’ve just got to do what we’ve got to do…”
Despite her global fame, Kate Winslet has remained a plain-spoken presence ever since 1997’s Titanic catapulted her to household name status. But while her easy candour provides a refreshing foil to many of her starry contemporaries, it’s clear she takes her work – namely her role as 19th-century palaeontologist Mary Anning in Francis Lee’s achingly romantic drama Ammonite – incredibly seriously.
In 2017,, won vast acclaim and legions of fans as it unspooled a simmering tale of sexual and romantic connection between two farmhands on the Yorkshire moors (Josh O’Connor and Alec Secăreanu), and in , Lee proves that a lightning bolt of cinematic inspiration really can strike twice as he digs up the past to explore a fictionalised tale between reclusive fossil-hunter Anning and a socialite tormented by grief following the loss of her child, Charlotte Murchison (played by the never-less-than-impeccable Saoirse Ronan).
