2 weeks Ago
“My God, the middle-aged women I know are exploding into life. They are catapulting into their next chapters.” Kate Winslet roars the words out.
“I mean, fucking hell, listen to me, you’ve asked me two questions and I’ve barely stopped talking!” Winslet is bemoaning the stereotype of “the sort of perimenopausal, slightly faded woman who’s done her child-rearing and is looking for something that might help her limp through the rest of her life”. And she is certainly demonstrating her point to the contrary — not just by conducting this interview in a whirlwind of colourfully expressed enthusiasm, but, more significantly, with , the portrait of war photographer Lee Miller in which she stars and that, as Winslet approaches 50, heralds a serious new guise as a producer. She is on Zoom from Los Angeles, as continues to garner strong reviews and perform well internationally, especially in Europe.
Around eight years in the making — which she attributes mostly to honing the script — the film is Winslet’s creation: she conceived and nurtured it and is leading its promotion. It marks her first time as producer and she feels “really triumphant” about her PGA marking on the film. Winslet made her film debut with 30 years ago, becoming a global star when was released three years later.
When so many emerging actors rush into producing, why did she wait so long? “I care about integrity, about commitment, and I also care about not winging it,” she says. “I’m not a faker. I had a flurry of offers to do development deals in my twenties and it didn’t sit right with me.
Why would I take development funding from anybody if I didn’t know what to do with it?” Instead, she has spent her career in front of the camera “paying attention, watching, learning”, adding to that process as an executive producer on at HBO while developing . Not that she ever felt ready. “There’s always the element of, ‘Okay, we’re going to white-knuckle the fuck out of this shit,’” she laughs.
“Sometimes you just have to hang on.” Winslet’s journey with Lee Miller started with a kitchen table she bought in 2015 that belonged to the Penrose family (Miller’s husband was artist Roland Penrose). It came with a wealth of background history, including photographs, leading to her discovery of the real woman behind a narrow myth.
She soon connected with Miller’s son Antony Penrose, whose book provided the starting point for a screenplay by Liz Hannah, Marion Hume and John Collee. Penrose approved of Winslet’s approach: to focus away from the well-trodden areas of Miller’s life, not least the modelling for Man Ray, and towards her work as a Second World War photographer and her revelatory coverage of the Nazi concentration camps. “Lee was, unfairly, defined as this ex-muse, former lover,” says Winslet.
“The word ‘muse’, this reductive fucking thing. It was a tiny chunk of her life. She hated being a model.
Couldn’t wait to hide herself behind the camera. This is the decade I feel she would have been the proudest of, and it’s the most undiscovered time in her life.” When Winslet, as Miller, says that “I was born determined”, she could also be speaking of herself.
“I do identify with Lee. It’s harder for the girls than for the boys. It’s harder to get our films made.
We’ve had to fight for gender parity; we continue to. I know what it means to hold on and refuse to let go.” There is also something more personal.
“Lee was subjected to a level of objectification in her life, as a model. And I was absolutely subjected to quite damaging scrutiny when I was in my twenties, post , from the media, put on this pedestal and then stripped apart.” Shooting in Marrakech back in 1997, which is where this writer first met Winslet, the actress gave a sense she was hiding away from the juggernaut on a small independent film.
“Yeah, it was a very deliberate choice,” she agrees. “And this is where I was lucky. Often people say to me, ‘How did you survive all that?’ Somehow, I had a profound instinct to protect my right to access a creative world that I wanted to be in and that I felt safe in.
“I was 22. I wasn’t ready to be ‘famous’. I had so much I wanted to learn about being an actor on film.
I needed to be able to make mistakes and learn from them out of sight. And that’s what happens when you make independent films. You all trip over things and pick each other up, and dust yourself off — and you have an amazing time doing it.
” Much of the crew is drawn from her career in front of the camera, starting with director Ellen Kuras, who was cinematographer on , then , and including first assistant director Richard Styles (“I worked with him on when I was 19 and he was a floor runner making the tea”), production designer Gemma Jackson ( , ), costume designer Michael O’Connor ( ) and make-up and hair designer Ivana Primorac ( , ). “It moved me so much that these people showed up for me,” says Winslet with a big smile. Perhaps her most significant collaborator was someone she did not know: Kate Solomon, who became her fellow producer.
“There was always going to be a moment when the financing was coming together and we’d need another person on the ground with me. I interviewed five or six different producers. Kate was on that initial call, breastfeeding her youngest child.
I thought, ‘You’re from my tribe.’ Then the film really became a reality, because I had a partner.” It was with Solomon that Winslet shared one of those white-knuckle moments.
“It was hairy in preproduction. We were hurtling to the start line and a piece of financing hadn’t landed. Kate was like, ‘I think we can’t stop.
Shall we step in and do it ourselves?’” Winslet’s faith in the film has been repaid at the box office. Supported by her own dogged promotional efforts, has grossed a healthy $29.7m worldwide following its Toronto 2023 premiere, performing particularly strongly in the UK and Ireland (via Sky Cinema), Germany and Australia (Studiocanal), and France (SND).
She and Solomon are planning their next joint producing project, as yet undisclosed, and she will be executive producing for HBO again: an adaptation of Pulitzer prize-winning novel , with her director Todd Haynes. She will also act in both. “I feel so enchanted by the job of acting, and now producing as well just amplifies that experience.
” When asks about the t-shirt Winslet sports during the interview, it turns out to have a connection — it is designed by an artist friend who recreated the surrealist artwork for the film. She stands back from the screen to give a better view, and reads the words out loud: “I’m here. Fuck the storm.
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