Actress Kate Winslet finds sunshine after the storm

By Luaine Lee
Knight Ridder Newspapers

	DAVID LEE / FOCUS FEATURES Kate Winslet, left, and Jim Carrey in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," about a woman who has the memory of her former love clinically erased from her mind.
	E-mail this article Print this article Search archive

But it isn't her career that's proved so beatific. It's her personal life. Married for a year to film director Sam Mendes ("Road to Perdition"), she's the mother of a 3-year-old daughter, Mia, and a 10-week-old baby boy, Joe.

"Meeting Sam, if I'm honest, it made me genuinely, genuinely happy for the first time in my life," she says, seated on an ivory couch in a hotel room here, catching her breath between interviews and nursing Joe.

"When you're given the great gift of happiness, you just don't want for anything else. I sometimes say to him, 'I wouldn't care if you were the man who delivered the paper in the morning or the guy who brought the groceries, I would still love you just as much.' Obviously the fact that he's a brilliantly talented director helps. It's nice. He's just fantastic and incredible and we're very, very happy."

She didn't find this "eternal sunshine" easily. She was married before to director Jim Threapleton, who is Mia's father. Going through a divorce was debilitating, she says.

"Completely horrendous. That in and of itself is a devastating thing to happen to any human being, but when you live that and get through it in front of the world and the press, and you have to be prepared they're going to criticize you and say it was your fault — even though it wasn't or whatever — that was really, really tough. Because dealing with that person, it was incredibly hard especially with a very small child, which Mia was at the time. It's frightening. It's really frightening going through that kind of experience. Yeah, that's the toughest thing that's happened."

Winslet, 28, has family and steadfast friends who helped, she says. They also understand what it is to be in the public eye. She comes from a family of actors, began performing when she was 10 and says she never had the urge to rebel like most teenagers.

"I never rebelled against the idea of being an actor. Never rebelled against my parents either for whatever reason. I never felt the need somehow. Maybe the most rebellious thing I did was dyeing my hair a terrible color. That's a very obvious and harmless thing to do. I remember getting a little packet of peroxide and mixing it up with a toothbrush and putting skunk streaks in the front of my hair. And it looked terrible. But that was my little moment of freedom and liberation and I did it because I could, sort of thing. But I didn't do it because my parents didn't want me to. I was relatively well behaved," says Winslet.

The British-born actress seems extraordinarily collected in spite of the fact that her husband and children are just down the hall and a cadre of press is waiting for her.

She says giving birth helped calm her down. "Just within myself I feel much more settled as a person because it's one of the things I've always wanted, to have children and be a mother," she says.

Meeting Mendes added to her serenity. "We met because he was casting two plays he directed, 'Uncle Vanya' and 'Twelfth Night,' and he wanted me to be in them, but I didn't want to be in them because it was a very long commitment. It was a six-month commitment, and Mia was quite small. It was partly in London, and then they transferred to New York, and that was basically how we met. He forgave me for not doing the plays quite quickly," she grins.
 
Besides, she's not so placid when it comes to leaving the house, she says. "I am useless at getting myself out of the house. It has nothing to do with applying makeup. It has nothing to do with blow-drying my hair. It's just to do with gathering up the things I need, making sure I've got the diapers and the wipes and the this and that and the juice for Mia and the water and the cellphone and money and keys. I'm absolutely useless, and I leave things everywhere, so I end up tearing through the whole house finding my house key. The worst thing is actually traveling with a child; you need a whole plane just for the things," she rolls her blue eyes.

Winslet, who's starred in the movies "Heavenly Creatures" (her first), "Hamlet" and "Sense and Sensibility," plays a wildly spontaneous woman in "Eternal Sunshine," who has the memory of her former love clinically erased from her mind.

"I would never erase any part of my life or things that have happened to me even if they've been tough to get through at the time or frightening or whatever they might have been," she says. "Those things do become wonderful memories to learn from and share with people and share with your children and grandchildren, and they're all kind of character-forming experiences. And, for an actor, that's all you have."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company