I am a war reporter Lee Miller has long been a hero of mine. “I wanted to tell the story of a flawed middle-aged woman who went to war and documented it.” “Lee was a woman who lived her life on her terms and she paid a horrific emotional price for all of it,” Winslet told me. Her work as a correspondent for Vogue in Europe during WW II brought an important female perspective to the news, even as the horrors that she witnessed opened her own chasms of trauma. In 1930s Paris, she was lover and collaborator to the photographer Man Ray and part of a Surrealist band of artists and poets (among them Jean Cocteau, who cast her in his film The Blood of a Poet), as well as friend and subject of Pablo Picasso (who painted her portrait with her head bright yellow to illustrate the brilliance of her personality). “Frankly,” she told me, “I’ve been through a lot, so there are corridors of emotions I can access that I simply didn’t have when I was younger.”
It all seems to have prepared Winslet for making Lee-which represents her first time as a deeply hands-on producer, responsible for everything from finances to script to casting to camera angles-and for being able to understand and communicate Miller’s extraordinary personality. Winslet has three children-Mia, 22, with her first husband, Jim Threapleton Joe, 19, with director Sam Mendes and Bear, aged 9, with her husband Ned Abel Smith, whom she met days before a terrifying house fire on businessman Richard Branson’s Necker Island in 2011. It’s an instinct that has served her well as she’s navigated a notoriously fickle and sexist industry, as well as the media intrusions that accompanied her early success and the personal upheavals of motherhood, marriage, and divorce. Time and again, Winslet has been drawn to independent productions and auteur directors, playing complex characters that challenge her. “Cause I wasn’t going to take that shit from anyone.” Winslet laughed. But in fact Winslet has always worked hard to make her own luck. She likes to say she owes her career to the luck of being cast at age 17 by Peter Jackson in Heavenly Creatures, an intimate and darkly brilliant film based on the true story of two girls who killed a woman in 1950s New Zealand, and then again in the megahit Titanic when she was 20. It’s a long way from where Winslet started out-“The fat kid at the back with the wrong fucking shoes on,” as she told me. She has been nominated for seven Oscars, winning in 2009 for The Reader, in which she played a former concentration camp guard who embarks on a postwar affair with a teenage boy, and has won five BAFTAs, five Golden Globes, four SAG awards, and two Emmys. She has honed her craft through 37 feature films and several highly regarded miniseries, working with many of the great directors of the day-Jane Campion, Todd Field, Ang Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Danny Boyle-and starring opposite the best actors of her generation: Leonardo DiCaprio, Harvey Keitel, Susan Sarandon, Johnny Depp, Jim Carrey, Jodie Foster, Saoirse Ronan. Kate Winslet is an actor at the top of her game.
“After 30 years of doing this, I should be,” says Winslet laughing, deflecting the compliment.
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