Kate Winslet

The Oscar-winning actress, known for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Steve Jobs and The Reader, is stepping behind the camera for the first time. Her directorial debut, Goodbye June – a stirring family drama, written by her son – marks a new chapter. Kate Winslet speaks about the surprising strength of midlife, the freedom of turning 50, and how, as a longtime Longines ambassador, she’s begun to think of time not just in hours, but in stories told

Anticipating the arrival of Kate Winslet – actress, producer, now director, and all-round leading light of the film world – in a busy central London hotel bar, I am enjoying the knowledge that at any moment a frisson of excitement may descend on the crowd as a bona fide Hollywood A-lister sweeps through their midst. While lost in this thought, a petite woman wearing thick-rimmed glasses and a backpack bustles over, thrusting her outstretched hand toward mine. I quickly try to place her. Behind the huge specs, her skin glows and she has a beautiful cupid’s bow. It is, I realise with a start, Winslet. The bar-goers remain oblivious.

“Whenever I put my glasses on, I just seem to disappear,” she says a little later as we settle down on her balcony, drinks poured. “I’m much shorter than people think I’m going to be. I am this, sort of, little person with my backpack on, and I just barrel on through like everybody else.” She has been riding the underground regularly, undisturbed: “I take the tube every day of my life at the moment. Everyone’s just on their phone; no one’s looking up.”

Winslet has long had the kind of megawatt silver screen presence that can be turned up – in Revolutionary Road, Titanic and on the red carpet – or dialled right down, as in Dominic Savage’s bracing 2022 tale of teenage mental illness, I Am Ruth, in which she plays a weary single mother to Freya, played by her real-life daughter, Mia Threapleton. In person, she sits somewhere in the middle – a pretty, healthy woman, embracing midlife – “I’m feeling very good, solid, you know. I feel strong” – and is every bit as warm and disarming as one might expect (“Shall we sit outside?” “Do you want a glass of wine?” “I just love the architecture around here…”)

Big topics – mortality, loss, motherhood – hang in the air at our meeting, as Winslet makes her directorial debut this winter with Goodbye June, a deeply moving tale of four adult siblings coming together as their mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer at Christmas time. The film is inspired by her family’s loss of their matriarch in 2017, reworked into an extraordinarily capable script by Winslet’s own son, Joe Anders – still only 21 years old. (It is not, however, she stresses, autobiographical: “No, no, no, definitely not.”) She explains that it came about because Anders won a place at screenwriting school where he was encouraged by “a brilliant teacher” to write about what he knows. “He, of course, had remembered when his grandmother, my mum, had died – he was a teenager at the time – and his clearest memory of it all was how everyone came together, and how we were able to give her a passing that she deserved. It struck him how, for so few families, can that possibly be the case, based on how difficult those interconnected relationships might be.” As she mentions her mum, she inhales quickly and her eyes mist with tears. We sit quietly for a moment. It’s a remarkably sage observation for someone so young, I say. “I know…” she breathes.

Anders’ work clearly signals (A-list pedigree aside) the arrival of an exciting new talent. His writing is purposeful and mature, light and shade employed as carefully as by anyone twice his age. And Winslet brings his words to life with a dream-team cast – “How lucky, for fuck’s sake!” Timothy Spall and Helen Mirren are father and mother Bernie and June: he, seemingly emotionally devoid, later hinting masterfully at oceans of unexpressed feeling, and she almost unrecognisable – physically ailing but internally steadfast, guiding the family ship home in the night. Winslet plays daughter Julia, alongside Andrea Riseborough, Toni Collette and Johnny Flynn, all bringing their A-game. “It’s magical when you have actors at that level, and they bring things to a story that just utterly floor you,” she enthuses. “But when you have a cast like that, such phenomenal performers, the key thing was to make them all disappear into the parts that they were playing. That mattered to me a great deal, you know – keeping it really… feeling very grounded, and very British, and keeping it in the world of a family people could relate to. That was critical.” The spectrum of relatable familial life is there: humour, frustration, resentment, joy, pain. (“Some of the most complicated relationships we have in our lives are with the people we love the most in the whole wide world,” Winslet observes.)

It’s tempting to declare that the resulting intimate, vulnerable performances could only have been drawn out by an actor-cum-director. “I’ve always had a dream as an actor to just act in a room with the cameras locked off and no crew, and we were able to do that a few times on this film. Not always, because often the camera needs to move, and you need to feel as though there’s a looseness to what you’re experiencing – but in some of the quieter, more still scenes, the cameras were set and locked off, the focus was set, everyone would walk away, and the actors would be left entirely alone in those spaces.” She also wanted to do away with the conventional overhead boom mics. “So, we had a lot of hidden microphones, as well as radio mics on actors. This is not a particularly unusual thing, but we were really religious about it.”

I ask her which veterans of the profession influenced her own directorial approach: “I have always been a huge Mike Leigh fan – I feel like most actors say that, and if they don’t, they probably should – because of the way in which he is able to capture pieces of life and is unafraid to just stand back and observe from the corners of rooms.

“For me, it was about trying to find something that I could offer , that might give them a framework to feel free in, that perhaps was unusual enough that it would do something to the quality of what they felt, the quality of those performances… how quiet it can sometimes be. Just making them feel alone and unobserved. That was something I’d thought about a lot before we started.” Clearly, trusting and ceding control to the performers was incredibly important to her. “The most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had as an actor are when I have really been absolutely given the reins.”

Later I will speak to Spall, who brims with affection for this production, calling it one of his best professional experiences. “There was this sense that she really had our backs, you know,” he tells me. “She created an esprit de corps that was totally natural – this purely infectious, positive energy and also this confidence in being delighted that you were doing it with her, and for her.”

Unsurprisingly, Winslet’s conversation crackles with love of the craft: “Actors are just so different and wonderful and free and eccentric and curious. There’s nothing more exciting than being in a room full of extraordinary actors. I remember Richard Eyre saying that to me – when I did Iris with him, and I was only 25 and I’d just had Mia – and it’s absolutely true.”

With Goodbye June, the viewer feels they are pulling back the curtain and seeing the nucleus of a regular, unassuming family – its beating heart. (Spall, rather beautifully, describes the movie as depicting “a kind of broken-down true love.”) “It mattered to me a lot that as they emotionally start to creep closer to one another, I wanted to do that with the camera. I wanted to feel that that’s when you go in closer, and you see literally every single wrinkle and every pore and every mark, and you see the closeness of the backs of hands and the beautiful translucency of Helen’s extraordinary skin.”

Anyone who has been through the kind of loss depicted will identify with the film’s close observation. I tell Winslet that I found it incredibly moving, having lost my dad to cancer last year and recognising so much of my own experience in the film: “Oh, my God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” She tells me that some of the cast had been through similar bereavements, and some hadn’t: “So there was a huge amount of sharing that went on in rehearsal and consistently throughout. It was a very private, special bond that we all formed, largely because of sharing all those kinds of stories, really, which happens with actors all the time, but it especially happens with actors who are prepared to really give it everything.” That’s not to say that this is a gloomy work – far from it. Winslet notes that much of the feedback has been that people have laughed and cried and laughed again, throughout. The lasting effect is utterly uplifting, a potent reminder to count one’s blessings.

The Kate Winslet filmography is difficult to pin down. Her roles are complex – increasingly so, as she ages – powerful, often likeable. Even her Oscar-winning performance in 2008’s The Reader, as an SS guard in Auschwitz – almost certainly her most ignominious character – is a reservoir of wide-eyed emotion, goading us to feel for her in her moral malignance. “I’ve never wanted to do anything that was predictable or that anyone would anticipate I might do. I’m quite sort of… not ‘out of the box’, but I like to just keep ducking and diving.” For many younger adults, Winslet is first and foremost Clementine Kruczynski, in Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – a phenomenon bordering on a cult classic. “There’s that brilliant line that Charlie wrote,” she smiles, adopting the character’s soft New York accent: “‘I’m just a fucked-up girl, who’s looking for her own piece of mind. Don’t assign me yours.’ Oh, my God, it’s such a good line. I still can’t believe I got to say it!”

Now, over 20 years on, what are Winslet’s memories of that period? “Well, I mean, the experience itself of making the film was that it was extremely cold. It was a particularly cold New York winter, and I had little tiny Mia, so I remember the phenomenal juggle of it.” Did she find it particularly stretching when working with a director known for such unpredictability? “Those scenes in the street with the elephant – that was extraordinary. I’d finished work for the night and Michel Gondry called me at 2am. He said , ‘I ’ave thees wonderful ideea… There is a carnival! The circus is coming into town, and they bring all the elephants down Fifth Avenue. We’re going to shoot!’ I was like, ‘Amazing. When is it? Tomorrow?’ He said, ‘No. It’s now!’ I thought, ‘Are you fucking mad?’ I jumped out of bed; I think I got in a taxi, and we just improvised this wonderful scene in the middle of the night.

“A lot of that experience with Michel was very spontaneous,” Winslet continues. “We went out to Montauk to shoot the sequence in the bed on the beach. We woke up that morning and it was, like, three and a half feet of snow… and I thought, ‘Oh, well shit, what are we going to do? We can’t shoot in the snow’. I found Michel and said, ‘So, what are we gonna do?’ And he said, ‘Ees so fantastique! We’re gonna shoot in that!’ So off we went, put the bed on the beach, woke up in the snow,” she hoots with laughter. “It was a real adventure.”

At the time of our meeting, Winslet is a few days from her 50th birthday, and she reflects on this milestone. “I definitely find myself thinking, God, where did I think I’d be at 50? I didn’t think I would feel as strong or capable and resilient. I feel quite surprised by how comfortable I am with myself. It’s fucking great. I’ve been one of those people who would look in the mirror and really have to not look again because I would hate what I see,” she admits. “I see so many young people now who scrutinise themselves, and it makes me sad. That part of my life has absolutely evaporated; it just doesn’t exist for me anymore, and that’s a nice feeling.”

She attributes her self-belief to several factors, including a small group of close friends, mainly outside of the industry; her husband, Ned; and the joy she takes in her profession. “I love what I do; I really do, and I love it more all the time… The overwhelming feeling I have right now is of being very fortunate, and I feel extremely lucky that I am married to somebody who literally, I mean, not just supports, but encourages me to do these things and to fill that cup.”

Winslet is an invigorating person to be around. Her intelligence is immediately obvious, but so too is her desire to pull everyone around, particularly women, up with her. “I really do care about championing other women. We have to lift each other up, otherwise we are literally fucked; both on set and off, in the world, in life, as mothers, partners – all of it – sisters, friends. We have to lift each other up.” She’s acutely aware of structural inequality in her own industry and puts her money where her mouth is, insisting that the 2024 film, Lee – about war photographer Lee Miller – which Winslet co-produced and starred in, had a female director – Ellen Kuras: “Because I felt that it was right that a woman should be telling that story, but also because we do still have such a shortage of female directors being offered those opportunities and stepping into that creative space.” Of her own move to director, Winslet is justifiably cautious about how press scrutiny might differ were she a man: “It’s so exciting for young male actors who are becoming directors; it’s wonderful, it really is. But they can just get on and do it. Whereas for women, there’s a whole bunch of, ‘Okay, so, what’s this… your vanity project?!’”

A mother-son director-scriptwriter combination is a unique thing. (“The pride that I feel is absolutely enormous, but you can’t keep telling a colleague you’re so proud of them all the time!” she laughs.) “I hope that the film creates conversation amongst families, either about a family dynamic or about a loss that they have had, or that might be coming, and what they can do to… lean on each other, because it’s fucking tough out there. Now more than ever.

“I hope that we’ve made a film that feels real and tender around this subject,” she says warmly, “and that ultimately feels loving, because that was what Joe wrote. He didn’t write a film about a death; he wrote a film about a family.”

Kate wears Longines throughout

Photography Liz Collins

Styling Naomi Miller

Make-up Lisa Eldridge using Lisa Eldridge Beauty

Hair Dayaruci @ The Wall Group using Hair by Sam McKnight

Production The Production Factory

Photography assistant Tom Ayerst

Styling assistant Elizabete Pakule